Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

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Mauthausen (from summer 1940, Mauthausen-Gusen; Template:Lang-de) was a group of Nazi German concentration camps centred around the small town of Mauthausen in Upper Austria, about 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz. Initially consisting of a single camp and a single quarry, with time it grew to become one of the largest labour camp complexes in German-occupied Europe<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Bischof">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Apart from the four main sub-camps at Mauthausen and nearby Gusen, the slave labour of the inmates was used in more than 50 sub-camps in all parts of Austria and southern Germany.

In January of 1945, the camps - directed from the central office in Mauthausen - had a total of roughly 85,000 inmates<ref name="Dobosiewicz">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. The death toll remains unknown, though most estimates place it between 122,766 and 320,000 for the entire complex. It was one of the first large concentration camps in the German system and the last one to be liberated by the Allies. The two main camps of the complex were also the only two camps in whole Europe to be labelled as grade III camps - the toughest camps for "incorrigible political enemies of the Reich"<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie"/>. Image:Mauthausen-barracks.jpg

Contents

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History

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Camp operation

On August 8, 1938, prisoners from Dachau concentration camp were ordered to the town of Mauthausen near Linz, Austria, to begin the construction of a new camp. The spot was chosen due to its proximity to the transport hub of Linz, but also due to the fact that the area was sparsely-populated<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/>. Initially, until May 8, 1939, it served as a strictly-run prison for common criminals, prostitutes<ref name="Żeromski">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref> and other categories of "incorrigible law offenders"<ref name="Heydrich">As stated in Reinhard Heydrich's memo of January 1, 1941; in: Dobosiewicz, Stanisław, op.cit., p.12</ref>. Over time the camp was converted to a heavy labour camp which was used mostly for political prisoners<ref name="Marsalek">Template:De icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Unlike many other concentration camp systems which were intended for all categories of people, Mauthausen was mostly used for extermination through labour of the "intelligentsia", that is educated people and members of the higher classes in countries subjugated by Germany during World War II<ref name="Gębik">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Image:Austria Mauthausen sub-camps.png Interestingly, although the camp was - from the beginning of its existence - controlled by the German state, it was founded with private money as an economic enterprise. The owner of the Wiener Graben, Marbacher Bruch and Bettelberg quarries located in and around Mauthausen was the DEST Company (an acronym for Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke Gmbh). The company, led by Oswald Pohl, who was also a high-ranking official of the SS, bought the quarries from the city of Vienna and started the construction of the camps at both Mauthausen and nearby Gusen. The money for the construction materials was gathered from a variety of sources, both from commercial loans from Dresdner Bank and Prague-based Escompte Bank, from the so-called Reinhardt's fund (money stolen from the inmates of the concentration camps themselves) and from the German Red Cross<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/>.

In late 1939 the Mauthausen camp with its Wiener Graben limestone quarry was already overcrowded with inmates. About that time the construction of a new camp in nearby Gusen (some 4,5 kilometres away) was started. The new camp, together with its Kastenhofen quarry was completed in May of 1940. The first transport of prisoners, mostly transferred from the camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen, arrived there on May 25 of that year<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/>. By 1942 the production capacity of both camps reached its peak. Gusen was expanded to include the central depot of the SS, where various goods stolen in countries occupied by Germany were sorted and then dispatched to Germany<ref name="Dobosiewicz2">Dobosiewicz, op.cit., p.26</ref>. Later that year the concentration camps started to be converted to be a part of the German war machine. Some parts of the quarry were converted into a Mauser automatic pistol assembly plant. In 1943 an underground factory for the Steyr-Daimler-Puch company was built in Gusen. A similar factory for the Messerschmitt aeroplane producer was opened near the village of St. Georgen. In the same period, the number of sub-camps of Mauthausen continued to rise. By the end of the war the list included 101 camps (including 49 major sub-camps<ref name="Waller">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>) covering most of modern Austria, from Mittersill south of Salzburg to Schwechat west of Vienna and from Passau on the pre-war Austro-German border to the Loibl Pass at the border with Yugoslavia<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/>. The list of companies using slave labour from the Mauthausen-Gusen camp system was long and included both national concerns and small, local firms and communities. Among them were<ref name="Memoriales">Template:Es icon Template:Cite book</ref>:

