warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.

Investigative documentary exploring the construction of the Mauthausen concentration camp. In 1938, Hitler ordered the construction of the camp, one of the deadliest in history. Some 200,000 people would be deported there. Over 120,000 would perish.

In the center of Austria , about  150 km west  of Vienna, stands a former hub of Nazi horror, Mauthausen concentration camp.

More than half of the 200,000 Europeans deported to this 15 hectar camp did not survive.they were not sent here for work only,time of work and then time of death.

Stone quaries for constructing buildings for the third reich

And secret  underground weapons factories.

Made  the Mauthausen system a key part of Adolf Hitler’s master plan.

A huge network of more than 40 sub camps was created all over the eastern part of the Austrian territories.

It was run by a ruthless men trained to kill.

After the war , much of   Mauthausen  disapeared.

Erased by Nazis…

Destroyed by the Allies after the liberation or willingly  forgotten by the people of Austria,but the Mauthausen  fortress and other vestigages still stand.

They would cram at least 50 people into this gas chamber.

Now ,  through  exlusive access to the most secretive of  the Mauthausen  compound, along with computerenerated imagery .

you ‘re about to delve in into this dreaded Third Reich landmark and discover the dreadful odeal that awaited the deported.

Over 75 years  after the liberation, this investigation will  unveil one of  the most formidable and  destructive concentration camps of the second world war.

On the eve of World War II ,Adolf Hitler  sought to build the greatest empire the world  had ever seen with the Third  Reich.

In the spirit of his limitless ambitiion ,five cities dubbed the Shurer  cities were  completely  redesigned to fit Adolf Hitler’s personal vision.

Berlin , Hamburg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Linz in  Austria, his  native country.

Which was annexed  in 1938.

Building these gigantic architectural projects required  stone and a lot of it. so he turned to the head of the SS,Heinrich Himmler.

Back then ,Himmler was  already overseeing three concentration camps  that imprisoned enemies of the Third Reich. and  provided the ideal  workforce, both abundant and sheap.

After  implementing concentration  camps in Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald

Himmler decided to build  a new one, this time  close to stone quaries,it was in Austria some 22 km east of Linz,that a small granite -rich village attracted his attention: Mauthausen

Mauthausen  has a long history  as a stone producing  town, stone producing  region actually because all around  mauthausen also several villages that have  tone quaries that had been in use since the 18th century.

Himmler saw it was an ideal location, In August 1938, he built austria’s first concentration camp, the first in a long  serie.

Perched on top of a hill, the imposing fortress of the camp still dominates the local skyline.

The appearance of the fortress was absolutely  key, it needed to look intimidating and crushing.

The first camp was built around four  barracks, one for the SS and 3 three for he prisoners,but the third Reich expanded rapitadly and and the growing  influx of new prospmers meant the camp needed to be continously expended.

Month after month, the number of SS buildings at Mauthausen grew along with additional barracks for prisoners brought to the camp from new territories occupiws by Nazi  Germany.

The camp grew beyond its own compound until finally it covered some 15 hectars.

The first piece prisoner at Mauthausen actually  were Austrians and Germans.

Only after actually towards of the beginning of the second World War, the first political prisoners arrived actually to  Mauthausen, we know of more than 40  nation states at that time.

War prisoners, political prisoners,people who were deported for their  religion, their background , or their sexuality  were all funneled  into a dehumanizing system as soon as they arrived at the camp .

shaved and stripped,they were crammed into a large room  with common showers.

Nazi capos  stood on the curb that surrounds the area on four sides,forcing all the prisoners into the center.

in the middle , the water was either freezing or boiling,the shower was not meant to offer any relief to prisoners after their difficult journey,it was meant to inflict  suffering.

At the exit, prisoners were given a uniform and a number that became their new identity.they were then isolated from the rest of the camp in quarantine to avoid  spreding any possible diseases to the  other prisoners.

They were sent to the showers and then they were disinfected, as part  of that , they were put in isolation as a lesson in surrender.

