Austria's Dark History: Exploring Concentration Camps

Before and during the Second World War, several concentration camps were maintained and controlled by Nazi Germany throughout its territories. The first of these camps were erected in Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took control of the country. There were also concentration camps in other countries where Nazi Germany had control, including Austria. One such camp is the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex in Austria, which consisted of three separate concentration camps: Gusen I, Gusen II, and Gusen III.

Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex

Mauthausen 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. Gusen I was meant for the political prisoners from Poland and became operational in May 1940. Gusen II was opened in March 1944 and contained up to 17,000 prisoners who were deprived of even the basic facilities.

The so-called kapos, or prisoners who had 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. On Himmler's order of June 1941, a brothel was opened in the Mauthausen and Gusen I camps in 1942. The Kapos formed the main part of the so-called Prominents (German: Prominenz), or prisoners who were given a much better treatment than the average inmate.

The Mauthausen camp complex was mostly a labour camp for men, but a women's camp was opened in Mauthausen, in September 1944, with the first transport of female prisoners from Auschwitz.

Gusen camp construction

Several concentration camps were maintained and controlled by Nazi Germany throughout its territories before and during the Second World War. One such camp was the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex in Austria.

The Gusen camp was located around three miles away from the Mauthausen concentration camp. The site was purchased by the SS in May 1938 because of its proximity to the Gusen and Kastenhof stone quarries. An SS-owned firm, Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DESt-German Earth and Stone Works), managed the site and used concentration camp prisoner labour to extract and finish construction materials at Mauthausen. Prisoners from Mauthausen were marched daily to the Gusen stone quarry beginning in 1938. Tiring of marching the prisoner detachment three miles to the Gusen quarries, SS authorities authorized the construction of concentration camp Gusen in late 1939. During the winter of 1939–1940, German, Austrian, and Polish concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen constructed the camp and prisoner barracks. The camp became operational in May 1940.

The Gusen camp consisted of three separate concentration camps in the Perg district: Gusen I, Gusen II, and Gusen III. Gusen I was meant for the political prisoners from Poland and became operational in May 1940. Gusen II was opened in March 1944 and contained up to 17,000 prisoners who were deprived of even the basic facilities. Construction on the Gusen crematorium, a double-muffle model built by Topf and Sons, began in December 1940. In use from late 1941, the crematorium was under the command of SS-Oberscharführer Karl Wassner.

Mauthausen camp construction

Mauthausen was a concentration camp in Austria. It was the central camp, referred to as the "mother camp" by the SS guards, for all of Austria. The camp was constructed in 1938, after the occupation of Austria by German troops. The money to fund the construction of the 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 (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".

The Mauthausen camp was constructed by prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp who were transferred to the Wiener Graben quarry. 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. The camp authorities deployed Mauthausen prisoners at forced labour, constructing the camp itself or at back-breaking work in the Wiener Graben stone quarry.

In May 1939, Mauthausen was converted to a labour camp for political prisoners. The number of inmates rose from 1,080 in late 1938 to over 3,000 a year later. The camp became overcrowded with prisoners after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. In December 1939, the SS ordered the construction of a new camp "for the Poles" in Gusen (Langenstein), about 4.5 kilometres away. This camp later became known as Gusen I and 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.

The Mauthausen-Gusen complex also included Gusen II and Gusen III. Gusen II opened in March 1944 and contained up to 17,000 prisoners who were deprived of even the most basic facilities. 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. On 1 January 1945, the Mauthausen camp system had 73,351 prisoners, 959 of them women. At this time, Mauthausen incarcerated more male prisoners than any other concentration camp system in Nazi Germany, and had the third-largest total prisoner population, behind Buchenwald and Gross-Rosen.

St. Pantaleon-Weyer concentration camp

There were several concentration camps in Austria before and during the Second World War. The Gusen camp in northern Austria was made up of three separate concentration camps: Gusen I, Gusen II, and Gusen III.

The St. Pantaleon-Weyer concentration camp was a former National Socialist detention camp in the municipal area of St. Pantaleon, today again called Haigermoos, in Upper Austria. The camp existed as a Labor Education Camp from July 1940 until the beginning of 1941, when it was converted into a Gypsy Detention Camp and used as such up to November of the same year. Today, a memorial place reminds us of this prison. The camp was situated in Weyer, a part of the municipality Haigermoos, which belonged to the municipality Sankt Pantaleon until 1945. The Labor Education Camp existed from July 5, 1940, until about January 7, 1941. From July 7, 1940, until the end of August 1940, the inn Göschl in Moosach in the parish of Sankt Georgen bei Salzburg served as an edifice for the camp.

The camp St. Pantaleon was called the "Gypsy Detention Camp", similar to the camp Lackenbach in Burgenland, that had been established at about the same time. The camp limits included just one building, a warehouse which belonged to the innkeeper Geratsdorfer. Those who were accused of avoiding work, criminals and the so-called antisocial element carried out drainage and regulatory work under supervision. Initially, this group of prisoners did not include Gypsies. At the turn of 1940 and 1941, the camp doctor Alois Staufer reported to the District Court a case of the Weyer camp, in which, according to him, minors were forced to work, prisoners were treated with violence, and there were also cases of killings.

A monument was erected by the riverlet Moosach in memory of the slave workers engaged there in 1940/41 at the Weyer concentration camp. St. Pantaleon lies in the Innviertel. About 24 percent of the municipality is forest and 64 percent farmland.

Nazi concentration camps in Austria

Mauthausen was a German Nazi concentration camp located in Upper Austria, 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of Linz. It was one of the first massive concentration camp complexes in Nazi Germany, and the last to be liberated by the Allies. The camp was founded by a private company, Deutsche Erd– und Steinwerke GmbH, as an economic enterprise. Mauthausen was established in April 1938, shortly after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. It started as a satellite of Dachau, in Germany, but became an independent camp in the spring of 1939, operated by the SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps).

Mauthausen was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The staff at Mauthausen administered more than 60 subcamps, including Gusen, Gunskirchen, Melk, Ebensee, and Amstetten. 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. The camp provided slave labour to work previously abandoned stone quarries nearby. During its first year, the camp received prisoners transferred from Dachau, mainly convicted criminals, but also so-called “asocial elements”, including political prisoners, homosexuals, and others. The camp later became a detention centre for anti-Nazis from all over Europe, including 10,000 Spanish Republicans.

During the war, forced labour using concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important to German armaments production. In the summer and fall of 1944, subcamps under the administration of Mauthausen were established near armaments factories throughout northern Austria. Thousands of prisoners were worked to death. In addition to Mauthausen and its subcamps, other camps in Austria extended from Lochau in the west to Strasshof in the east.

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