Altogether some 45 larger companies took part in making the KZ Mauthausen-Gusen one of the most profitable concentration camps of Germany at the time, with more than 11,000,000 Reichsmark of the profits in 1944 alone<ref name="Memoriales"/>. The production of Mauthausen-Gusen exceeded that of other five large slave labour centres of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Marburg and Natzweiler-Struthof<ref name="Memoriales"/>. The political function of the camp continued in parallel with its economic role. Until at least 1942 it was used for the detention and murder of Germany's political and ideological enemies, both real and imagined<ref name="Bischof"/><ref name="Richardson">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Image:Mauthausen-quarry.jpg

Several subordunate camps of the KL Mauthausen included munitions factories, quarries, mines, arms factories and Me 262 fighter plane assembly plants. The inmates were also used as slave labour at nearby farms and for road construction. The camp carried out exterminations through labour and served the needs of the German war machine. The inmates working in the quarries worked 12 hours a day until they were totally exhausted; then they were transferred to the Revier or other place for extermination. Initially the camp did not have a gas chamber of its own and the so-called Muslims, or prisoners heavily sick from maltreatment, malnutrition and total exhaustion, were transferred to other concentration camps for extermination (mostly to the infamous Hartheim Castle<ref name="Traveler's Guide">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>), or killed by lethal injection at the camp, and cremated in the crematorium. The growing number of prisoners of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex made the system too expensive and from 1940 Mauthausen was one of the few camps in the west to use a gas chamber regularly. To begin with, an improvised mobile gas chamber, that was a lorry with the exhaust tube directed to the inside, shuttled between Mauthausen and Gusen. By December of 1941 a permanent gas chamber that could kill about 120 prisoners at a time was completed<ref name="Abzug">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Shermer">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>.

As the production in all sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen complex was constantly rising, so was the number of prisoners and sub-camps themselves. When the strategic bombing campaign started to target German war industry, German planners decided to move production to underground facilities, impenetrable to enemy aerial bombardment. In Gusen the prisoners started to build several large tunnels beneath the hills surrounding the camp. After 1944 similar tunnels were also built beneath the village of Sankt Georgen. Altogether, by the end of World War II the prisoners had dug 29,400m² of tunnels. Roughly 4000m² were dug beneath St. Georgen for the Messerschmitt company as an assembly plant of Messerschmitt Me 262 and V-2 rocket fuselage factory. Another 7000m² served as factories for various war materials. In late 1944 roughly 11,000 of the inmates of Gusen were working in the underground facilities<ref name="Dobosiewicz-tunnels">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, W obronie życia..., op.cit., p.194</ref>. In 1945 the Me 262 works were able to assemble 1250 planes every month and were the second largest plane factory in Germany after the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, also located underground<ref name="Dobosiewicz-tunnels"/>.

In March of 1944 the former SS depot was converted to a new sub-camp, from then on called Gusen II. By the end of the war the depot had become an improvised concentration camp hosing from 12,000 to 17,000 inmates, deprived of even the most basic facilities<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie"/>. In December of that year yet another part of Gusen was opened in nearby Lungitz, by converting parts of the factory infrastructure to the third sub-camp of Gusen - Gusen III<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie"/>. However, the rise of the number of sub-camps could not catch up with the rise of the number of inmates which led to tragic overcrowding of the huts in all sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen. While in late 1940 there were roughly 2 inmates per every bed, in 1944 the number rose to 4<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie"/>.

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Inmates

Image:Mauthausen-courtyard.jpg Until early 1940, the largest group of inmates consisted of German, Austrian and Czechoslovak socialists, communists, anarchists, homosexuals, and Roma. Other groups of people to be persecuted solely on religious grounds were the sectarians, as they were dubbed by the Nazi regime, that is the Bible Students and Jehovah's Witnesses. The main reasons of their persecution were rejection of the loyalty oath to Hitler and their refusal to render any kind of military service — a political consequence of their beliefs<ref name="Marsalek"/>.

