Deported to Mauthausen Vol. 2

This four-volume work is an in-depth history of the survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp; the volumes interlock and complement each other. While volume 1 focuses on methodological problems and the macrohistorical preconditions governing the composition of the inmate population to the archipelago of Nazi concentration camps, volume 2, submitted here, deals explicitly with the deportation transports and death marches as well as the constant transfers between different Nazi camps. Topics such as the varieties of the prisoners society and the return of the survivors to the outside world are left to Volumes 3 and 4. The basic research and the main sources of the project are derived from the earlier Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP) directed by Gerhard Botz and carried out by an international team of collaborators in 2002/03. The MSDP had conducted and recorded in Europe, Israel and in North and South America 859 interviews in 16 different languages with both male and female survivors of Mauthausen and its more than 40 subcamps. The subsequent equally international Mauthausen Survivors Research Project (MSRP) used this unique source base for a stringent analysis, whose results are presented here for the first time. The internal composition of the inmate society was formed by the logic and the opportunities supplied by the expanding and finally inexorably shrinking territory controlled by the Third Reich rather than along universal social or political categories of the perceived enemies of the Nazis. Hence, the survival or death of different (groups of) deportees from all over Europe can be understood only when the transnational character of Nazi dominated Europe, as mirrored in the camp, is taken into account. The present volume addresses this challenge by its multinational approach enabling us to mirror the transnational character of Mauthausens prisoner society. Deportations and the permanent transfers of prisoners within the camp system had always been part and parcel of the Nazi system of power. This volume highlights the entangled ideological, economic, military and bureaucratic considerations underlying the concentration camp system and the oppression and extermination of political, racial and cultural `undesirables`. Volume 2 demonstrates how powerfully these measures impacted the lives and life stories of the survivors and initiates a new perspective on the history of the Nazi camp system from the point of view of deportees.