Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen (roughly east of Linz), Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.

The Mauthausen main camp operated from 8 August 1938, several months after the German annexation of Austria, to 5 May 1945, when it was liberated by the United States Army. Starting with the camp at Mauthausen, the number of subcamps expanded over time. In January 1945, the camps contained roughly 85,000 inmates.

As at other Nazi concentration camps, the inmates at Mauthausen and its subcamps were forced to work as slave labour, under conditions that caused many deaths. Mauthausen and its subcamps included quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms factories and plants assembling Me 262 fighter aircraft. The conditions at Mauthausen were even more severe than at most other Nazi concentration camps. Half of the 190,000 deportees died at Mauthausen or its subcamps.

Mauthausen was one of the first massive concentration camp complexes in Nazi Germany, and the last to be liberated by the Allies. The Mauthausen main camp is now a museum.

Establishment of the main camp

On 9 August 1938, prisoners from Dachau concentration camp near Munich were sent to the town of Mauthausen in Austria, to begin the construction of a new slave labour camp. The site was chosen because of the nearby granite quarry, and its proximity to Linz. Although the camp was controlled by the German state from the beginning, it was founded by a private company as an economic enterprise.

The owner of the Wiener-Graben quarry (the Marbacher-Bruch and Bettelberg quarries) was a DEST Company: an acronym for ''Deutsche Erd– und Steinwerke GmbH''. The company was led by Oswald Pohl, who was a high-ranking official of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). It rented the quarries from the City of Vienna in 1938 and started the construction of the Mauthausen camp. A year later, the company ordered the construction of the first camp at Gusen.

The granite mined in the quarries had previously been used to pave the streets of Vienna, but the Nazi authorities envisioned a complete reconstruction of major German towns in accordance with plans of Albert Speer and other proponents of Nazi architecture, for which large quantities of granite were needed. The money to fund the construction of the Mauthausen camp was gathered from a variety of sources, including commercial loans from Dresdner Bank and Prague-based Böhmische Escompte-Bank; the so-called Reinhardt's fund (meaning money stolen from the inmates of the concentration camps themselves); and from the German Red Cross.

Mauthausen initially served as a strictly-run prison camp for common criminals, prostitutes and other categories of "Incorrigible Law Offenders". On 8 May 1939 it was converted to a labour camp which was mainly used for the incarceration of political prisoners.

Gusen

The three Gusen concentration camps held a significant proportion of prisoners within the Mauthausen-Gusen complex. For most of its history, this exceeded the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp itself.

DEST began purchasing land at St Georgen/Gusen in May 1938. During 1938 and 1939, inmates of the nearby Mauthausen makeshift camp marched daily to the granite quarries at St Georgen/Gusen, which were more productive and more important for DEST than the Wienergraben Quarry. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the as-yet unfinished Mauthausen camp was already overcrowded with prisoners. The numbers of inmates rose from 1,080 in late 1938 to over 3,000 a year later. At about that time, the construction of a new camp "for the Poles" began in Gusen about away after an order by the SS(Schutzstaffel) in December 1939. The new camp (later named Gusen I) became operational in May 1940. The first inmates were put in the first two huts (No. 7 and 8) on 17 April 1940, while the first transport of prisoners – mostly from the camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen – arrived just over a month later, on 25 May.

Like nearby Mauthausen, the Gusen camps also rented inmates out to various local businesses as slave labour. In October 1941, several huts were separated from the Gusen subcamp by barbed wire and turned into a separate ''Prisoner of War Labour Camp'' (german: link=no, Kriegsgefangenenarbeitslager). This camp had many prisoners of war, mostly Soviet officers. By 1942 the production capacity of Mauthausen and the Gusen camps had reached its peak. The Gusen site was expanded to include the central depot of the SS, where various goods, which had been seized from occupied territories, were sorted and then dispatched to Germany. Local quarries and businesses were in constant need of a new source of labour as more and more Austrians were drafted into the Wehrmacht.

