Mauthausen

Built in 1938, Mauthausen was part of a system that included 40 sub camps. Carpenters in the local village were only too happy to have been hired by the Nazis to build the first buildings here. The Nazis bought the property at Mauthausen because of the valuable quarry that existed there. The first prisoners arrived here by train from Dachau. The 300 prisoners were forced to march through the town to get to the camp, where they continued the construction that the carpenters had started. The picture below shows prisoners who were forced to carry stones, sometimes as heavy as 60 pounds, up the stairs from the quarry to help build the rest of the camp.

This picture shows just how high a path the prisoners traveled while carrying stone from the quarry.This shows the very narrow stairs prisoners climbed while carrying stone from the quarry to the top of the hill. Once they got to the top of the  stairs, they continued on a rocky gravel road. 

At the entry to Mauthausen, we saw remnants of the soccer field where the team of SS soldiers played their home games. They played these games as members of the regular Austrian soccer league, with the last game played in March,1945. (You can even see the SS letters on their shirts, and in the  background behind the team, you can see the buildings which housed 10,000 prisoners in the "sick camp" buildings, which represented half of the population of prisoners at the whole camp. The insanity of this whole thing is that the games went on with local fans sitting in seats on one side, while the prisoners watched from behind the fence on the other side.

Directors of the camp said there were only two types of people....those who can work and those who must die. The first 6 days after liberation, 3000 people died. A graveyard was set up in the area where the "sick camp" was located, and the bodies remained buried here until 1955 when the bodies were exhumed and relocated to a graveyard set up in an area at the back of the camp. These were the graves for the people who could not be identified.

   The picture below shows the roll call area at Mauthausen--900 feet of pavement, where, twice a day, prisoners would line up in their prison issued wooden shoes and striped prison clothing, to have their numbers called. This was a process that should have taken no longer than 30 minutes, but often times would take up to two hours, almost as a form of torture for the prisoners.  In addition, these roll calls were mostly led by other prisoner "functionaries," or capos.

    Strangely enough, the crematorium at Mauthausen was located in the basement of the hospital barracks, and it was a doctor who decided to have the gas chamber installed. The doctor saw this as part of his job, seeing as Hitler said the doctors were the most important people, because they were "designated specialists for the reason of health;" therefore, doctors were buying into the ideology that they weren't killing people, but in fact, they believed they were eliminating people who were dangerous to the health of others.... This was a very difficult stop today, and it is hard to reconcile how human beings can commit such inhuman acts against others....