Mauthausen - Mauthausen

Mauthausen is a city ofUpper Austria.

To know

In northern Austria, Mauthausen is a sadly notorious country because, during the Second World War, the concentration camp of Mauthausen was built near the town. Mauthausen-Gusen where about 122,000 people died.

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What see

The most important place in the city is probably the 48.2569614.501321 Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. located a few kilometers away from the city, the minimum age for entry is 14 years. 

Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

Improperly regarded as a mere labor camp, it was in fact, of all the Nazi camps, "the only concentration camp classified as 'class 3' (as a punishment and annihilation camp through labor)". The extermination took place above all through forced labor in the nearby granite quarry, accessible only through the 186 steps of the ladder of death, and consumption due to malnutrition and hardship, although there are also some small gas chambers.

The internment camp was initially opened by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to exploit the quarry of Wiener-Graben, a granite that owes its name to the fact that it was used to pave the streets Viennese. In it, Russians, Serbs, Italians reached the figure of 40,000 inmates, and about 9,000 of them lost their lives there.

The Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen was opened on 8 August 1938. The first to arrive were 300 prisoners from Auschiwitz-Dachau, who began to build the camp and later inhabited it. When it opened, it housed 1,000 inmates; in almost seven years of life, over 200,000 prisoners were locked up.

Mauthausen, built with the granite of the underlying quarry, was an extensive stone fortress in a vaguely oriental style, so much so that the main entrance to the lager was called by the prisoners "The Mongolian Gate". The fortress, rectangular in plan, was closed on three sides by stone walls two meters thick and up to eight meters high. The side of the lager that could not be finished was closed by a barbed wire fence crossed by high voltage electric current, the site of numerous suicides.

The inmates were mostly forced to work in the nearby granite quarry to produce stone artifacts to be used for the construction of the camp itself and for the various architectural projects wanted by Hitler.

On May 5, 1940, the first of the three crematory ovens installed in the camp became operational and Mauthausen began to function as a "death factory", with an ascertained figure of around 128,000 victims.

During the last months of World War II, more than 20,000 prisoners from other evacuated concentration camps were transferred to the Mauthausen complex. In April 1945, the SS began the destruction of documents and the total extermination of prisoners.

On May 1, the radio broadcasts the official news of Hitler's death, but the SS continue with the executions. The Mauthausen concentration camp was reached by the US army only on Saturday 5 May 1945, the last of the main Nazi camps.

Today almost all the structures of the extermination camp remain. Outside the walls there are the apartments of the SS and a memorial with monuments installed by many European states. Inside the walls the shower room that welcomed all the new arrivals, the barracks where the inmates were crowded, the crematorium and the gas chamber, which today, out of respect for the victims, it is no longer allowed to enter.

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  State Memorial ofIsrael

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  Memorial of theHungary

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• Wikipedia contains an entry concerning Mauthausen
• Commons contains images or other files on Mauthausen

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