We walked to the metro station at Herrengasse in light rain, and caught the U3 to the Westbahnhoff station. When my mom asked me what platform we needed to be on to catch our train, I told her nine-and-three-quarters, and she totally didn't get it. Not much of a Harry Potter fan, I guess. :) We went to platform 8 and got on the train bound for St. Valentin. The train ride was maybe and hour long, and then we got off at St. Valentin and waited 40 minutes for the train to arrive that would take us the 8 minutes further to the Mauthausen train station.
Here are some pictures of the countryside between Vienna and Mauthausen. This was the worst day of weather we had. I don't think it reached 15 degrees (Celsius) and it was drizzly/raining the whole day. We weren't really prepared for such cold weather with just light sweaters. Then again, having such cold, dreary weather seemed fitting for a day spent at a concentration camp.
We had to call a taxi to take us to the concentration camp because there is no other way there. I think they make a killing off of people like us because it was 11 Euro to drive 3 miles. Oh well. You do what you gotta do.
The squarish buildings in the front are the entrance/museum. The museum had lots of listening stations and things to look at, but we didn't spend any time there. We spent the majority of our time in the concentration camp itself. You can see one of the watchtowers in this picture, and the building directly behind it is one of the bunkhouses.
The round turret and the square turret in this picture are where the main entrance to the camp is.
This is the main entrance. There was a large bird atop the gate when it was a functioning camp (a symbol of the Nazis), but it was taken down when the camp was liberated. Mauthausen began in 1938 as a working camp for Russian prisoners, and then it progressed into a full-fledged concentration camp as the war continued. Mauthausen and its sub-camps held 195,000 prisoners. Of those prisoners, 105,000 died. It was the last concentration to be liberated. It was liberated May 5, 1945.
A close-up of one of the watchtowers. To the right of it you can see high-voltage barbed wire. Many prisoners threw themselves up against it intentionally to commit suicide.
This is just inside the entrance. This is the garage area. Looking at it, you'd think, "Hm, the concentration camp is better looking than I thought it would be." It's all a facade. You go to the end of this block and up the stairs, and that's where the rows of dilapidated bunkers were.
This is looking back towards the front gate:
Before you go up the stairs, there are these three plaques dedicated to the American Armed Forces. The one on the left reads, "In remembrance of the members of the 11th Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army who liberate the concentration camps at Mauthausen, Gusen, Ebensee and others located in nearby Upper Austria in May 1945. Their deeds will never be forgotten." The one in the center reads, "In recognition of U.S. Army 65th Infantry Division and the 131st Evacuation Hospital who provided humanitarian services for the Mauthausen survivors..." The plaque on the right is a little hard to read, but it's similar to the first two.
This is the view from the top of the stairs above the garages and entrance. You can see just a glimpse of the town of Mauthausen in the distance. It's easy to see how this was a good location for a concentration camp because it wasn't by anything. I watched a movie in the museum and they had interviewed a couple of people from the town of Mauthausen who said they knew that it was a prison camp and that they knew there was a stone quarry there, but they had no idea anything else was going on.
This was the memorial wall at the top of the stairs. This first plaque reads, "In memory of those citizens of the United States of America, civilian and military, who suffered death here for their part in the fight against the Nazi regime." Again, you can see the barbed wire that surrounded the camp. It carried 380 volts of electricity.
The barracks are on the left side of the picture, the memorials, barbed wire fence, and watch tower are on the right.
This is a map of all the concentration camps. I had no idea there were so many.
The is the prison area in one of the barracks.
The next barrack was the one that will stick on my mind the most, for obvious reasons.
These next pictures are of the gas chamber. The first picture is where the gas container, pipes, and fan were stored. The actual killing took place in the room that has the sign in it. You can tell that it was disguised to look like a shower.
This plaque reads, "The gaz chamber was camouflaged to an ordinary bath room with the help of showers and water pipes. Cyclon B-gas was flown trough a small shaft with sucking-in and exhaust appliances. The operation itself was commanded from a separate room. On April 29, 1945, just a few days before liberation, the sucking-in and exhaust canal was dismantled."
This next room was an execution room. In the first picture, a device used for height measurements had been set up in the corner. When the prisoner was standing in front of it, a shot was fired at his neck through a slot in the head board. In the second picture, you'll see a device that was used for hangings.
This was the room where they stored the dead bodies. You can see part of the drain in the floor just behind the post in the middle of the room.
This is the crematorium. The Nazis started off burning one body at a time and offering the prisoner's remains to his family, but when the war picked up, they started burning 4 bodies at a time and disposing of the ashes.
This is the "autopsy" room. This is where the dead had their tattooed numbers carved out of their skin and their gold teeth removed.
This is the door that leads down to that whole gas chamber, autopsy, crematorium area.
