Mauthausen/Gusen Death Book

Holocaust · Victims · Prisoners · Europe (multiple)

This death book, with 38,206 names, is not a complete list, since several thousand prisoners, particularly Russian prisoners of war, were never entered into the records, but simply murdered.  There were relatively few Jewish prisoners in Mauthausen in the early years, but near the end of WWII this changed and thousands of Jewish forced laborers, particularly Hungarian, were sent to Gusen.  The death book includes the names of 10,517 persons identified as Jews.

Nearly 68,000 prisoners were held in Gusen before liberation on May 5, 1945.  While not a death camp in the strict sense of that term, conditions were so bad that a majority of the prisoners died there.

Mauthausen, located 20 km from Linz, Austria, was set up in 1938, after the "Anschluss of Austria.  On August 8, 1938 prisoners from Dachau were transferred to the "Wiener Graben" quarry to build the Mauthausen concentration camp.  It became the central camp for Austria, from which forty-nine permanent sub-camps were administered.

Between August 8, 1938 and liberation on May 5, 1945, approximately 195,000 prisoners were in Mauthausen.  Estimates are that 150,000 perished.

Initially German and Austrian criminals, "asocials," political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses were sent there.  Later Poles, Spanish republican refugees transferred by Vichy France, Soviet and other POWs, as well as Jews, were sent there.  For example, between 1942 and 1944, political prisoners from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Albania, Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy, Hungary, and Germany, and thousands of unregistered Soviet POWs were sent to Mauthausen.  And in 1945, more than 20,000 prisoners from other concentration camps in countries given up by the Nazis were transferred to Mauthausen -- Lublin, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Natzweiler, and Gross-Rosen.

About the same time, thousands of Hungarians, mostly Jews, were sent to Mauthausen.  On May 3, 1945, 64,800 men and 1,734 women were listed as prisoners in Mauthausen, including 18,015 Hungarians, 15,803 Poles, and 15,581 Romanians.  (Source: Mauthausen, Osterreichische Lagergemeinschaft Mauthausen).

There is some evidence to suggest that the Nazis had planned to move the Auschwitz gas chambers to Mauthausen, and that some of the equipment had been transferred to Mauthausen.

Most of the guards at Mauthausen and its subcamps were SS members.  In 1939 there were 1,500; in 1944-45, there were 9,000.  Incredibly, only 818 of them were identified.  A couple hundred were captured by the Americans.  In the trial at Dachau on March 7, 1946, 58 were sentenced to death and three to life imprisonment.  All pled not guilty.  The commandant, Franz Ziereis, was shot by American soldiers in the camp hiding in civilian clothes.  His "deathbed" confession is online -- a chilling account of the inhuman treatment of the prisoners, ordered by Himmler and carried out by Zereis, who characterizes himself as "not a wicked man."  He estimated that 65,000 inmates were murdered in Mauthausen, and he confessed that he took part in the executions.

Fred Friendly wrote in May 19, 1945: "Mauthausen was built with a half-million rocks which 150,000 prisoners - 18,000 was the capacity - carried up on their backs from a quarry 800 feet below.  They carried it up steps so steep that a Captain and I walked it once and were winded, without a load.  They carried granite and made 8 trips a day... and if they stumbled, the S.S. men pushed them into the quarry.  There are 285 steps, covered with blood.  They called it the steps of death."

Source: Mauthausen, Osterreichische Lagergemeinschaft Mauthausen jewishvirtuallibrary.org

The KZ Gusen I, II, III concentration camp,complex was the biggest and most brutal of all the Mauthausen subcamps.  More people died at the KZ Gusen I, II & III camps than at the related Mauthausen Central Camp.  All in all, the 40,000 KZ Gusen victims were approximately one-third of all the concentration camp victims on "Austrian" territory.

Before the first Gusen camp was built (there were three), prisoners of Mauthausen had to march 4 km every day to reach the stone quarries at Gusen.  More than 150 prisoners died in the winter of 1938/39 due to that march; therefore, it was decided to build a sub-camp at Gusen, using 400 German and Austrian prisoners from Mauthausen.

The first inmates were German and Austrian political dissidents and priests.  Due to the severity of the work in the quarries and the unspeakable cruelty of the guards, the first group died after only a few weeks.  After the Nazis invasion of Poland, hundreds of Polish intellectuals and civilians were sent to Gusen and murdered in the stone quarry.

Gusen was noted for atrocities committed by the guards, and some of the torture methods were named Parachute Troops and Todebadeaktionen (death bath action). See jewishvirtuallibrary.org for a detailed list of the atrocities committed at Gusen.

The conditions at Gusen II (St Georgen) and Gusen III (Lungitz) were incredible.  The inmates called Gusen II "The hell of the hells."  The Gusen complex was considered to be worse than Mauthausen.

There is a wealth of detailed information on the Internet about Mauthausen and Gusen.  It should also be noted that medical experiments were conducted at Gusen and extensive information about these is on the Internet.  In addition, the database notes deaths at Hartheim.  Hartheim Castle (Schloss Hartheim), located near Linz, was a euthanasia killing center where physically and mentally challenged were killed by gassing and lethal injection.

The database includes 38,207 names of prisoners that were imprisoned and died at Mauthausen and/or other nearby sub-camps.  The fields in the database are as follows (In English and German):

Note A: Prisoners who were under the "nacht und nebel" decrees (night and fog), were said to have disappeared mysteriously and were not allowed outside contacts nor was their location disclosed to relatives or friends.

To assist the researcher, below are some helpful tables and references to translations.

Please see the JewishGen InfoFile for translations of occupations from German to English at: German Occupation Definitions — English Translations.

Persons seeking to obtain copies of individual pages from the death books where a particular name of interest appears should write to the Mauthausen Gedenkstätte at mauthausen-memorial@mail.bmi.gv.at.  Alternatively, one can write to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has an incomplete copy of the death book (RG 17.002M, reel 1), as well as information on other Mauthausen prisoners.  Unfortunately, there is no complete list of all Mauthausen prisoners.

This database, which appears with the permission of the Mauthausen Gedenkstätte (memorial site), was donated to JewishGen by HFPJC (Heritage Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries).  Special thanks to Edward Mitelsbach for translation assistance with German occupations and causes of death.

Joyce Field and Nolan Altman
May 2004

This database is searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database.