In early 1940 a large number of Poles were transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen complex. The first groups composed mostly of artists, scientists, boy scouts, teachers and university professors<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/><ref name="Nogaj">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>, arrested in the course of the AB Action. Before and during World War II large groups of Spanish Republicans were also transferred to the camp and its sub-camps. The largest group arrived to Gusen in January of 1941<ref name="Wnuk">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in 1941 the camps also started to receive a large number of Soviet POWs. Many of them were kept separately; it was the Soviet prisoners of war who constituted the first large group to be gassed in the newly-built gas chamber in early 1942. Image:Mauthausen-Barbed wire memorial.jpg

In 1944 a large group of Hungarian and Dutch Jews was also transferred to the camp. Most of them either died as a result of the hard labour and poor conditions, or were thrown down the sides of the Mauthausen quarry (nick-named the Parachute Wall by the SS guards and their Kapos). Outside of the major waves of inmates, throughout the years of World War II the camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex received new prisoners in smaller transports on a daily basis, mostly from other concentration camps in German-held Europe. The first transports from Auschwitz arrived in February of 1942. The second transport of June of that year was much larger and numbered some 1200 prisoners. Similar groups were sent from Auschwitz to Gusen and Mauthausen in April and November of 1943 and then in January and February, 1944. Finally, after Adolf Eichmann visited Mauthausen in May of that year, the KL Mauthausen-Gusen received a first group of roughly 8,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz, the first group evacuated from that camp before the Soviet advance. Initially the groups evacuated from Auschwitz consisted of qualified workers for the ever-growing industry of Mauthausen.

However, with time Auschwitz almost stopped accepting new prisoners and most were directed to Mauthausen. This was also true for a group of roughly 10,000 prisoners evacuated in the last wave in January of 1945, only a few weeks before the Soviet capture of the area of Auschwitz-Birkenau complex<ref name="KARTA">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite web</ref>. Among them was a large group of civilians arrested by the Germans after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising<ref name="Kirchmayer">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>; by the liberation not more than 500 of them were still alive<ref name="Dobosiewicz-evacuation">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit., pp.365-367</ref>. Altogether, during the final months of the war, 23,364 prisoners from other concentration camps were marched to the complex<ref name="Dobosiewicz-evacuation"/>. Many of them died before they were ever registered, while others were given the camp numbers of prisoners who had already been killed<ref name="Dobosiewicz-evacuation"/>. The estimated number of prisoners that passed through all of the sub-camps is 335,000; most of them were forced to do hard labour in the limestone quarries and the factories. Image:Kazimierkiewicz georg 1 hpk.jpg

As in all other German concentration camps not all prisoners were equal. Their treatment depended largely on the category assigned to each inmate, as well as nationality and rank within the system. The so-called kapos, or prisoners who have been recruited by their captors to police their fellow prisoners, were given more food and higher pay in the form of concentration camp coupons which could be exchanged for cigarettes in the canteen, as well as a separate room inside most barracks. In addition, following Himmler's order in June, 1941, a brothel was opened for them in 1942 in the Gusen I camp<ref name="nizkor">Template:Cite web</ref>. Image:Mauthausen-Jewish memorial.jpg

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Women and children in Mauthausen-Gusen

