Mauthausen and the Nazi Expansion and Persecution Policies

This four-volume work is an in-depth history of the survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp; the volumes interlock and complement each other. Volume 1, submitted here as a general introduction, provides an overall survey of the camp complex and of research on Mauthausen, focuses on methodological problems and the macropolitical preconditions governing the compositon of the inmate population in the archipelago of a Nazi concentration camp. The contributions show how prisoners of the camp system were defined to a large degree as a function of the occupation and persecution policies of the Nazi regime (including the collaborating countries). In terms of structural history, this volume locates Mauthausen in the context of the logic and the opportunities offered by the territorial sphere dominated and exploited by the Nazis and the dynamic of its initial rapid expansion and its final shrinkage. Metaphorically speaking, Europe is mirrored in the totality of Mauthausens inmates. 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; its results are presented here for the first time. Our research highlights the significance ascribed to the experience of persecution by the survivors. The four-volume history of Mauthausen survivors focuses both on individual lives and life stories of survivors and on social and political contexts of memory and narration. In this way, the camp universe of Mauthausen is shown to be still very much alive in European national cultures of memory. This approach involved using a broad range of quantitative research techniques and qualitative methods regarding the analysis of oral and video history interviews to provide an overall conspectus of the Nazis persecution and occupation policies and the system of concentration camps as exemplified by Mauthausen. It is hoped that this will pave the way for a new assessment of the life- worlds of the inmates and their chances of survival.