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- On May 3, 1945, the SS abandoned the camp, aware of the impending arrival of the Allies. Mauthausen’s liberation by the US Army came two days later, and it was a key moment in the history of the camp and the wider story of World War II.
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By the end of World War II the prisoners had dug 29,400 square metres (316,000 sq ft) to house a small-arms factory. In January 1944, similar tunnels were also built beneath the village of Sankt Georgen by the inmates of Gusen II subcamp (code-named Bergkristall). [31]
On May 3, 1945, the SS abandoned the camp to the custody of a guard unit of 50 Viennese firefighters, who remained on the perimeter of the camp. Members of an “International Committee” formed by the prisoners in the last days of April administered the camp as units of the US Army arrived at the camp and secured the surrounding area on May 5.
The first victims were Soviet prisoners of war transferred to Mauthausen from POW camps run by the German army. Later the SS gassed inmates who were extremely ill. Some 3,500 people were murdered with this abominable method by the war’s end.
- Malloryk
It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. The previous spring, the SS had evacuated most of the Majdanek prisoners and camp personnel. The evacuated prisoners were sent to concentration camps further west, such as Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen.
Starting as a satellite of Dachau, in Germany, it became an independent camp in the spring of 1939, operated by the SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps) and acquiring satellite camps of its own throughout Austria, all collectively called Mauthausen.
During the war, the SS incarcerated more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war at Mauthausen, including 3,000 held at the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen. Nationals of virtually every German-occupied country in World War II came through Mauthausen.