Although the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex was mostly a labour camp for men, in September of 1944 a women's camp was opened in Mauthausen with the first transport of female prisoners from Auschwitz. Eventually more women and children came to Mauthausen from Ravensbruck, Bergen Belsen, Gross Rosen, and Buchenwald. With them came some female matrons. Twenty are known to have served in the Mauthausen camp, and sixty in the whole camp complex. Female guards also staffed the Mauthausen sub-camps at Hirtenberg, Lenzing (the main women's sub-camp in Austria), and St. Lambrecht. Chief wardress at Mauthausen was first Margarete Freinberger, then Jane Bernigau. Of all the female overseers who served in Mauthausen, almost all of them were recruited between September 1944 and November 1944 from Austrian cities and towns. One female guard came from Schwertberg, a small village located a few miles from Mauthausen. Edda Scheer, who worked in a factory in Hirtenberg, Austria, was recruited by force in September 1944 and sent to Ravensbruck for Aufseherin training. Soon after she was sent to the Hirtenberg sub-camp near Vienna, Austria. When the SS evacuated the camp in April 1945 Edda went to Mauthausen. After the war she talked about the main camp at Mauthausen, and said, "Every now and then [we] drove the prisoners to the crematorium because one always had to die somewhere". She was never punished for war crimesTemplate:Fact. In early April 1945, at least 2,500 more female prisoners came from the female sub-camps at Amstetten, St. Lambrecht, Hirtenberg, and the Flossenburg subcamp at Freiberg. It is rumoured that Hildegard Lachert also served at Mauthausen<ref name="Brown">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Image:Ebensee.jpg The available Mauthausen inmate statistics<ref name="Friedlander">Template:En icon Template:Cite book as quoted in Template:Cite web</ref> from the spring of 1943 shows that there were 2,400 prisoners below the age of 20, = 12.8% of the 18,655 inmate population. By late March 1945, the number of juvenile prisoners in Mauthausen increased to 15,048, = 19.1% of the 78,547 Mauthausen inmates. The number of incarcerated children increased 6.2 times, whereas the total number of prisoners in the same period multiplied by a factor of only four. These numbers reflect the increasing use of Polish, Czech, Russian, and Balkan teenagers as slave labour as the war continued<ref name="Myczkowski">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. Statistics showing the composition of the juvenile inmates shortly before liberation<ref name="Friedlander"/> reveal the following major child prisoner sub-groups: 5,809 foreign civilian labourers, 5,055 political prisoners; 3,654 Jews; and 330 Russian POWs. There were also 23 gypsy children, 20 a-socials, 6 Spaniards, and 3 Jehovah's Witnesses. Mauthausen's children are probably representative for the composition of child prisoners in the camps after 1940.

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Treatment of inmates and methodology of crime

Although not the only concentration camp where the German authorities implemented their extermination through labour (Vernichtung durch Arbeit), Mauthausen-Gusen was one of the most brutal and severe. The conditions within the camp were considered exceptionally hard to bear, even by concentration camp standards<ref name="HolocaustMuseum">Template:En icon Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Bloxham">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>. In the camps, where the inmates suffered not only from malnutrition, overcrowded huts and constant abuse by the guards and kapos, but also from exceptionally hard labour<ref name="Abzug"/>, every conceivable horror was perpetrated on the inmates<ref name="Burleigh">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>.

The work in the quarries, often in unbearable heat or in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius<ref name="Dobosiewicz"/> led to exceptionally-high mortality rates<ref name="Mortality">It is often mentioned that the mortality rate in 1941 reached 58%, as compared with 36% at Dachau and 19% at Buchenwald over the same period.</ref><ref name="Burleigh"/>. The food rations were limited and during the 1940-1942 period an average inmate weighed 40 kilograms<ref name="Pike">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>. It is estimated that the average energy content of food rations dropped from about 1750 calories a day in the 1940-1942 period to between 1,150 and 1,460 during the next period. In 1945 the energy content was even lower and did not exceed 600 to 1000 calories a day; that is less than a half of the energy needed by an average worker in heavy industry<ref name="Dobosiewicz_W_obronie"/>. This led to muzulmanisation and starvation of thousands of inmates.

