". 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
Francisco Franco's victory in the
Spanish Civil War 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. On 24 August 1940, a cattle train from
Angoulême with 927 Spanish refugees onboard arrived at Mauthausen. The group believed that they were being taken to
Vichy. Of the 490 males, those over the age of 13 were separated from their families and taken to the extermination camp nearby. 357 of the 490 would die in the camp. The remaining women and children were then sent back to Spain. 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 labor 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 centers 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 visited Mauthausen in May of that year, Mauthausen received the first group of roughly 8,000
Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz; the first group to be 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 and its subcamps, but as the evacuation proceeded other categories of people were also transported to Mauthausen, Gusen, Vienna or
Melk. Over time, Auschwitz had to almost stop accepting new prisoners and most were directed to Mauthausen instead. The last group – roughly 10,000 prisoners – was evacuated in the last wave in January 1945, only a few weeks before the Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Among them was a large group of civilians arrested by the Germans after the failure of the
Warsaw Uprising, but by the liberation not more than 500 of them were still alive. Altogether, during the final months of the war, 23,364 prisoners from other
concentration camps arrived at the camp complex. Many more perished from exhaustion during
death marches, or in railway wagons, where the prisoners were confined at sub-zero temperatures for several days before their arrival, without adequate food or water. Prisoner transports were considered less important than other important services, and could be kept on sidings for days as other trains passed. Many of those who survived the journey died before they could be registered, whilst others were given the camp numbers of prisoners who had already been killed. Most were then accommodated in the camps or in the newly established tent camp () just outside the Mauthausen subcamp, where roughly 2,000 people were forced into tents intended for not more than 800 inmates, and then starved to death. As in all other Nazi concentration camps, not all the prisoners were equal. Their treatment depended largely on the
category assigned to each inmate, as well as their nationality and rank within the system. 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 (), or prisoners who were given a much better treatment than the average inmate.
Women and children in Mauthausen Although the Mauthausen camp complex was mostly a labor camp for men, a women's camp was opened in Mauthausen, in September 1944, with the first transport of female prisoners from
Auschwitz. Eventually, more women and children came to Mauthausen from
Ravensbrück,
Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, and
Buchenwald. Along with the female prisoners came some female guards; 20 are known to have served in the Mauthausen camp, and 60 in the whole camp complex. Holocaust Survivor, Eva Clarke was born at the camp and liberated 3-weeks later by Eisenhower's US army Forces. Female guards also staffed the Mauthausen subcamps at
Hirtenberg,
Lenzing (the main women's subcamp in Austria), and
Sankt Lambrecht. The Chief Overseers at Mauthausen were firstly
Margarete Freinberger, and then
Jane Bernigau. Almost all the female Overseers who served in Mauthausen were recruited from Austrian cities and towns between September and November 1944. In early April 1945, at least 2,500 more female prisoners came from the female subcamps at
Amstetten,
St. Lambrecht, Hirtenberg, and the Flossenbürg subcamp at
Freiberg. According to Daniel Patrick Brown,
Hildegard Lächert also served at Mauthausen. The available Mauthausen inmate statistics from the spring of 1943, shows that there were 2,400 prisoners below the age of 20, which was 12.8% of the 18,655 population. By late March 1945, the number of juvenile prisoners in Mauthausen increased to 15,048, which was 19.1% of the 78,547 Mauthausen inmates. The number of imprisoned children increased 6.2 times, whereas the total number of adult prisoners during the same period multiplied by a factor of only four. These numbers reflected the increasing use of Polish, Czech, Soviet, and Balkan teenagers as slave labor as the war continued. Statistics showing the composition of juvenile inmates shortly before their liberation reveal the following major child/prisoner sub-groups: 5,809 foreign civilian laborers, 5,055 political prisoners, 3,654 Jews, and 330 Russian POWs. There were also 23 Romani children, 20 so-called "anti-social elements", six Spaniards, and three Jehovah's Witnesses.
