Österreichische Post 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp

 

ÖSTERREICHISCHE POST on 6 May 2005 issued a first day cover stamp marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. The stamp features the "The Stairway of Death" coated in the blood of the detainees who were forced to build it and the camp, among other notorious activities. Österreichische Staatsdruckerei GmbH printed the stamp. Cancellation postmark originated from Mauthausen.

The first detainees arrived at Mauthausen in August 1938. It had been the largest granite quarry of the Austrian empire. And it was the main labour camp until 1942. Thousands of men climbed these 186 steps day after day, five at a time, with a granite block on their shoulders. It is how the stone walls of the camp were erected.

The primary function of the “Stairway of Death” was to exhaust the detainees, in the words of one of the accused at the Mauthausen trial (Dachau, 1946). Massacres on these steps happened daily, as men were pushed into the abyss, or forced to throw themselves down. It was thus also a macabre place of spectacle. Historian Michel Fabréguet described the quarry as “a human slaughterhouse”.

Political opponents and groups of people labelled as ‘criminal’ or ‘antisocial’ were initially imprisoned here and forced to work in the granite quarries. In 1938, the SS transferred the first prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp. During this phase, the prisoners, who were all Germans and Austrians and all men, laboured here. In addition to working in the quarry, their daily lives were shaped by hunger, arbitrary treatment and violence. Later in the war, women were transferred here and were increasingly used as forced labourers in the arms industry.

When the US Army reached Gusen and Mauthausen in May 1945, some prisoners were in such a weakened state that many still died in the days and weeks after liberation. Of a total of around 190,000 people imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps over seven years, at least 90,000 died.