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In January of 1945, the camps — directed from the central office in Mauthausen — had a total of roughly 85,000 inmates 1. The Death Toll remains unknown, although most estimates place it between 122,766 and 320,000 for the entire complex. The camps formed one of the first massive concentration camp complexes in Nazi Germany, and were the last ones to be liberated by The Allies . The two main camps - Mauthausen and Gusen I - were also the only two camps in the whole of Europe to be labelled as grade III camps — meaning that they were intended to be the toughest camps for the "Incorrigible political enemies of the Reich ". Unlike many other concentration camps — intended for all categories of prisoners — Mauthausen was mostly used for Extermination Through Labour of the " Intelligentsia ", who were educated people and members of the higher Social Class es in countries subjugated by Germany during World War II 2. HISTORY KZ Mauthausen On August 8 , 1938 , prisoners from Dachau Concentration Camp were sent to the town of Mauthausen near Linz , Austria , to begin the construction of a new camp. The spot was chosen due to its proximity to the transport-hub of Linz, but also because the area was sparsely-populated. Although the camp was — from the beginning of its existence — controlled by the German state, it was founded by a private company as an economic enterprise. The owner of the Wiener-Graben quarry (the Marbacher-Bruch, and Bettelberg quarries)which were located in, and around, Mauthausen — was the DEST Company; an acronym for ''Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke Gmbh''. The company, led by Oswald Pohl - who was also a high-ranking official of the SS - bought the quarries from the city of Vienna and started the construction of the Mauthausen camp. A year later it also constructed the first camp at Gusen. 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 in accordance with the plans of Albert Speer and other architects of Nazi Architecture 3, for which large quantities of granite were needed. The money needed for the construction of the Mauthausen camp was gathered from a variety of sources, including: commercial loans from Dresdner Bank and Prague -based Escompte Bank , the so-called Reinhardt's Fund (meaning money stolen from the inmates of the concentration camps) and from the German Red Cross Oswald Pohl, apart from being a high-ranking SS member, owner of DEST and several other companies, chief of administration and treasurer of various Nazi organizations, was also the managing director of the German Red Cross. In 1938 he transferred 8,000,000 RM from member-fees to one of the accounts of the SS (SS-Spargemeinschaft e.V.), which in turn donated all the money to DEST in 1939.. Initially, Mauthausen served as a strictly-run prison camp for common criminals, prostitutes 4 and other categories of "Incorrigible Law Offenders"As stated in , 1939 it was converted to a labour camp which was mainly used for the incarceration of political prisoners 5. KZ Gusen In late 1939, the Mauthausen camp, with its Wiener-Graben quarry, that supplied Granite was already overcrowded with prisoners. Their numbers rose from 1,080 in late 1938 to over 3,000 a year later. About that time the construction of a new camp in Gusen — about 4.5 kilometres away — was started. The new camp (later named Gusen I), and its Kastenhofen quarry, was completed in May of 1940. The first inmates were housed in the first two huts (No. 7 and 8) on April 17, 1940, while the first transport of prisoners, mostly from the camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen , arrived on May 25 of the same year. Like nearby Mauthausen, the Gusen camp also used its inmates as slave labour in the granite quarries, but they also rented them out to various local businesses. In October of 1941, several huts were separated from the Gusen sub-camp by Barbed Wire and turned into a separate ''Prisoner of War Labour Camp'' (), where a large number of Prisoners Of War — mostly Soviet officers — were imprisoned. By 1942, the production capacity of both Mauthausen and Gusen reached its peak. Gusen was expanded to include the central depot of the SS , where various goods which had been stolen from occupied territories were sorted and then dispatched to GermanyDobosiewicz, op.cit., p.26. Local quarries quarries and businesses were in constant need of a new source of labour as more, and even more, Germans were drafted into the Wehrmacht . In March of 1944, the former SS depot was converted to a new sub-camp, and was named Gusen II. By the end of the war the depot had become an improvised concentration camp, which contained from 12,000 to 17,000 inmates, who were deprived of even the most basic facilities. In December of 1944, yet another part of Gusen was opened in nearby Lungitz , where parts of the factory infrastructure were converted into the third sub-camp of Gusen — '''Gusen III'''. The rise in the number of sub-camps could not catch up with the rising number of inmates, which led to tragic overcrowding of the huts in all of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen. In late 1940, there were roughly 2 inmates per bed, but in 1944, the number rose to 4 per bed. Mauthausen-Gusen camp system See Also: List of subcamps of Mauthausen ]] As the production in all of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen complex was constantly rising, so was the number of prisoners and the number of the sub-camps themselves. Although initially the camps of Gusen and Mauthausen mostly served the local quarries, from 1942 onwards they began to be included into the German War Machine . To accommodate the ever-increasing number of slave workers, additional sub-camps of Mauthausen were started to be built in all parts of Austria. At the end of the war the list included 101 camps (including 49 major sub-camps 6) which covered most of modern Austria , from Mittersill south of Salzburg to Schwechat west of Vienna and from Passau on the pre-war Austro-German border to the Loibl Pass on the border with Yugoslavia . At their height (in late 1944 and early 1945), the largest sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex were:
Mauthausen-Gusen as a Business Enterprise The production output of Mauthausen-Gusen exceeded that of each of the five other large slave labour centres, including: Auschwitz-Birkenau , Flossenbürg , Gross-Rosen , Marburg and Natzweiler-Struthof , in terms of both production quota and profits 7. The list of companies using slave labour from the Mauthausen-Gusen camp system 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. A similar factory for the Messerschmitt aeroplane-producer was opened near the village of St. Georgen . Altogether, 45 larger companies took part in making KZ Mauthausen-Gusen one of the most profitable concentration camps of Nazi Germany, with more than 11,000,000 Reichsmark of the profits in 1944 alone. Among them were:
