page_title: Mauthausen concentration camp
section_title: Establishment of the main camp
hierarchical_section_title: Mauthausen concentration camp / Establishment of the main camp
caption_attribution_description: Information added by Wikimedia users.Himmler, Karl Wolff, Franz Ziereis and August Eigruber
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: On 9 August 1938, prisoners from Dachau concentration camp near Munich were sent to the town of Mauthausen in Austria, to begin the construction of a new slave labour camp. The site was chosen because of the nearby granite quarry, and its proximity to Linz. Although the camp was controlled by the German state from the beginning, it was founded by a private company as an economic enterprise. 
  The owner of the Wiener-Graben quarry (the Marbacher-Bruch and Bettelberg quarries) was a DEST Company: an acronym for Deutsche Erd– und Steinwerke GmbH. The company was led by Oswald Pohl, who was a high-ranking official of the Schutzstaffel (SS). It rented the quarries from the City of Vienna in 1938 and started the construction of the Mauthausen camp. A year later, the company ordered the construction of the first camp at Gusen. 
  The granite mined in the quarries had previously been used to pave the streets of Vienna, but the Nazi authorities envisioned a complete reconstruction of major German towns in accordance with plans of Albert Speer and other proponents of Nazi architecture, for which large quantities of granite were needed. The money to fund the construction of the Mauthausen camp was gathered from a variety of sources, including commercial loans from Dresdner Bank and Prague-based Escompte Bank; the so-called Reinhardt's fund (meaning money stolen from the inmates of the concentration camps themselves); and from the German Red Cross.
  Mauthausen initially served as a strictly-run prison camp for common criminals, prostitutes and other categories of "Incorrigible Law Offenders". On 8 May 1939 it was converted to a labour camp which was mainly used for the incarceration of political prisoners.
caption: Heinrich Himmler visiting Mauthausen in June 1941. Himmler is talking to Franz Ziereis, camp commandant, with Karl Wolff on the left and August Eigruber on the right.
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