Imprisoned in Mauthausen

"INTERNED IN MAUTHAUSEN" is volume 3 of a four-part "History of the Survivors of a National Socialist Concentration Camp". In the preceding two volumes, one can read about the influence of Nazi expansion and persecution policies on the composition of the "prisoner society" of Mauthausen and how, when and from where prisoners were deported to Mauthausen. Mauthausen became one of the most horrific Nazi concentration camps, to which more than 190,000 inmates from all over Europe were transported in various ways; only about half of them survived. Through the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project (MSDP), directed by Gerhard Botz (Univ. Vienna) and carried out with an international team, over 850 survivors were interviewed in 2002/03. This publication builds on an examination of these narratives. Its main results include: - Not one or a few life history narratives are analyzed here, but hundreds of interviews, often lasting several hours, with surviving men and women. - The interviews are not in one single language (German, English or Polish, etc.), but in 16 different languages, some of them already transcribed and to a large part translated into German. - This makes it possible to trace the different phases of development of the Mauthausen concentration camp and its more than 40 subcamps, its internal functions for the Nazi regime, the economic objectives of the SS and the death or survival conditions of the inmates. -The social, age, gender and national composition of the prisoners and their living or dying conditions changed fundamentally over time, so that a uniform "theory" of the concentration camps must fall short and is replaced by a researched synopsis of the variegated experiences and narratives of survivors. - Although terror, violence and death were always present, especially in Mauthausen, this study primarily examines the everyday life of the persecuted ones and asks which scope for action and possibilities there were in the concentration camp to improve their individual chances of survival. - While there was no certainty of escaping the manifold deaths in Mauthausen, for many prisoners there were also opportunities to act in a way that promoted life or to use coincidences for themselves (and their friends and next of kin). Among other things, this depended heavily on the racial, national, political, or occupational categories (Jews, "gypsies," "asocials," etc.) into which they were placed by the SS and under which circumstances they had entered the concentration camp. The 21 contributions to this volume present a new assessment of the prisoners` multi-faceted living conditions and their chances of survival that transcend national and cultural boundaries.