Mauthausen and the Jewish Prisoners
After the annexation (“Anschluss”) of Austria in March 1938, the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz was established as a central Nazi forced labor camp. Initially intended as a stone quarry camp for political opponents, Mauthausen quickly developed into a site of systematic violence and exploitation—especially toward Jewish prisoners. Already in 1941 the first larger group of Jews were incarcerated, the big number of Jews were registered in early 1944 , and beginning in March of that year, this changed drastically: tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children—mainly from Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—were deported from ghettos or Auschwitz to Mauthausen and its satellite camps. Through a special transport, a number of Jews from the Netherlands were brought here, becoming part of this tragic fate. The number of registered Jewish prisoners reached at least 25,000, with some sources indicating up to 29,500. Their chances of survival were extremely slim. They suffered from brutal forced labor, starvation, systematic violence, lack of medical care, and arbitrary killings.
The Gusen Camp
A central site of Jewish suffering was the Gusen camp, originally established for granite quarrying but later expanded into a major site of arms production, including underground tunnels. Large numbers of Jewish prisoners—many transferred from Auschwitz—were forced to work there. Gusen was notorious for its extremely high mortality rate: around 35,000 people, including many Jews, died there.
The Camps of Melk and Ebensee
In the Melk subcamp, Jewish prisoners were forced to dig tunnels for underground weapons factories under inhumane conditions. Disease, exhaustion, and violence led to high death rates. The conditions in Ebensee, which also used forced labor for tunnel construction, were similarly catastrophic. Both camps were among the deadliest in the entire Mauthausen complex.
Death Marches
The final phase of the camp system in spring 1945 was especially dramatic. As the frontlines approached, the SS ordered so-called death marches. Thousands of Jewish prisoners from Mauthausen, Gusen, Melk, and other camps were forced to march for weeks across Upper Austria—on foot, weakened, starving, often barefoot. Their destination was the newly built subcamp Gunskirchen near Wels, which consisted only of tents and earthen pits. An estimated 20,000 to 22,000 Jews, many from Hungary, reached Gunskirchen—only about 6,000 survived the final weeks of the war. The rest died from hunger, typhus, exhaustion, or were shot during the marches.
Vienna-Schönbrunn
In the Vienna-Schönbrunn subcamp, one of Mauthausen’s smaller satellite camps, Jewish prisoners were forced into labor—such as in horticulture or in war-related industries. Many of them were transferred to the main camp or other subcamps before the liberation, where they fell victim to the death marches. The path of many Jewish prisoners through the camp system began or ended in one of these camps—rarely with liberation, often with death.
In total, at least 38,000 Jewish prisoners died in the Mauthausen camp complex— through systematic neglect, forced labor, violence, or mass murder. The number indicates that not all Jews were indexed as such in the camp files. The Jewish experience within the Mauthausen system was marked by complete disenfranchisement, exploitation unto death, and isolation. Their story remains another central chapter in the remembrance of the Holocaust in Austria and Europe.
