Even before she took the new job she had picked up reports, while working for the family business in her home town, of a camp being built by forced labourers on a hill just outside Mauthausen where prisoners would serve their sentences. There were German soldiers on the streets from whom she picked up alarming stories about similar camps already set up before 1938 in Germany, administered by National Socialist "SS" paramilitaries and the atrocities committed inside them. By the time she started her new job at Mauthausen the opening of the Mauthausen camp, constructed by prisoners shipped in from the Dachau concentration camp during the previous eight months, was no secret to anyone. She saw how the "unfortunate prisoners" were forced out of the train carriages at Mauthausen station and herded by their SS guards to the camp. After the outbreak, in September 1939, of the European war the numbers of prisoners greatly increased, arriving from many parts of Europe, sometimes in passenger carriages and sometimes in cattle trucks. Shortly after this prisoners, under SS supervision, constructed a special dedicated ramp for the concentration camp at the station, designed to receive prisoners and supplies.