Mauthausen Memorial

Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen (roughly 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Linz) in Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp was established in 1938 in the same municipality where the Austro-Hungarian WWI POW camp (k.u.k. Kriegsgefangenenlager Mauthausen) had previously operated, holding a total of around 40,000 prisoners, out of whom 8,256 Serbs and up to 5,000 Italians died from 1915 to 1918. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St. Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometers from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp. The Mauthausen main camp operated from 8 August 1938, several months after the German annexation of Austria, to 5 May 1945, when it was liberated by the United States Army. Starting with the camp at Mauthausen, the number of subcamps expanded over time.