Pre-Site Visit Reflection
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp, now a memorial site and museum, located roughly 20 kilometres east of Linz, Austria. On our trip, we will visit Mauthausen from Vienna and stay in Linz for a night afterwards. Mauthausen concentration camp was established in August of 1938 following the annexation of Austria. During its first year, most of the prisoners were criminal offenders or considered ‘asocial elements’ who were transferred from Dachau. Throughout its years of operation, many prisoners, including Jews, were directly murdered via gas chambers or executions, and many more died because of the stone quarry which was located at the camp where they were forced to work. This was brutal, gruelling work, which would now be considered “forced labour” and “extermination through labour”. The prisoners were forced to carry heavy stones up the 186 steps of the “Todesstiege”, ‘stairs of death’ or ‘stairway to death’. It was easy to fall on these steps with heavy rocks on one’s back, which could be deadly. But even worse, SS guards sometimes hurled inmates down to their death from the top of the cliff deliberately and for “fun” referring to their victims as “Fallschirmspringer” or ‘parachutists’. Mauthausen and its subcamps are estimated to have had 190,000 prisoners during its operation, over half of whom were murdered.
The camp is known for being a remarkably international camp, with the majority of prisoners being Soviet POWs, Polish and Hungarian Jews. However, there were also a significant number of prisoners from other nations, including Spain, Armenia and Yugoslavia. When we go, we will see many plaques acknowledging the internationality of its victims. Mauthausen as a memorial site stands out as many of its buildings are preserved in their original condition. According to a dark tourism website for Europe, at Mauthausen, you can see the former SS swimming pool. This was shocking to me, thinking about SS guards going for a swim and enjoying themselves, mere yards away from the camp’s walls. Finally, we will see the “stairs of death”. According to the Mauthausen website, walking the stairs was closed in 2019 due to safety regulations. This is controversial and many people have called out the irony of closing the “stairs of death” for safety reasons. I couldn’t find any information on whether we will be able to walk them this year. There was also some controversy over the installation of an elevator within the original walls of the main complex. In my post-site blog reflection, I will have to update whether or not we were able to walk the stairs and how being at the site has impacted my own thoughts on these safety and accessibility controversies.
Post-Site Visit Reflection (5 June 2024)
Our trip to Mauthausen concluded our visits to former concentration camps as we visited it after Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. This ensured a valuable experience as it allowed us to compare the site to the other memorials and museums located at the other concentration camps. Before our visit, we had the opportunity for a class session where I raised the concept of how to categorize the concentration camps in terms of the learning they facilitated or the responses they provoked. I felt as though the three we visited on the field school could be labelled as either “place-based” learning (Ravensbrück), “information-based” learning (Sachsenhausen), or, to me at least, curated emotional reactions (Auschwitz). While Sachsenhausen aimed to teach visitors about the site via walls of text, Ravensbrück relied more strongly on the physical locations and the tour guide to convey its story. Further, Sachsenhausen felt more like a museum whereas Ravensbrück’s focus seemed to be more on memorialization.
In our class session, I raised the question of where Mauthausen would fit within these categories, or whether an entirely new label would need to be created. To answer my own question, I do believe Mauthausen was a site offering “place-based” learning, even more strongly than Ravensbrück. Whereas Ravensbrück has had at least some text displayed in many of the buildings to inform visitors about them, Mauthausen only had written information in the main exhibition. In fact, many of the buildings’ original purpose was not even revealed. In one instance my friend and I only discovered that the building we were in had once been a camp brothel because our field school director, Helga, happened to be exploring it at the same time as us and had asked the guide earlier. Mauthausen strongly contrasted the sites that seemed designed to have a museum feel, instead fully embracing the use of memorials to remember the atrocities that occurred. As I discussed in my pre-site post, there are memorials to victims of many nationalities. However, I had been picturing simple plaques dedicated to their memory. Instead, there were many large, unique monuments (see images attached).
The “stairs of death” were closed at the time of our visit, but are set to open to the public next year. The public’s response to the decision to open has varied significantly according to our guide. Personally, I do not feel as though they should be open to the public. One can see the view of the quarry from the top and bottom without needing to climb the stairs and the thought of someone climbing them to “know what it felt like” does not sit right with me. We will never be able to comprehend the suffering the prisoners went through, and so it seems insulting to even try. Our field school group talked extensively about the merit of having certain sites, or areas of sites, open to the public. Similar to the controversy regarding the stairs, should the gas chambers at concentration camps be open to walk through? If they are open, should there be trigger warnings before entering? Even after visiting these sites, I still have questions.
Overall, I did enjoy (as much as one can at a former concentration camp) our visit to Mauthausen. Our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and did his best to involve the whole group in the discussions. The Memorial Park was moving and unique, and I appreciated the layout and information included in the main exhibition. My main criticism was the limited (and sometimes non-existent) information in certain buildings. However, I am sure this was a conscious decision by the curators, and perhaps they did want to shift the focus more to the memorialization of the victims of Mauthausen and away from a standard text-based concentration camp “museum”. If I do visit more former concentration camp sites in the future, I plan to categorize them in a similar way and determine whether more labels are necessary.
Citations:
https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/History/The-Mauthausen-Concentration-Camp-19381945
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mauthausen
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/mauthausen-concentration-camp
https://www.britannica.com/place/Mauthausen-concentration-camp-Austria