Personal memories of when I visited the Mauthausen Concentration Camp located in Austria, established in August 1938.

In my opinion, the entire facility stands as a graveyard: where buildings and rooms still remain in a peaceful state, yet the presence of death, horror, and torture continuously stream through the mind. One doesn’t truly understand the amount of pain and dehumanization done in this place until touring the museum located on site.

Mauthausen was the only category III camp, a camp with the hardest conditions of confinement within the SS camp systems—holding one of the highest death rates. The brutal detention conditions left inmates, in their admission process, standing outdoors for hours in all kinds of weather without clothing. Then they had their hair shorn and were shaved completely and disinfected. Next, those who survived admission detainment were handed special clothes and entered the quarantine camp where they were forced into labor.

Each inmate had a colored triangle on his jacket indicating the category assigned by the SS.

Meaning in colors of triangles: red: political green: professional criminal blue: emigrant purple: jehovah’s witness pink: homosexual black: antisocial The stars (in fourth column down) represented the marks given to the Jews

The German SS didn’t just seek to capture the Jews, but other qualifications intrigued their interests. Over 200,000 people from all over Europe were deported to Mauthausen based on their political activity, ‘criminal record’, religious conviction, homosexuality, and/or ‘racist and anti’ reasons for war. Over half of them died there.

The museum hosts a drawing of what an inmate saw looking out a window of the camp.

There were various ways the SS killed the inmates. Some were beaten to death, shot or hanged. And those with a sickness were frozen to death, starved, or killed by lethal injection or gas.

When visiting, one may walk through the varied rooms where the killing activities were performed.

The Crematory

Furnace

Picture of a smiling SS commander as he visits the camp to check on its progression, photo located in museum.

A sign of remembrance for the Americans who fought for the inmates’ freedom hangs along the inside of the camp’s wall.

More Photos of the Concentration Camp

A jail cell

A bathroom

While touring the Mauthausen camp and visually going back into this frightful duration of history,  I found myself in a state of unease. Looking upon a graphic image, located on a poster in a room of the camp, my stomach began to whorl in an acidic state—poisoned by the sight of an inmate’s dead face. It was as if his tortured soul was seeping through his eyes, his mouth permanently wide-open from his cries, and his malnourished flesh dried to his bones. Gagging and holding back tears, I had to walk out of the room. I thought about how these were all humans, and the realization of evil weighed heavily on this place.

Memorial in the center of camp