Cemetery

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By the end of 1944, the number of prisoners in Mauthausen and its satellite camps had climbed to over 73,000. Between January and the beginning of May 1945, over 20,000 additional prisoners arrived at the camp which was filled beyond overflowing. Upon arrival they were extremely weak. Because only a few were capable of doing forced labour, the SS provided them with little food, clothing, medicine and shelter. Actually, the SS tried systematically to accelerate their mass death. In this phase the number of fatalities came to several hundred per day. The crematoria were not longer able to incinerate all of the dead.

Charles Heintz from Luxembourg remembers:

“The dead could not be cremated due to a lack of coal. On February 18, 1945 a double work detail of about 100 prisoners was put together, myself included. We were told to dig a mass grave on the farmland near Marbach, at a distance of some 600 metres from the concentration camp for burying the dead from the evacuations from Sachsenhausen, as well as any other remaining bodies. You must keep in mind that starting in February, over one hundred people died of starvation daily, because all of the transports arrived in Mauthausen from all of the other concentration camps. Mauthausen was the last concentration camp to be freed and was not liberated by the Americans until May 5, 1945.

We shovelled in 12-hour shifts day and night, in rain and snow to dig a large grave about 20 x 5 x 3 metres in size. During the night while we were working, the dead were brought on wheelbarrows, on farming vehicles, as well as on trucks lined up endlessly, where we put them in the grave carefully arranging them in layers. [...] At midnight, we were forced to eat our soup in the grave for fear that we might escape. Because it was pouring down rain, we used the heaps of bodies as seats and for resting during our half-hour break. After we were finished with the work, I remember this very clearly, we received extra rations, one litre of goulash...”



A total of 9,860 bodies were buried in this mass grave. They were exhumed in 1967 and laid to rest here in the front part of the former Quarantine Ward. A second mass grave containing some 2,000 bodies is still located in the town of Mauthausen today, on the grounds of the cemetery for prisoners of war from World War I.