This cemetery used to hold several more barracks. It now holds the remains of more than 9,800 inmates whose bodies had been buried by American soldiers after the liberation in another part of the camp. The remains were moved here in 1961. There was an interview with an American soldier in the video that I watched. Because the movie was made several years after the war ended, the soldier was an old man. He cried in the interview and said that the American soldiers had no idea how bad things were until they saw all of the prisoners, dead and alive. The first day they were there, they buried over 1200 people. Each consecutive day they buried 300-400 more people. He said that the prisoners were so weak, they couldn't even eat.
This is the roll call area. Prisoners would have to gather here 3 times a day. When the camp got too large, the Nazis only made them gather twice a day. They had to stand here rain or shine, in the snow, half-naked. They were also required to smooth the ground by pulling a roller than weighed nearly a ton.
This gives you an idea of what the beds looked like that the prisoners slept in, and the sinks where they could wash up a little bit.
This area held several more bunkers. The bunkers that you saw in the roll call area are the only ones that still remain.
Like I mentioned earlier, this camp was a work camp. It was built on the edge of a granite quarry, and prisoners were forced to climb 186 stairs out of the quarry carrying large granite rocks. Keep in mind that these forced laborers were only being fed every 3 days, and even then they were only given 5 spoonfuls of food. This is outside the entrance to the museum. It's hard to see in the picture, but rows of these granite rocks and have been placed outside to show people the size of the rocks prisoners had to carry.
Just outside of the camp before you get to the quarry, there is a park full of memorials from other European countries. These are just a few of them:
From Poland:
From the Soviet Union:
From Italy:
This one from Slovenia was my favorite:
From Ukraine:
I left my mom at the top and ventured down in to the lower fields where there were two more memorials, one in German and one in Russian. This field was an SS sport field where they used to go to relax in between killing people. When the American soldiers arrived, it was turned into a makeshift cemetery. Some of these bodies were exhumed and moved to the cemetery that I showed earlier in pictures, others that could be identified were sent to their countries of origin for proper burial there.
We walked down to the quarry in the rain because I couldn't leave without seeing it. It was beautiful but sad all at the same time. The first picture is a view once again of part of the city of Mauthausen.
At the top of the cliff above the small pond is where all the memorial were. SS guards called this cliff "Parachute Jump" because they like to push prisoners off of it. They either died by smashing into the rocks or drowning in the pond.
These next pictures show the 186 steps the prisoners had to carry granite stones up. These stairs weren't built until 1942; before then the prisoners had to carry the stones up a path made of loosely placed rocks and uneven boulders. Thousands of prisoners were shot to death here for not moving fast enough, or they were crushed by falling rocks.
This is near the bottom, looking up:
Other things I learned:
Hitler didn't like to visit the concentration camps because it made his stomach upset. I wonder why.
One of the blocks was full of Russian prisoners. Block 20, approximately 500 prisoners, staged an escape. They threw large items at the electric fence to disable it, and then took off running towards the town of Mauthaunsen. The SS shot whoever they could, but some of the townspeople in Mauthausen knew that something awful was going on at the camp and they hid the Russians. This attempt at escaping was dubbed the "Muhlviertel Rabbit Chase".
Just to be clear, it was my idea to go to this concentration camp. My mom agreed to go, but I don't think she enjoyed it. Well, maybe "enjoyed" isn't the right word because I wasn't "enjoying" it either. I'm interested in this part of history, though, because it is incredible what people can do to each other. How did one man become so powerful that he could convince thousands of people to follow him, and at his command, murder people on a daily basis? How did no one notice that this was happening right under their noses? Could it have been prevented, or even stopped before it got out of control? Everything about Mauthausen was amazing. And now I understand what this prisoner was thinking when he wrote this on a prison wall: "If there is a God, he will have to beg for my forgiveness." You can't come here, see the crematorium, gas chamber, and execution room and wonder why it is that God gave his children the agency to kill their brothers and sisters. The pictures in the exhibits of thousands of prisoners, known only as numbers, naked and starving... Pictures of hundreds of dead bodies piled up on top of each other... Pictures of prisoners shot dead, taken by the SS guards who shot them... Who would ever think that this behavior is normal? The psychology of it all is unbelievable. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been here.
Anyway, that was our day at Mauthausen. We got a cab back to the train station, rode the train for a short while and got off the train a stop too early in Linz (my fault). Thankfully we were next to the tram stop, but it took me a while to figure out which tram we should take because I was unprepared for this part of the trip. We finally found the right one and thankfully it stopped not too far from our hotel. Because we weren't sure about Linz, we decided to eat in the Italian restaurant in the basement of the hotel. We laughed at the menu because their translations were a little rough. I had the spaghetti bolognese with "meatloaf" and my mom's lasagna also had "meatloaf" in it. Neither one of them had meatloaf in them, but the did have meat, so I guess that's the same thing?
This was our hotel room in Linz. See - two twin beds, right next to each other. Snuggle up!
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