Mauthausen — The Stone Escape

The Mauthausen Memorial welcomes you at the main entrance of what was one of the deadliest concentration camps of the Reich. Built on orders from August Eigruber, Gauleiter of Upper Austria, the camp opened on August 8, 1938 with the transfer of 300 prisoners from Dachau, mainly Austrians classified as repeat offenders or asocials. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, ordered the expansion of this network from 1938, which would extend to Gusen. The memorial's permanent exhibitions trace the seven years of the camp's existence, where 200,000 detainees were interned under extremely brutal conditions.

The Quarry Path leads you to the heart of the Nazi concentration economy: granite exploitation by Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (DESt). From late April 1938, this SS enterprise used forced prisoner labor to extract stone from the Wiener Graben quarry, located immediately adjacent to the main camp. This path, traveled daily by detainees, testifies to the extermination through work system established by Franz Ziereis, camp commander from 1939 to 1945. Working conditions in this quarry were so extreme that Mauthausen was classified as a Level III camp, reserved for prisoners considered irredeemable.

The Mauthausen quarry reveals the scale of industrial exploitation of death. Carved into the limestone rock of the Danube heights, 180 km west of Vienna and 20 km east of Linz, it served as the main forced labor site for detainees. The extracted granite blocks served the Reich's grand architectural projects, while prisoners suffered extreme violence documented by SS photographs taken between 1942 and 1944. This quarry, scene of thousands of deaths by exhaustion, illustrates the economic logic underlying the Nazi concentration system.

The Stairs of Death, composed of 186 steps carved into the rock, constitutes Mauthausen's most striking symbol. Used from 1938 for forced transport of granite blocks, these stairs were the scene of disguised executions: SS guards deliberately pushed overloaded prisoners, causing fatal falls. Archival photographs show detainees carrying stones under inhuman conditions, testifying to this method of extermination through work. Each step carved in stone recalls the thousands of lives broken on this path of suffering, now a place of memory and remembrance.

Your journey through Mauthausen concludes with the discovery of the killing installations: the gas chamber built in autumn 1941 and operational from March 1942, the crematorium installed in winter 1941, the bunker serving as punishment cells, and the Appellplatz where daily roll calls took place. These remains, preserved as historical testimony, remind us that 3,500 people were murdered by gas in this camp alone. Leaving this memorial site, you carry the responsibility to transmit this history, that of over 100,000 deaths in a concentration network that embodies Nazi barbarism in Upper Austria.