REMEMBER and honor the victums
Mauthausen Concentration Camp...Very difficult to visit or to put into words a meaningful tribute to those whose lives ended on this piece of ground...A gripping historical memorial in a contrasting setting, the beautiful Danube River Valley, with the wide rushing river, surounded by rolling hills of farming country...This camp was forced to become a memorial by agreement between the Allies and the Soviet Union which invaded Austria and this Concentration Camp...A POWERFUL experience...Operational from 1938 to 1945 the historical purpose moved from holding Hitler's domestic political opponents initially, to, in 1943, hold Jews, Eastern European and Soviet war prisoners...Concentration Camps had different purposes, Auschwitz and Birkenau were mass gas chamber extermination machines, while inmates at Mauthausen were worked to death...Mauthausen began as a killer stone quarry with the inmates to be worked to death, forced to carry heavy slabs of granite on their backs up a steep grade, or to be starved to death...as WWII progressed the German war industry had to change with bombing destruction and loss of workers, Mauthausen and other surrounding camps became underground manufacturing factories, using skilled prisoner workers to turn out the Messerschmidt Jet fighter plane, and Panther Tanks in adjoining camps....This was the last camp to be liberated on May 5, 1945 by the Soviet Army...The Nazi leader Hitler died a week earlier...200,000 humans in this camp and about 100,000 survived, including a man who dedicated his life to the world wide hunting down of former Nazis...Surprise how the world forgot the inmates of the concentration camps, many prisoners had nowhere to go, no one who was alive to care, were in poor health, and were still in the liberated camps untll as late as 1951...This memorial is under a continuing reconstruction of weathered buildings...
Mauthausen Concentration Camp...Very difficult to visit or to put into words a meaningful tribute to those whose lives ended on this piece of ground...A gripping historical memorial in a contrasting setting, the beautiful Danube River Valley, with the wide rushing river, surounded by rolling hills of farming country...This camp was forced to become a memorial by agreement between the Allies and the Soviet Union which invaded Austria and this Concentration Camp...A POWERFUL experience...Operational from 1938 to 1945 the historical purpose moved from holding Hitler's domestic political opponents initially, to, in 1943, hold Jews, Eastern European and Soviet war prisoners...Concentration Camps had different purposes, Auschwitz and Birkenau were mass gas chamber extermination machines, while inmates at Mauthausen were worked to death...Mauthausen began as a killer stone quarry with the inmates to be worked to death, forced to carry heavy slabs of granite on their backs up a steep grade, or to be starved to death...as WWII progressed the German war industry had to change with bombing destruction and loss of workers, Mauthausen and other surrounding camps became underground manufacturing factories, using skilled prisoner workers to turn out the Messerschmidt Jet fighter plane, and Panther Tanks in adjoining camps....This was the last camp to be liberated on May 5, 1945 by the Soviet Army...The Nazi leader Hitler died a week earlier...200,000 humans in this camp and about 100,000 survived, including a man who dedicated his life to the world wide hunting down of former Nazis...Surprise how the world forgot the inmates of the concentration camps, many prisoners had nowhere to go, no one who was alive to care, were in poor health, and were still in the liberated camps untll as late as 1951...This memorial is under a continuing reconstruction of weathered buildings...