In March 1944, the former SS depot was converted to a new subcamp, named Gusen II, which served as an improvised concentration camp until the end of the war. Gusen II contained about 12,000 to 17,000 inmates, who were deprived of even the most basic facilities. In December 1944, Gusen III was opened in nearby Lungitz. Here, parts of a factory infrastructure were converted into the third Gusen camp. The rise in the number of subcamps could not catch up with the rising number of inmates, which led to overcrowding of the huts in Mauthausen and its subcamps. From late 1940 to 1944, the number of inmates per bed rose from two to four.

Subcamps

As the production in Mauthausen and its subcamps was constantly increasing, so were the numbers of detainees and subcamps themselves. Although initially the camps of Gusen and Mauthausen mostly served the local quarries, from 1942 onwards they began to be included in the German war machine. To accommodate the ever-growing number of slave workers, additional subcamps (german: Außenlager, links=no) of Mauthausen were built.

By the end of the war, the list included 101 camps (including 49 major subcamps) which covered most of modern Austria, from Mittersill south of Salzburg to Schwechat east of Vienna and from Passau on the prewar Austro-German border to the Loibl Pass on the border with Yugoslavia. The subcamps were divided into several categories, depending on their main function: ''Produktionslager'' for factory workers, ''Baulager'' for construction, ''Aufräumlager'' for cleaning the rubble in Allied-bombed towns, and ''Kleinlager'' (small camps) where the inmates were working specifically for the SS.

Forced labour

Business enterprise

The production output of Mauthausen and its subcamps exceeded that of each of the five other large slave labour centres: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Marburg and Natzweiler-Struthof, in terms of both production quota and profits. The list of companies using slave labour from Mauthausen and its subcamps was long, and included both national corporations and small, local firms and communities. Some parts of the quarries were converted into a Mauser machine pistol assembly plant.

In 1943, an underground factory for the Steyr-Daimler-Puch company was built in Gusen. Altogether, 45 larger companies took part in making Mauthausen and its subcamps one of the most profitable concentration camps of Nazi Germany, with more than in profits in 1944 alone (EUR in ). The companies using slave labourers from Mauthausen included:
* DEST cartel (producing bricks and quarrying stone for German state construction projects)
* Accumulatoren-Fabrik AFA (the main producer of batteries for German U-boats)
* Bayer (the main German producer of medicines and medications)
* Deutsche Bergwerks- und Hüttenbau (constructing mines and quarries)
* Linz-based Eisenwerke Oberdonau (the largest World War II steel supplier for the German Panzer tanks)
* Flugmotorenwerke Ostmark (aeroplane engine manufacturer)
* Nibelungenwerk (the largest tank factory in Nazi Germany)
* Otto Eberhard Patronenfabrik (munitions works)
* Heinkel and Messerschmitt ( ''Heinkel-Sud'' facilities in Floridsdorf, Vienna-Schwechat and Zwölfaxing, and other aeroplane factories, also a V-2 rocket factory)

* Österreichische Sauerwerks (arms producer)
* Rax-Werke (machinery and V-2 rockets)
* Steyr-Daimler-Puch (arms and vehicles)
* Hochtief)

Prisoners were also rented out as slave labour to work on local farms, road construction, reinforcing and repairing the banks of the Danube, and the construction of large residential areas in Sankt Georgen as well as being forced to excavate archaeological sites in Spielberg.

When the Allied strategic bombing campaign started to target the German war industry, German planners decided to move production to underground facilities that were impenetrable to enemy aerial bombardment. In Gusen I, the prisoners were ordered to build several large tunnels beneath the hills surrounding the camp (code-named ''Kellerbau''). By the end of World War II the prisoners had dug to house a small-arms factory.

In January 1944, similar tunnels were also built beneath the village of Sankt Georgen by the inmates of Gusen II subcamp (code-named ''Bergkristall''). They dug roughly so the Messerschmitt company could build an assembly plant to produce the Messerschmitt Me 262 and V-2 rockets. In addition to planes, some of Gusen II tunnels served as factories for various war materials. In late 1944, roughly 11,000 of the Gusen I and II inmates were working in underground facilities. An additional 6,500 worked on expanding the underground network of tunnels and halls.

