page_title: Mauthausen concentration camp
section_title: Gusen
hierarchical_section_title: Mauthausen concentration camp / Gusen
context_page_description: Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
  The Mauthausen main camp operated from the time of the Anschluss, when Austria was united with Nazi Germany on 8 August 1938, to 5 May 1945, at the end of the European theatre of Second World War. Starting with the camp at Mauthausen, the number of subcamps expanded over time and by the summer of 1940 Mauthausen and its subcamps had become one of the largest labour camp complexes in the German-controlled part of Europe.
  As at other Nazi concentration camps, the inmates at Mauthausen and its subcamps were forced to work as slave labour, under conditions that caused many deaths. Mauthausen and its subcamps included quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms factories and plants assembling Me 262 fighter aircraft.
context_section_description: The three Gusen concentration camps held a significant proportion of prisoners within the Mauthausen-Gusen complex. For most of its history, this exceeded the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp itself.
  DEST began purchasing land at St Georgen/Gusen in May 1938. During 1938 and 1939, inmates of the nearby Mauthausen makeshift camp marched daily to the granite quarries at St Georgen/Gusen, which were more productive and more important for DEST than the Wienergraben Quarry.  After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the as-yet unfinished Mauthausen camp was already overcrowded with prisoners. The numbers of inmates rose from 1,080 in late 1938 to over 3,000 a year later. At about that time, the construction of a new camp "for the Poles" began in Gusen about 4.5 kilometres (2.8 mi) away. The new camp (later named Gusen I) became operational in May 1940. The first inmates were put in the first two huts (No. 7 and 8) on 17 April 1940, while the first transport of prisoners – mostly from the camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen – arrived just over a month later, on 25 May.
  Like nearby Mauthausen, the Gusen camps also rented inmates out to various local businesses as slave labour. In October 1941, several huts were separated from the Gusen subcamp by barbed wire and turned into a separate Prisoner of War Labour Camp (German: Kriegsgefangenenarbeitslager). This camp had many prisoners of war, mostly Soviet officers. By 1942 the production capacity of Mauthausen and the Gusen camps had reached its peak. The Gusen site was expanded to include the central depot of the SS, where various goods, which had been seized from occupied territories, were sorted and then dispatched to Germany. Local quarries and businesses were in constant need of a new source of labour as more and more Austrians were drafted into the Wehrmacht.
  In March 1944, the former SS depot was converted to a new subcamp, named Gusen II, which served as an improvised concentration camp until the end of the war. Gusen II contained about 12,000 to 17,000 inmates, who were deprived of even the most basic facilities. In December 1944, Gusen III was opened in nearby Lungitz. Here, parts of a factory infrastructure were converted into the third Gusen camp. The rise in the number of subcamps could not catch up with the rising number of inmates, which led to overcrowding of the huts in Mauthausen and its subcamps. From late 1940 to 1944, the number of inmates per bed rose from two to four.
caption: Soviet prisoners of war at Gusen, October 1941
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