Mauthausen concentration camp
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen in 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 kilometers 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 labor, 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 inmates 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 building a new slave labor 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 was a DEST company. The company was led by Oswald Pohl, who was a high-ranking official of the Schutzstaffel. 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 Nazi authorities envisioned a complete reconstruction of major German towns in accordance with the 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 ; 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 labor camp for 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 Sankt Georgen an der 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 the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the as-yet unfinished Mauthausen camp became overcrowded with prisoners. The number 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 in December 1939. The new camp became operational in May 1940. The first inmates were put in the first two huts 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. This camp had many prisoners of war, mostly Red Army 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 seized from occupied territories were sorted and then dispatched to Germany. Local quarries and businesses were in constant need of a new source of labor because 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 12,000 to 17,000 inmates, 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 increasing number of subcamps could not keep 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 production in Mauthausen and its subcamps constantly increased, so too did the number of detainees and subcamps. Initially the camps at 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 of Mauthausen were built.By the end of the war, the list included 101 camps 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 clearing the rubble in Allied-bombed towns, and Kleinlager where the inmates worked 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 labor centers: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Marburg and Natzweiler-Struthof, in terms of both production quota and profits. The list of companies using slave labor 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. The companies using slave laborers from Mauthausen included:
- DEST cartel
- Accumulatoren-Fabrik AFA
- Bayer
- Deutsche Bergwerks- und Hüttenbau
- Linz-based Eisenwerke Oberdonau
- Flugmotorenwerke Ostmark
- Nibelungenwerk
- Otto Eberhard Patronenfabrik
- Heinkel and Messerschmitt
- Österreichische Sauerwerks
- Rax-Werke
- Steyr-Daimler-Puch
- Hochtief
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 192-005, KZ Mauthausen, Stolleneingänge.jpg|thumb|alt=A partially collapsed intersection of two tunnels in the Bergkristall complex.|The Bergkristall tunnel system at Gusen was built to protect Me 262 production from air raids.
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. 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. 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.