In 1945, the Me 262 works was already finished and the Germans were able to assemble 1,250 planes a month. This was the second largest plane factory in Germany after the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which was also underground.

Weapons research

In January 2015, a "panel of archaeologists, historians and other experts" ruled out the earlier claims of an Austrian filmmaker that a bunker underneath the camp was connected to the German nuclear weapon project. The panel indicated that stairs uncovered during an excavation prompted by the allegations led to an SS shooting range.

Extermination

The political function of the camp continued in parallel with its economic role. Until at least 1942, it was used for the imprisonment and murder of the Nazis' political and ideological enemies, real and imagined. Initially, the camp did not have a gas chamber of its own and the so-called Muselmänner, or prisoners who were too sick to work, after being maltreated, under-nourished or exhausted, were then transferred to other concentration camps for extermination (mostly to the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, which was away), or killed by lethal injection and cremated in the local crematorium. The growing number of prisoners made this system too expensive and from 1940, Mauthausen was one of the few camps in the West to use a gas chamber on a regular basis. In the beginning, an improvised mobile gas chamber – a van with the exhaust pipe connected to the inside – shuttled between Mauthausen and Gusen. It was capable of killing about 120 prisoners at a time when it was completed.

Inmates

Until early 1940, the largest group of inmates consisted of German, Austrian and Czechoslovak socialists, communists, homosexuals, anarchists and people of Romani origin. Other groups of people to be persecuted solely on religious grounds were the ''Sectarians'', as they were dubbed by the Nazi regime, meaning Bible Students, or as they are called today, Jehovah's Witnesses. The reason for their imprisonment was their rejection of giving the loyalty oath to Hitler and their refusal to participate in any kind of military service.

In early 1940, many Poles were transferred to the Mauthausen–Gusen complex. The first groups were mostly composed of artists, scientists, Boy Scouts, teachers, and university professors, who were arrested during ''Intelligenzaktion'' and the course of the AB Action. Camp Gusen II was called by Germans ''Vernichtungslager für die polnische Intelligenz'' ("Extermination camp for the Polish intelligentsia").

Later in the war, new arrivals were from every category of the "unwanted", but educated people and so-called political prisoners constituted the largest part of all inmates until the end of the war. During World War II, large groups of Spanish Republicans were also transferred to Mauthausen and its subcamps. Most of them were former Republican soldiers or activists who had fled to France after Franco's victory and then were captured by German forces after the defeat of France in 1940 or handed over to the Germans by the Vichy authorities. The largest of these groups arrived at Gusen in January 1941.

In early 1941, almost all the Poles and Spaniards, except for a small group of specialists working in the quarry's stone mill, were transferred from Mauthausen to Gusen. Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in 1941, the camps started to receive a large number of Soviet POWs. Most of them were kept in huts separated from the rest of the camp. The Soviet prisoners of war were a major part of the first groups to be gassed in the newly built gas chamber in early 1942. In 1944, a large group of Hungarian and Dutch Jews, about 8,000 people altogether, was also transferred to the camp. Much like all the other large groups of prisoners that were transferred to Mauthausen and its subcamps, most of them either died as a result of the hard labour and poor conditions, or were deliberately killed.

After the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the outbreak of the partisan resistance in summer of the same year, many people suspected of aiding the Yugoslav resistance were sent to the Mauthausen camp, mostly from areas under direct German occupation, namely northern Slovenia and Serbia. An estimated 1,500 Slovenes died in Mauthausen.

Throughout the years of World War II, the Mauthausen and its subcamps received new prisoners in smaller transports daily, mostly from other concentration camps in German-occupied Europe. Most of the prisoners at the subcamps of Mauthausen had been kept in a number of different detention sites before they arrived. The most notable of such centres for Mauthausen and its subcamps were the camps at Dachau and Auschwitz. The first transports from Auschwitz arrived in February 1942. The second transport in June of that year was much larger and numbered some 1,200 prisoners. Similar groups were sent from Auschwitz to Gusen and Mauthausen in April and November 1943, and then in January and February 1944. Finally, after Adolf Eichmann

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