The Mauthausen "camp-SS"

The focus of the proposed project is on the Mauthausen concentration camp complex SS personnel. In our definition this term refers not only to SS members employed within the camp administration or the guard units but also to other groups of individuals active in the Mauthausen concentration camps - Wehrmacht servicemen detailed to the concentration camp guard units, female guards and female auxiliary staff as a component of the Waffen SS, civilians employed in various departments of the camp administration, members of the fire police and the plant guards, as well as staff serving with establishments affiliated to the Mauthausen camp (Security Service, the German Earth and Stone Works company, etc.). As its main concern, the project intends to provide an analysis of the field of study "Mauthausen camp SS personnel" that would be as comprehensive and differentiated as possible: Who were the individuals serving at the Mauthausen camp, where did they come from? What were the operational and administrative structures within which they were acting, what were their tasks and how much freedom did they have in carrying them out? In what way may the crimes committed by the camp personnel be described and explained? In order to shed light on these issues, the following thematic fields will be examined: administrative structure; staff policies, development and structure; social structure; commands and duty regulations; doing service in the camp as well as workaday and daily life at the working place; interaction with inmates; economic and material aspects; self-perception and identity of a "Mauthausen SS", the structural and territorial environment as well as post-war careers. As of today, the ever-increasing number of publications on concentration camp personnel notwithstanding, only a small number of studies have emerged that would deal in detail with the entirety of concentration camp personnel and the complex network of connections between them. The proposed project would thus be one of the first research endeavours to offer a comprehensive description of concentration camp personnel. Given the far-reaching approach adopted by the project, key findings may be expected with regard to the entirety of SS personnel serving within the concentration camp system. Research findings are intended to be incorporated in the long term in an exhibition on the SS to be staged at the Mauthausen Memorial Site in the course of the Site`s redesign. The Mauthausen Memorial Site (Department IV/7) of the Federal Ministry of the Interior is also a close project cooperation partner. As for the source materials to be used, the focus will be on the holdings of the Mauthausen Memorial Site (mainly copies of the Dachau trials court records relating to Mauthausen, documents originating from the Mauthausen camp as well as collections of copies maintained at archival repositories abroad), the Federal Archive Berlin (in particular, personnel files transferred to the Archive from the former Berlin Document Center), the National Archives in Washington D.C. (a number of holdings relating to Mauthausen) as well as the documents held by the ITS Bad Arolsen made accessible to the public only recently. Moreover, oral interview are planned to be conducted, as far as possible, with former members of the Mauthausen camp SS personnel. The evaluation of sources will be based on both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Throughout its existence between 1938 and 1945, the Mauthausen concentration camp, together with the Gusen satellite camp and about 40 sub-camps, received a total of roughly 200,000 inmates, mostly men, from all over Nazi-controlled Europe. With a death toll of 90,000-odd resulting from abysmal conditions of detention, heavy forced labour and targeted killings, the Mauthausen camp complex featured one of the highest mortality rates among all concentration camps. This project has been the first to examine the entirety of concentration camp personnel - to a great extent directly responsible for the mass deaths - in terms of identity and origin, division of tasks, operational and service-related structures within the facility, scopes of action, as well as collective and individual involvement in the system of violence. The Mauthausen camp SS was composed of the command staff comprising several hundred persons and organised into six divisions who were in charge of the overall running of the camp complex, and the guard units numbering, as of spring 1945, almost 10,000 soldiers. In addition, the camp accommodated, among others, dozens of female SS guards and civilian staff. Having become, in its final phase, the destination of evacuation marches, the Mauthausen camp complex had the highest number of staff across the entire camp system. In the beginning, the command staff was invariably drawn from German, Austrian and Sudeten German SS members with fluctuation, compared to that in other camps, being very low. While many of them had gained years of experience serving and exerting violence in the armed SS, specific training was imparted only to leading members of the administration department and to doctors. Violence was wielded on a co-operative basis within clearly defined organisational structures and scopes of duties not only on command - self-initiative as well as anticipatory obedience to superior bodies played a similarly important role. The guard units were originally recruited from the SS Totenkopfverbände; however, when the war began they started to be replaced by members of the General SS either older or unfit for front service. The huge requirement for personnel emerging by the middle of the war was met by the assignment of young men from the German-speaking minorities of southern Europe and, from 1944 onwards, the transfer of Wehrmacht soldiers as well as of special groups such as Ukrainian guards who had formerly served in the extermination camps in occupied Poland. During the last days preceding liberation the guard units were manned with Viennese fire fighters. The study shows that especially on the part of the command staff the commitment to fighting political-ideological opponents, real and presumed alike, was regarded both as a military duty and ordinary work not principally different from other kinds of activities. A socio-structural analysis based upon the survey of almost 4,000 individuals revealed that the members of the camp SS hailed from all parts of society. And also especially with regard to the members of the command staff, who often lived in the surroundings of the camps with their families for years, it holds that they not only maintained close official contacts with local bodies. Having overcome initial conflicts, they were well integrated in the local community, which is testified by marriages to local women, children of SS families attending local schools, regular participation in local festivities such as sporting events - the Mauthausen SS soccer team played successfully in the Regional League - as well as by locals seeing SS doctors. A high degree of integration in the national socialist society may be regarded as one factor accounting for the fact that so many of the Mauthausen camp SS members could re-integrate into the post-war society without causing much of a stir.