The inmates of Mauthausen, Gusen I and Gusen II had access to a separate sub-camp for the sick - the so-called Krankenlager. Despite the fact that roughly 100 medics from among the inmates were working there<ref name="Krukowski">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>, they were not given any medication<ref name="Krukowski"/><ref name="Dobosiewicz"/>. Thus the hospital camp, as it was called by the German authorities, was in fact the last stop before death for thousands of inmates - and very few had a chance to recover. Image:Mauthausen-survivors.jpg

The rock quarry in Mauthausen was at the base of the infamous "Stairs of Death". Prisoners were forced to carry blocks of stone — often weighing as much as 50 kilograms — up the 186 stairs, one behind the other. As a result, many exhausted prisoners would collapse in front of the other prisoners in the line, and then fall on top of the other prisoners, creating a horrific domino effect — that is, the first prisoner falling into the next, and so on all the way down the stairs<ref name="Weissman">Template:En icon Template:Cite book</ref>.

Such brutality was not accidental. In fact, and often, the SS guards would force prisoners — exhausted from hours of hard labour and having had insufficient food and water — to race up the stairs with the blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as "The Parachute Wall"<ref name="Waller"/>. At gunpoint each prisoner would have the option of being shot, or to push the prisoner in front of them off of the cliff. Other methods of extermination of prisoners, either sick, unfit for further labour or as means of collective responsibility after escape attempts included:

  • Icy showers - some 3,000 inmates died of hypothermia after having taken an icy cold shower and were then left outside in cold weather<ref name="Oskarżamy">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>.
  • Mass shootings
  • Medical experiments
  • Hanging
  • Starvation
  • Injections of phenol (a group of 2000 prisoners who applied to be transferred to the sanatorium were declared mentally sick and murdered by Dr. Ramsauer in the course of the H-13 action)<ref name="Oskarżamy"/>
  • Drowning in large barrels of water (Gusen II)<ref name="W_obronie2">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, W obronie..., op.cit. p.12</ref>
  • Beaten to death

After the war one of the survivors, Dr. Antoni Gościński reported 62 ways of murdering people in the camps of Gusen I and Mauthausen<ref name="Oskarżamy"/>.

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Death toll

Image:Mauthausen-tablet.jpg

Because of the fact that the Germans had destroyed much of the camp files and evidence, as well as have often given newly-arrived prisoners the camp numbers of those who had already been killed<ref name="Abzug"/>, the exact death toll of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex is impossible to estimate. The matter is further complicated by the fact that some of the inmates of Gusen were murdered in Mauthausen, at least 3423 were sent to Hartheim Castle and several thousands were killed in the mobile gas chambers - without any mention of the exact number of victims in the surviving files<ref name="Dobosiewicz-Zamordowani">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit., pp.418-426</ref>. The SS before their escape on May 4, 1945 tried to destroy the evidence and only approximately 40,000 victims were identified. During the first days after the liberation the camp's main chancellery was seized by the members of a Polish resistance organization and secured from other inmates, who wanted to burn it<ref name="Dobosiewicz-Samoobrona">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. After the war they were brought by one of the survivors to Poland and then passed to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Oświęcim<ref name="PAP">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Muzeum">Template:En icon Template:Cite web</ref>. The surviving camp archives include personal files of 37,411 murdered prisoners, including 22,092 Poles, 5024 Spaniards, 2843 Soviet prisoners of war and 7452 inmates of 24 other nationalities<ref name="Wlazłowski">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>. The surviving parts of the death register of KL Gusen list additional 30,536 names.

Apart of the surviving camp files of the sub-camp of Mauthausen, the main documents used for estimation of death toll of the camp complex are:

  1. A report by Józef Żmij, a survivor who had been working at the Gusen I camp's chancellery. His report is based on a personally-made copies of yearly reports of 1940-1944 and daily reports of the camp's commander for the period between January 1, 1945 and the liberation.
  2. Original death register for the sub-camp of Gusen held by the International Red Cross
  3. Personal notes of Stanisław Nogaj, yet another inmate who had been working in the chancellery of Gusen
  4. Death register prepared by the SS chief medic of the Mauthausen sub-camp for the Gusen camp (similar records for the Mauthausen camp itself were destroyed)
Death toll of Gusen I, II and III
in various sources<ref name="table">Compiled from a larger table published in: Stanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit., p.421; the numbers are fragmentary and include only the numbers for Gusen I, II and III, without the numbers for other sub-camps or the main camp in Mauthausen. Summary by Stanisław Dobosiewicz includes categories omitted by some of the sources, including roughly 2744 former inmates who died immediately after liberation, both in the camp and in American field hospitals, as well as an approximate number of Jewish children (420) and prisoners in the Sick Camp (1900) who were not registered in the official camp statistics.</ref> 		Józef Żmij Stanisław Nogaj KL Gusen
death register 		Hans Maršálek<ref name="Marsalek"/> Stanisław Dobosiewicz<ref name="table"/>
1940 1784 7214 1430 1389 1762
1941 5793 5564 5272 6300
1942 6088 7203 5005 7410 9534
1943 5225 5303 5173 5248 6103
1944 5921 4790 4691 4091 5488
1945 12600 197 4673 15415
undated 2843
Total 37411 24707 30536 33451 44602

