The Gusen satellite camp

In the last months of 1939, a new labour kommando was created to build what would become Mauthausen’s first satellite camp. Constructing it brought with it a double torture. In addition yo the punishment of having to build the new facility, there was the fact that, until March 1940, Gusen had no structures to house the prisoners. Every day for more than six months, the approximately 400 prisoners first chosen for the project had to walk from the Mauthausen quarry to the site of the new camp, five kilometres away. Such was the torture that of the 1,770 deaths registered in the main camp between December and April, most occurred in Gusen.

The first inhabitants of the satellite camp were 1,300 Austrians, Germans, and Poles, although it was officially declared open only on 25 May 1940, when 1,084 Poles were transferred there to be “re-educated” as labourers. With the construction of Gusen, Mauthausen became the first of the quarry-camps to have a satellite, which made it unique and would allow it to produce more granite than any of the SS facilities.

The unfortunate prisoners who had the misfortune to be condemned to suffer this new peak of pain in which it was even less likely to escape death than in Mauthausen. Their very condition and origins guaranteed their ordeal. The habitual criminals were joined by a majority of Poles from the surviving pockets of resistance. This put them in the groups of prisoners most hated by their captors. The first two deaths at Gusen occurred on 1 June, the first entries in a death register that, in fourteen days, would have more names than those who died at Mauthausen in its first six months.

Quarry work at Gusen was easily the most painful of all and differed from that in the main camp only in the absence of the staircase. All the rest was equally macabre: working to exhaustion carrying rocks that could weigh as much as fifty kilograms. At the end of June, 1,664 people had died, a frightening number. A quarter of them were Spaniards. The tragic balance sheet only kept growing as 853 more had died by early September. Winter was approaching and things could only get worse.

November and December were especially hard, and the mortality rate became unimaginably high. Of the total of 5,570 deaths, 40 percent occurred in those two months. The Spanish tragedy that took place in those last months of 1941 played a large part in this. Of the 2,906 Spaniards who died in Mauthausen in 1941, 1,612 died at Gusen in the last months of the autumn. The peak came with 889 deaths in November. At no other moment did more Spaniards die.

GGB