In its essence, in its most fundamental aspects, Nazism was defined by the demonization, suppression, and ultimately mass annihilation of groups condemned as racial and political enemies. The gigantic network of concentration and extermination camps and the killing centers of the T-4 program for the mentally and physically disabled remain the starkest reminders of this ideological core of the National Socialist regime.
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The system of degradation, enslavement, medical experimentation, and genocide created by the Hitler dictatorship for its adversaries was without parallel, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union not excepted. By comparison, the Nuremberg rallies with their massive spectacles of Führer adoration, the mobilization of Germans from all backgrounds into party organizations, and even the suppression of other parties and political perspectives all appear as secondary qualities of rule in the Third Reich.
Mauthausen was one of the worst of the concentration camps in this system. “One of the worst,” a phrase of comparison, is not used lightly here. Established in 1938 near the city of Linz in Upper Austria, it was founded, along with Flossenbürg and Ravensbrück, on orders from Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, as part of an expansion of the concentration-camp network. Quickly Mauthausen acquired a reputation for lethality, even among its peer camps. With its subcamps at Gusen, Ebensee, and Melk, Mauthausen sat at the center of a web of systematic violence.
Reflecting on the liberation of Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, I do not have to refer to the work of others on this point. In July 2005 I made my own trip to the site of the camp while doing dissertation research at the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. I took a morning train from Vienna via St. Pölten and St. Valentin to the town of Mauthausen, close to where the Danube and Ems Rivers converge. From there I went out to the huge camp complex which bears the same name as the town. Once I reached it, there were spectacular views of the Upper Austrian countryside accessible from several of the camp’s major sites. Rolling hills grabbed my attention. How could such a place of torment exist in such a beautiful locale? Yet it does.
Oswald Pohl, director of the SS Administration Office, and Theodor Eicke, Inspector of Concentration Camps, two men enjoying Himmler’s complete confidence, visited Mauthausen in March 1938 immediately following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria. The granite quarries there interested them greatly. Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer’s plans for megalomaniacal construction projects required building materials beyond what German industry could then satisfy. Quarries, like those at Mauthausen or at Flossenbürg in Bavaria, Pohl and Eicke realized, could meet these new needs. Under Pohl’s leadership, the newly founded German Earth and Stone Works administered these economic ventures.
Who would do the work? The SS could count on a reserve army of concentration-camp inmates, human beings who had been stripped of all their rights. At first, Himmler, Pohl, and Eicke chose men deemed “professional criminals” and “asocials” to do the labor. In early August 1938 the first inmates set foot on the site and started construction of the camp. Although most of them bore on their uniforms a green triangle signaling their official status as criminals, the vast majority were in custody for petty property offenses. That did not matter in the slightest to Franz Ziereis, whom Eicke selected to replace Albert Sauer as Mauthausen’s commandant in February 1939.