Mauthausen Concentration Camp

The soccer field where prisoners who were lucky enough to play well could gain favor by playing on officer's teams and get special treatment.

 



 

Gas Chambers don't need words to express the tragedies that occurred there.

 

The handles of the stretcher used to push bodies into the furnaces.

 

The table used for removing gold teeth from dead prisoner's bodies before burning them in the furnaces.

 

Mauthausen was a Concentration Camp, not an Extermination Camp. While large numbers of people still died within the walls of the camp, the primary reason for the camp was labor. This rock quarry was the location of the main source of labor for the prisoners.

 

These stairs were known as the "Stairs of Death," where the prisoners were forced to carry heavy loads of rock on their backs up the staircase. If one prisoner fell, the domino effect took place, and those affected by the fall were usually beaten to death if the fall itself did not kill them.

 

Prisoners were sometimes forced to stand in single file lines at the top of this cliff, where they were made to push the person at the front of the line off the cliff, until the entire line lay dead in the pool below. To me, it seemed that these melancholy waters remembered the terrors that once sat reflected on its surface.