Austria Group Tour: Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Mauthausen: Part 1 of 4 : September 22, 2016

On the Thursday one week after arriving in Vienna, our group of 34 boarded this Dr. Richard charter bus in front of the Amerika institute and set off for a six day tour of Austria. Since the trip was so long, and we did so many things, I will split them into different blog posts. This one will cover our fist stop. The Mathausen concentration camp. 

The Mauthausen-Gusen concentration Labor camp is located in Upper Austria and was operated from August 1938 to May 1945 by the Nazi SS during World War II. It is not categorized as an extermination camp because the inmates were put to work in a stone quarry just outside of the camp walls.  After the war, it was under the control of the Soviet Red Army. Most of the inmates here were Soviet and Polish citizens and it is estimated that there were between 122,766 and 320,000 of those citizens who were killed here. 

Today there is a large garden courtyard with many monuments dedicated to the victims. They are all built by different nations and some are more artistic than others. This one is from the Russian government, and must have been one of the first monuments built at Mauthausen. 

This is just inside the main entrance. On the left are barracks, and on the right are camp buildings including the shower room, crematorium and offices. 

The main gate to the Concentration camp.

The barracks were built just to the right of this picture of the outer wall. Only some of the original buildings still stand. 

Barrack

Shower room. Though they are not gas chambers like some "Shower rooms" in other extermination camps, these showers caused many fatalities. Thousands of inmates died of hypothermia after being forced to take an ice cold shower and then left out in the freezing winter weather. 

It was honestly a very chilling and solemn experience to walk around the camp and contemplate the cruel injustice that occurred here. I understand the history behind it, but still can't comprehend how the world came to be in such a state. 

Crematorium:

Crematorium entrance

Caption reads: "Autopsy Room, In this room the SS had autopsies performed on the corpses. SS doctors also disected corpses for training purposes."

The Sign reads: "First Crematorium Oven. This oven started operating in May 1940. It was in constant use until the liberation of the camp" (in May of 1945 by the US Army). 

This is a cemetery just across the main camp road from the crematorium. It is the final resting place of thousands of the camp victims. I hope that the educational systems of the world can proficiently teach topics from our history such as this so that we can all learn from the mistakes of those who came before us.

Mauthausen was our first stop on our tour of Austria and left us with somber thoughts for the next couple hours before we reached a much more beautiful and happy place which I will write about in part 2. 

Hallstatt, Austria