Mauthausen concentration camp
Nazi concentration camp in Austria (1938–1945)
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. In January 1945, the camps contained roughly 85,000 inmates.
As at other Nazi concentration camps, the inmates at Mauthausen and its subcamps were forced to work as slave labor, under conditions that caused many deaths.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mauthausen concentration camp” as nazi concentration camp in Austria (1938–1945). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q160139. VIAF identifies the subject as 158578513. The Library of Congress control number is no96065604. Authority coordinates are 48.258, 14.500. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1915, 1918 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mauthausen concentration camp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.