Mauthausen

The complex of the camps around the small town Mauthausen Gusen in Upper Austria was built in 1938 and was intended especially for political opponents of Nazi regime and intelligentsia. All of them were supposed to be “exterminated by work.” The fatality rate was enormous, and according to some sources, there were 320,000 casualties. The prisoners died from exhaustion during unimaginably difficult work in the nearby quarries and industrial companies. For example, they had to carry stone blocks weighing almost fifty kilograms along the infamous Mauthausen stairs. The prisoners that were incapable of work were systematically liquidated in the gas chamber. Out of eight thousand Czechoslovaks imprisoned in the camp only a half of them survived. Within the retaliatory measures after the assassination on Reinhard Heydrich, 261 Czechoslovak resistance fighters and their families including children were executed by a shot to the back of the head on October 24th, 1942. Two other mass executions of Czechoslovaks ocurred in January 1943 and February 1944.