Because of that the exact death toll of the entire Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp system varies considerably from source to source. Various scholars place it at between 122,766<ref name="tablet">As evidenced by one of the stone tablets commemorating the victims, erected after the war by Austrian authorities.</ref> and 320,000<ref name="Oskarżamy"/>, with other numbers also frequently quoted being 200,000<ref name="Pike2">David Wingeate Pike, op.cit., p.XII</ref> and "over 150,000"<ref name="Wrogom">Template:Pl icon Template:Cite book</ref>.

The death toll of the four main camps of Mauthausen, Gusen I, Gusen II and Gusen III which formed the main centre of the complex. Various historians place the total death toll in those sub-camps at between 55,000<ref name="Abzug"/> and 60,000<ref name="Gilbert">Template:En icon Template:Cite book According to Martin Gilbert, there were 30,000 deaths in Mauthausen and its sub-camps in the first four months of 1945. According to him, this was approximately half of the deaths in the whole history of the camp.</ref>.

Out of an estimated number of 320,000 prisoners who were incarcerated in various sub-camps of KL Mauthausen-Gusen throughout its existence only approximately 80,000 survived the warTemplate:Fact. Image:Some of the bodies being removed by German civilians for decent burial at Gusen Concentration Camp, Muhlhausen, near Linz, Austria.jpg

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Liberation and post-war heritage

Image:KZ Mauthausen.jpg During the final months before liberation, the camp's commander Franz Ziereis prepared for its defence against a possible Soviet offensive. Most of the inmates of German and Austrian nationality "volunteered" for the SS-Freiwillige Häftlingsdivision, an SS unit composed mostly of former concentration camp inmates and headed by Oskar Dirlewanger. The remaining prisoners were rushed to build a line of limestone anti-tank obstacles to the east of Mauthausen. The inmates unable to cope with the hard labour and malnutrition were exterminated in large numbers to free space for newly-arrived evacuation transports from other camps, including most of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen located in eastern Austria. In the final months of the war the main source of calories, that is the parcels of food sent through the International Red Cross, stopped and food rations became catastrophically low. The prisoners transferred to the "Hospital Sub-camp" received one piece of bread per 20 inmates and roughly half a litre of weed soup a day<ref name="Dobosiewicz-food rations">Dobosiewicz, op.cit., pp.374-375</ref>. This made some of the prisoners, previously engaged in various types of resistance activity, begin to prepare plans to defend of the camp in case of an SS attempt to exterminate all the remaining inmates. It is not known why the prisoners of Gusen I and II were not exterminated en masse, despite direct orders from Heinrich Himmler; Ziereis' plan assumed rushing all the prisoners into the tunnels of the underground factories of Kellerbau and blowing up the entrances. The plan was known to one of the Polish resistance organizations which started an ambitious plan of gathering tools necessary to dig air vents in the entrances.

