Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains among others:

Number books, arrivals books and arrival lists of incoming prisoners, transfer and release lists, status reports, transport lists, protective custody-files, prisoner registration files, prisoner lists, lists and telegrams from released German prisoners, operation records, death registers, death registers, numerical death lists, death lists, execution lists, listing of cremation urn deliveries, cremation lists, lists of victims according to nation, liberation lists, deaths after the liberation, Red-Cross-correspondence, general correspondence, medical reports, examination lists for armed forces duty, documentation from prisoner-of-war-camp Mauthausen-Gusen, documentation from various commandos, documentation about medical experiments on humans, testimonies from camp personnel and former prisoners, arrest books, individual documents of prisoners, registry office cards, documents of the War Crimes Investigations

History of Concentration Camp Mauthausen 1938-1945:

On 8 August 1938 a group of 300 Austrian and German prisoners from Concentration Camp Dachau began with the construction of Concentration Camp Mauthausen near Linz in Upper Austria. Like Concentration Camp Flossenbürg, Mauthausen was also chosen as location due to the neighboring granite quarries.

Until 1942, when all the concentration camps were becoming increasingly important as a labor force reservoir for the weapons industry, Mauthausen was a death camp where primarily Poles, Czechs, Soviet prisoners of war, republican Spaniards, but also Yugoslavs, Belgians, French, Sinti and Roma as well as German and Austrian communists were systematically murdered. Jewish prisoners had essentially no chance of survival until 1942. They were brought from the occupied countries and other concentration camps to Mauthausen to be murdered. However, extermination through slaving in the Mauthausen stone quarries and in the satellite camp Gusen, founded in 1940, played just as significant a role as did the killing facility in Hartheim Castle, which was put into operation in 1940 and where as of 1941 more than 5,000 prisoners of the camp were murdered with poisonous gas. In the spring of 1942 a gas chamber was also in operation in CC Mauthausen.

From the summer of 1943 the majority of the prisoners were laboring in the armaments factories of the 46 satellite camps. Besides the Steyr-Daimler-Puch A.G. and the Reich works „Hermann Göring“ in Linz, as of autumn 1944 in Ebensee in Salzkammergut, near Melk and close to St. Georgen an der Gusen, enormous tunnel systems were created, where the airplane and rocket production was to be relocated underground.

By the end of 1944 there were approx 10,000 prisoners in Mauthausen, and in the satellite camps 60,000, among them a large number of Jewish prisoners. Between August 1938 and May 1945 a total of some 200,000 people were imprisoned in Mauthausen and in its satellite camps, about half of them died there. Almost 45,000 prisoners died between January and May 1945 alone. Because of the ever-approaching front lines a large number of the satellite camps were “evacuated” in March and April 1945. For the most part the prisoners were forced onto foot marches back to Mauthausen, Gusen, or the satellite camp Ebensee.

In the final days of April, before fleeing on 3 May, the SS ordered all documentation to be destroyed, the killing facilities to be dismantled as well as direct witnesses of the mass crimes to be murdered. On 5 May 1945 the Mauthausen and Gusen camps were liberated by American troops.

Source: Distel, Barbara: Mauthausen (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed.by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 149-150 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/71/KZ-Gedenkstätte-Mauthausen [Latest access: 2012-08-09].