Auschwitz was the largest and deadliest of six dedicated extermination camps where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured and murdered during World War II and the Holocaust under the orders of Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.
There is no charge to visit the Mauthausen Memorial. An overview of our tours and educational programmes, including prices, is available here.
The two largest camps, Mauthausen and Gusen I, were classed as "Grade III" (Stufe III) concentration camps, which meant that they were intended to be the toughest camps for the "incorrigible political enemies of the Reich". Mauthausen never lost this Stufe III classification.
Austria under National Socialism describes the period of Austrian history from 12 March 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany (the event is commonly known as Anschluss) until the end of World War II in 1945. Austrians generally supported union with Nazi Germany and were enthusiastic supporters of it.
Gassing and Euthanasia
Like some other concentration camps, Mauthausen was equipped with a stationary gas chamber with the capacity to kill up to 80 people at a time by means of Zyklon B gas (prussic acid).On 20 April 1945, the Soviets, without asking their Western allies, instructed Renner to form a provisional government. Seven days later Renner's cabinet took office, declared the independence of Austria from Nazi Germany and called for the creation of a democratic state along the lines of the First Austrian Republic.
After Austria's entry into the European Union in 1995, both countries are member-states of the Schengen Agreement. Whereas Germany is a member nation of NATO, Austria remains a partner to NATO in accordance with its constitution to maintain neutrality.
Bombing of Vienna in World War II. The city of Vienna in Austria was bombed 52 times during World War II, and 37,000 houses of the city were lost (20% of the entire city). Only 41 civilian vehicles survived the raids, more than 3,000 bomb craters were counted. and the Schwarzenberg Palace was bombed but later rebuilt.
On March 12, 1938, German troops march into Austria to annex the German-speaking nation for the Third Reich. In early 1938, Austrian Nazis conspired for the second time in four years to seize the Austrian government by force and unite their nation with Nazi Germany.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Austria was divided into four occupation zones and jointly occupied by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. Vienna was similarly subdivided but the central district was collectively administered by the Allied Control Council.
Austria was part of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation until the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 which resulted in Prussia expelling Austria from the Confederation. Thus, when Germany was founded as a nation-state in 1871, Austria was not a part of it.
The Austrian government, consisting of Social Democrats, Conservatives, and Communists (until 1947), and residing in Vienna, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was recognised by the Western Allies in October 1945 after some doubts that Renner could be Stalin's puppet.
The Death Camps. The 6 death camps, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau were used to carry out the systematic mass murder of Jews as part of the Final Solution, first in gas vans, and later in gas chambers.
British concentration camps refers to camps which were operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War which lasted from 1900–1902. The term concentration camp grew in prominence during that period.
The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime. The first Nazi concentration camp was Dachau, established in March 1933, near Munich.
Auschwitz concentration camp
| Auschwitz |
|---|
| Operated by | Nazi Germany and the Schutzstaffel |
| Founding commandant | Rudolf Höss |
| Original use | Army barracks |
| Operational | May 1940 – January 1945 |
Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as detention and labor centers, killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death factories." German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or
The early concentration camps primarily held political prisoners as the Nazis sought to remove opposition, such as socialists and communists, and consolidate their power. In 1933 alone, approximately 200,000 political prisoners were detained. The early camps were haphazard and varied hugely.
Political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals were sent to concentration camps as punishment. Members of these three groups were not targeted, as were Jews and Roma, for systematic murder. Nevertheless, many died in the camps from starvation, disease, exhaustion, and brutal treatment.
In 1933-1934, SS chief Heinrich Himmler secured SS control over a centralized concentration camp system. Throughout Germany, various civilian authorities and police agencies had established concentration camps during 1933 to incarcerate political enemies of the Nazi government.
Francesc Boix i Campo (in Spanish Francisco Boix Campo, 31 August 1920 in Barcelona – 7 July 1951 in Paris) was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and photographer who was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
On 5 May 1945 the US Army reached Gusen and Mauthausen. Some prisoners were in such a weakened state that many still died in the days and weeks after liberation. Of a total of around 190,000 people imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps over seven years, at least 90,000 died.
The film tells the history of the photographer Francisco Boix during his life in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex. Actor Mario Casas lost 12 kg in weight while preparing to play the part of the malnourished Boix.
Risiera San Sabba, in Trieste, a national museum since 1965, and the only restored Italian concentration camp, was actively managed by Nazi Germany from 1943 to 1945. Unlike Fossoli, the San Sabba camp was an extermination camp for antifascists and Jews. It was the only camp in Italy engaged in systematic murder.
Jewish Prisoners
From March through December 1944, at least 13,826 Jews arrived in Mauthausen, most of them Hungarian and Polish Jews and approximately 500 of them women. The SS had deported virtually all of them from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Plaszow camps to Mauthausen.Located near the industrial town of Oświęcim in southern Poland (in a portion of the country that was annexed by Germany at the beginning of World War II), Auschwitz was actually three camps in one: a prison camp, an extermination camp, and a slave-labour camp.
Following the German defeat of France in spring 1940, Nazi authorities conscripted Spanish Republicans for forced labor and deported more than 30,000 to Germany, where about half of them ended up in concentration camps. Some 7,000 of these became prisoners in Mauthausen; more than half of them died in the camp.
It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany.