On April 28, under cover of a fictional air-raid alarm, some 22,000 prisoners were indeed rushed into the tunnels. However, after several hours in the tunnels all of the prisoners were allowed to return to the camp. Stanisław Dobosiewicz, the author of a monumental monograph of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex explains that one of the possible causes of failure of the German plan was that the Polish prisoners managed to cut the fuse wires. Ziereis himself stated in his testimony written on May 25 that it was his wife who convinced him not to follow the order from above<ref name="Dobosiewicz-final">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit.,pp. 382-388</ref>. Although the plan was abandoned, the prisoners feared that the SS might want to start a massacre of prisoners by other means. Because of that the Polish, Soviet and French prisoners prepared a plan for an assault on the barracks of the SS guards in order to seize the arms necessary to put up a fight. A similar plan was also passed by the Spanish inmates<ref name="Dobosiewicz-final"/>.

On May 3, the SS and other guards started to prepare for evacuation of the camp. The following day the guards of Mauthausen were replaced with unarmed Volkssturm soldiers and a police unit of the fire fighters evacuated from Vienna. The police officer in charge of the unit accepted the "inmate self-government" as the camp's highest authority and Martin Gerken, until then the highest-ranking prisoner in the camp's administration, became the new de facto commander. He attempted to create an International Prisoner Committee that would become a provisional governing body of the camp until it was liberated by one of the approaching armies, but he was openly accused of cooperation with the SS and the plan failed. All work in the sub-camps of Mauthausen stopped and the inmates focused on preparations for the liberation - or defence of the camps against a possible assault by the SS divisions concentrated in the area<ref name="Dobosiewicz-final"/>. The remnants of several German divisions indeed assaulted the Mauthausen sub-camp, but were repelled by the prisoners who took over the camp<ref name="Żeromski"/>. Out of all the main sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen only Gusen III was to be evacuated. On May 1 the inmates were rushed on a death march towards Sankt Georgen, but were ordered to return to the camp after several hours. The operation was repeated the following day, but called off soon afterwards. The following day the SS guards escaped leaving the prisoners to their own fate<ref name="Dobosiewicz-final"/>. Image:Ebensee-survivors.jpg

The camps of Mauthausen-Gusen were the last to be liberated during the World War II. On May 5, 1945 the camp at Mauthausen was approached by soldiers of the 41st Recon Squad of the US 11th Armoured Division, 3rd US Army. The reconaissance squad was led by S/SGT Albert J. Kosiek. His troop disarmed the policemen and left the camp. By the time of its liberation, most of the SS-men of Mauthausen had already fled; however, some 30 who were left were lynched by the prisoners<ref name="Dobosiewicz-liberty">Stanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit., pp.395-397</ref>; a similar number was lynched in Gusen II<ref name="Dobosiewicz-liberty"/>.

Among the inmates liberated from the camp was Lieutenant Jack Taylor, an officer of the Office of Strategic Services. He had managed to avoid execution with the help of several prisoners. He survived the war and was later a key witness at the Dachau War Crimes Trials. Another of the camp's survivors was Simon Wiesenthal, an engineer who spent the rest of his life hunting Nazi war criminals.

Following the capitulation of Germany, the Mauthausen-Gusen complex fell within the Soviet sector of occupation of Austria. Initially the Soviet authorities used parts of the Mauthausen and Gusen I camps as barracks for the Red Army. After that, between 1946 and 1947, the camps were unguarded and many furnishings and facilities of the camp were dismantled, both by the Red Army and by the local population. Although the camp was turned over to Austrian civilian authorities in the early summer of 1947, it was not until 1949 that it was declared a national memorial site. Finally, 25 years after camp's liberation, on May 3, 1975 Chancellor Bruno Kreisky officially opened the Mauthausen Museum<ref name="Bischof"/>. Unlike Mauthausen, much of what constituted the sub-camps of Gusen I, II and III is now covered by residential areas built there after the war<ref name="Terrance 2">Marc Terrance, op.cit., pp.138-139</ref>.

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Notable inmates

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See also

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Notes and references

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External links

Template:Commons

es:Campo de concentración de Mauthausen-Gusen eo:Mauthausen fr:Mauthausen it:Campo di concentramento di Mauthausen-Gusen he:מאוטהאוזן nl:Mauthausen (concentratiekamp) no:Mauthausen-Gusen konsentrasjonsleir pl:Mauthausen-Gusen cs:Mauthausen

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