Prisoners were also ´rented-out´ as slave-labour, and were exploited in various ways, such as: working for local farms, for road construction, reinforcing, and repairing, the banks of the river Danube, and the construction of large residential areas in Sankt Georgen, as well as being forced to excavate archaeological sites in Spielberg. 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 (code-named ''Kellerbau''). By the end of World War II the prisoners had dug 29,400 m&2 to house a small arms factory. After 1944, similar tunnels were also built beneath the village of Sankt Georgen by the inmates of Gusen II sub-camp (code-named ''Bergkristall''). They dug roughly 50,000 m&2 so the Messerschmitt company could build an assembly plant to produce the Messerschmitt Me 262 and V-2 Rocket s. In addition to planes, some 7,000 m&2 of Gusen II tunnels served as factories for various war materials. 9. In late 1944, roughly 11,000 of the Gusen I and II inmates were working in underground facilitiesStanisław Dobosiewicz, ''W obronie życia...'', op.cit., p.194. An additional 6,500 worked on expanding the underground network of tunnels and halls. In 1945, the Me 262 works was already finished and they 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. Extermination through labour The political function of the camp continued in parallel with its economic role. Until at least 1942, it was used for the imprisonment and murder of Germany's political, and ideological, enemies, both real and imagined 10. The camp carried out Exterminations Through Labour and also served the needs of the German war machine. The inmates were totally exhausted after having worked in the quarries for 12 hours a day, and if they were too ill, or too weak to work, they were then transferred to the Revier ("Krankenrevier", sick barrack) or other places for extermination. Initially, the camp did not have a Gas Chamber of its own and the so-called Muzulman s, or prisoners who were too sick to work, after being maltreated, under-nourished or totally exhausted, were then transferred to other concentration camps for extermination (mostly to the infamous Hartheim Castle 11), or killed by lethal injection and cremated in the local Crematorium . The growing number of prisoners made the system too expensive and from 1940, Mauthausen was one of the few camps in the West to use a gas chamber on a regular basis. In the beginning, an improvised Mobile Gas Chamber - a van with the exhaust pipe connected to the inside - shuttled between Mauthausen and Gusen . By December of 1941, a permanent gas chamber that could supposedly kill about 120 prisoners at a time was completed 12 13. INMATES Until early 1940, the largest group of inmates consisted of German, Austrian and Czechoslovak socialists, communists, Anarchists , homosexuals, and people of Gypsy 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 and Jehovah's Witnesses . The political consequence for their persecution was their rejection of giving the loyalty oath to Hitler and their refusal to participate in any kind of military service.. In early 1940, a large number of Poles were transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen complex. The first groups were mostly composed of artists, scientists, Boy Scouts , teachers, and university professors 14, who were arrested during the course of the AB Action . Later in the war all 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 camp's existence. During World War II , large groups of Spanish Republicans were also transferred to Mauthausen and its sub-camps. Most of them were former Republican soldiers or activists who had fled to France after Franco 's victory and then were captured by German forces after the French Defeat in 1940. The largest of these groups arrived at Gusen in January of 1941 15. 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 16. Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in 1941 the camps started to receive a large number of Soviet POW s. 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 was also transferred to the camp. Much like all the other large groups of prisoners that were transferred to Mauthausen-Gusen, most of them either died as a result of the hard labour and poor conditions, or were thrown down the sides of the Mauthausen quarry (nick-named the ''Parachutists´ Wall'' by the SS guards and Kapos ). This name was a sick joke because it made fun of the prisoners by calling them "Parachutists without a parachute". Throughout the years of World War II the camps of Mauthausen-Gusen received new prisoners in smaller transports on a daily basis; mostly from other concentration camps in German-occupied Europe. Most of the prisoners in the sub-camps of Mauthausen were kept in various detention sites prior to transportation to their final destination. The most notable of such ''recruitment centres'' for Mauthausen were the infamous camps at Dachau and Auschwitz . The first transports from Auschwitz arrived in February of 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 of 1943, and then in January and February of 1944. Finally, after Adolf Eichmann visited Mauthausen in May of that year, KZ Mauthausen-Gusen 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 the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, 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 - roughly - 10,000 prisoners were evacuated in the last wave in January of 1945; only a few weeks before the Soviet capture of the area of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex 17. Among them was a large group of civilians arrested by the Germans after the failure of the Warsaw Uprising 18, but by the liberation not more than 500 of them were still aliveStanisław Dobosiewicz, op.cit., pp.365-367. Altogether, during the final months of the war, 23,364 prisoners from other Concentration Camp s arrived at the camp complex. Many more perished during Death March es; where they dropped dead because of pure exhaustion, or in railway wagons, where the prisoners were confined at sub-zero temperatures - without any food or water - for several days prior to their arrival. Some of the delays in the transportation of prisoners were, in part, due to the disruption of the Nazi railway system after constant aerial attacks by the Allied forces. Prisoner transports were considered to be less important that other important services. 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. The estimated number of prisoners that passed through all of the sub-camps is 335,000. |
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