By Alion Çaçi
The Mauthausen concentration camp – now Mauthausen Memorial – is about a 165 km drive from Vienna, east of Linz, close enough to feel like a day trip, far enough to make one wonder how the crimes committed here could ever have been hidden from sight.
I visited the now-Memorial for the second time on a rainy and rare cold April day, to honor my great-grandfather, who, even though not Jewish – as common knowledge and popular culture suggest that prisoners were – spent his last months there. “They (nazis) smashed the door in the middle of the night and grabbed him from the bed where we were asleep,” my great-grandmother used to tell my father. “The traitors gave him to the nazis, simply because he fed the partisans bread from his bakery shop.” My great-grandfather was initially a police officer under King Zog’s regime in Albania, before he started his own small business: a bakery shop.
“They threw him in a truck and disappeared,” my father continues to replicate what his grandmother had told him over the years. “Only much later, after the war, they found out where he had ended up and how he spent his last days.” His death date is marked on Christmas Day, 1944.
The Mauthausen Memorial is now a highly visited location, primarily from school pupils, who are organized by schools and teachers who continue to fight to keep the memories alive for future generations. As you enter the Memorial, several objects are exhibited from several countries that sent them there in honor of the victims from their countries, who were imprisoned and executed in the Camp.
The SS opened the camp in August 1938, days after Germany annexed Austria. Classified as “Category III”, Mauthausen and its rapidly multiplying sub-camps were intended for prisoners who were not meant to return. From that first transport of 300 men from Dachau until American soldiers arrived on 5 May 1945, roughly 190,000 people from more than forty nations were imprisoned in this hillside complex; at least 90,000 of them died from hunger, slave labour, medical murder, or outright execution.
Early in 1945, as other camps were evacuated ahead of the Red Army, tens of thousands of prisoners poured into Mauthausen. Overcrowding turned already lethal barracks into fever nests, and corpses lay unburied in piles. When American tanks finally climbed the hill on 5 May, they found prisoners so weak that many died even after medics arrived. Yet most perished more slowly, worn out by starvation rations, typhus or dysentery, and ceaseless beatings.
On 3 May, the SS fled, leaving a skeleton crew of Viennese firefighters to guard the wire. A clandestine International Prisoners’ Committee took charge until scouting units of the US Third Army reached the perimeter on the morning of 5 May. Later that day, tanks of the 11th Armored Division – the “Thunderbolts” – rolled through the gates and formally liberated Mauthausen and the satellite camp at Gusen (about 3km away).
The first American voices many prisoners heard belonged to teenagers in Sherman tanks. One of them, Dutch-Jewish survivor Max R. Garcia, told an Ebensee memorial audience in 2012 how he caught sight of a red-and-white cigarette pack. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a Lucky Strike,” he shouted in English. The gunner lifted the thin 20-year-old onto the tank’s turret. “From that moment on, I was under the care and protection of the United States Army.”
Liberation did not bring instant relief. Army medics catalogued thousands of corpses; General Patton ordered residents to dig graves and scrub barracks floors. Yet within weeks, the survivors began erecting national monuments along the camp’s north wall, and in 1949, the Austrian Republic declared the site a memorial. Visitors today walk past slabs dedicated to Spaniards, Poles, Albanians, Greeks, Russians, Frenchmen, Italians, Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, physically disabled people, and Austrian political prisoners.
Monday, 5 May 2025, marks the eightieth anniversary of the liberation. This anniversary is being marked all year under the theme “Gemeinsam für ein Niemals wieder!”—Together for a Never Again.
The Mauthausen Komitee Österreich has scheduled over a hundred local ceremonies; the largest will be the International Liberation Ceremony on 11 May 2025, beginning with a memorial procession and wreath-laying before speeches on the former roll-call square. Two days earlier, on May 8, Vienna’s Heldenplatz will host the annual Fest der Freude – Festival of Joy, an open-air concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, which celebrates the end of the war while commemorating its victims.
Organisers expect delegations from every continent, and President Alexander Van der Bellen is due to address the gathering. Youth groups will read names from the memorial’s digital “Room of Names”, and the quarry’s Stairs of Death will form part of a special night-time light installation. In Vienna, an art projection on the Hofburg palace will scroll through the surnames of more than 84,000 people who died at Mauthausen and its sub-camps, displacing evening shoppers with a tide of silent testimony.
Eight decades after the 11th Armored Division halted its advance long enough to break open the gates, Austria will pause again, not merely to count the dead but to listen to the living. Survivors are fewer each year, yet their stories carry across generations.