Treatment of inmates and methodology of crime Mauthausen was one of the most brutal and severe of the Nazi concentration camps; prisoners at
Dachau considered themselves fortunate to be not at a death camp like Mauthausen. Inmates suffered not only from
malnutrition, overcrowded huts and constant abuse and beatings by the guards and kapos, but also from exceptionally hard labor. The work in the quarries – often in unbearable heat or in temperatures as low as – led to exceptionally high mortality rates. The food rations were limited, and during the 1940–1942 period, an average inmate weighed . It is estimated that the average energy content of food rations dropped from about a day during the 1940–1942 period, to between a day during the next period. In 1945 the energy content was even lower and did not exceed a day – less than a third of the energy needed by an average worker in
heavy industry. The reduced rations led to the starvation of thousands of inmates. The rock quarry in Mauthausen was at the base of the "Stairs of Death". Prisoners were forced to carry roughly-hewn blocks of stone – often weighing as much as – up the 186 stairs, one prisoner behind the other. As a result, many exhausted prisoners collapsed in front of the other prisoners in the line, and then fell on top of the other prisoners, creating a
domino effect; the first prisoner falling onto the next, and so on, all the way down the stairs. In the quarry, prisoners were forced to carry the boulders from morning until night, whipped by Nazi guards. The inmates of Mauthausen, Gusen I, and Gusen II had access to a separate part of the camp for the sick – the so-called
Krankenlager. Despite the fact that (roughly) 100 medics from among the inmates were working there, they were not given any medication and could offer only basic first aid. Thus the
hospital camp – as it was called by the German authorities – was, in fact, a "hospital" only in name. Such brutality was not accidental. Former prisoner
Edward Mosberg said: "If you stopped for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed you off the cliff to your death." The SS guards would often force prisoners – exhausted from hours of hard labor without sufficient food and water – to race up the stairs carrying 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 Parachutists' Wall" (). At gunpoint, each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the cliff. Other common methods of extermination of prisoners who were either sick, unfit for further labor, or as a means of
collective responsibility, or after escape attempts, included beating the prisoners to death by the SS guards and Kapos, starving to death in bunkers, hangings, and mass shootings. At times the guards or Kapos would either deliberately throw the prisoners on the 380-
volt electric barbed wire fence, or force them outside the boundaries of the camp and then shoot them on the pretense that they were attempting to escape. Another method of extermination were icy showers – some 3,000 inmates died of
hypothermia after having been forced to take an icy cold shower and then left outside in cold weather. A large number of inmates were drowned in barrels of water at Gusen II. The Nazis also performed
pseudo-scientific experiments on the prisoners. Among the doctors to organize them were
Sigbert Ramsauer,
Karl Josef Gross,
Eduard Krebsbach and
Aribert Heim. Heim was dubbed "Doctor Death" by the inmates; he was in Gusen for seven weeks, which was enough to carry out his experiments. '' SOE agents are buried
Hans Maršálek Kapo and camp resistance member estimated that an average
life expectancy of newly arrived prisoners in Gusen varied from six months between 1940 and 1942, to less than three months in early 1945. Paradoxically, with the growth of forced labor industry in various subcamps of Mauthausen, the situation of some of the prisoners improved significantly. While the food rations were increasingly limited every month, the heavy industry necessitated skilled specialists rather than unqualified workers and the brutality of the camp's SS and Kapos was limited. While the prisoners were still beaten on a daily basis and the
Muselmänner were still exterminated, from early 1943 on some of the factory workers were allowed to receive food parcels from their families (mostly Poles and Frenchmen). This allowed many of them not only to evade the risk of starvation, but also to help other prisoners who had no relatives outside the camps – or who were not allowed to receive parcels. In February 1945, the camp was the site of the Nazi war crime
Mühlviertler Hasenjagd ("hare hunt") where around 500 escaped prisoners (mostly Soviet officers) were mercilessly hunted down and murdered by SS, local law enforcement and civilians.
Death toll The Germans destroyed much of the camp's files and evidence and often allocated newly arrived prisoners the camp numbers of those who had already been killed, so the exact death toll of Mauthausen and its subcamps is impossible to calculate. The matter is further complicated due to some of the inmates of Gusen being murdered in Mauthausen, and at least 3,423 were sent to Hartheim Castle, away. Overall, more than 90,000 of the 190,000 people deported to Mauthausen died there or in one of its subcamps. ==Staff==