The story of this place
Established by the SS in August 1938, months after the Anschluss, Mauthausen became the harshest of the Nazi concentration camps, classified for prisoners deemed impossible to reform. At its granite quarry, prisoners were forced to carry blocks weighing up to 50 kilograms up the 186 steps of the Stairs of Death; the exhausted were often thrown from the cliff the SS called the Parachutists' Wall. Of the roughly 190,000 people imprisoned across the Mauthausen system, at least 90,000 died from labour, starvation, execution and gas. US troops liberated the camp on 5 May 1945. It is now a memorial and museum.