After weeks in quarantine.

Prisoners were  intergrated into the so – called free part of the camp.it was surrounded by Granit walls and  electricfied  barbed wire surveyed by SS guards from watchtowers.

And it contained 400 wooden barracks.

Normally those barracks were supposed to house  up  300 prisoners alltogether ,but we know that in several camp parts there were up 2,000 prisoners in one of these barracks.

Prisoners were fed bread and broth, only receiving daily 1,500 calories, 2/3 of a normal daily requirement.

This constant feeling of being hungry seems to be one of the worst parts of the torture prisoners had  to suffer here in the camp,but  apart from this permanent hunger, this  permanent lack of  sleep, there was also  permanent state of violence.

The SS at Mauthausen, as they did in  many other camps ,connected  just the daily routine of life to torture and to beatings and to murder.

The center of the camp was another key part of the prisoner’s daily life, the roll  call square.

This  was where we learned the first torment of the concentration camp world.waiting.

…we waited for roll call..

we waited to go to work ,we waited to be fed.we waited to sleep…

…Always waiting.

Take a minute  to think about that, the first ill to afflict the deportiz was waiting.

roll call could take  several hours ,despite the cold which was glacial in winter and any hint of defiance was immediately  punished.

A prisoner would be attached to this chain and left to die, that was the punishment for error,

He was left to die.

Bellow the camp was a stone quarry that was more than 1 kilometer long and 110 m deep,thousand of prisoners were sent here to work.

There were between 1,000 and 4 000 men working int he quarry every day.

Some of them carved  stone, but those who carried it were exposed to even greater risk,it was very dangerus work,and they were often times killed,the work itself was  created as torture.

They died of exhaustion and they died from the constant demands from the capos who always wanted more from the, working them to death.

Evert stone extracted from the  quarrt was carried on  prisoner’ back up this  staircase. these 186  steps became a symbol of torture,the granit was carried up the steps on people’s back,stone’s wighing 30,40 or even 50 kilos  every days  for years.

They had to move quickly beneath blows coming from all sides and in fear of falling and when they fell, they took everyone down behind them,creating a chain of injuries it was  horrendous.

The Waffan SS were trained to kill people and their job in the quarry was not to produce stone.it was  to produce murder.

  It was to kill people, it was to humiliate the inmates  in the quarry.

They combine the violence of the SS project of exterminating people with the project of creating  building materials  and exterminating people.

This is a bad business model,but it is the business model of the SS.

The SS regularly made a spectacle  out of a prisoner’s death.this,the highest cliff in the quarry, was darkly nicknamed ” the parashutist’s wall”

Men were  forced to job off ,they were told tat  if they didn’t do it of their own accord they’d be beaten to death, they were  then left to contemplate their fate ,and given the choice , some of the them chose to  jump.

In addition to being used in third right construction throughout Europe, the quarry stone was also  used to build and enlarge the Mauthausen camp itself.

These photos, rare relics in concentration  camp history, are some of the only exisiting images documenting the work.

They were taken on behalf of the camp’s  idententification departement and were saved from destructionby a handfull of detainees who worked there.

In spain  at the history  Museum  of Catalonia, 500 negative from  Mauthausen  are carefully  perserved in cold  storage.

They inclue photos of the liberation,but also 320 photos taken by the SS during the War.

This images immortalized key moments inthe camp’s history.

Like the visit of the head the SS Heinrich Himmler.

there are also  portrait of new inmates meant for their administrative files.

and photos of prisoners at work.

Of  course,the photographs  also had a propagandadistic function, the progagandadistic idea of the SS was to  show the concentration  camps of  orderly ,well funcrioning  places.

with prisoners  who were  put to do hard labor but not maltreated, they were rather being educated to be good German citizens.

They only show part of what the concentration camp  really was, they’re not  necessarily  fake,but there’s so much more to the truth story that was never photographed.

Many  of the photos depict SS soldiers on duty or detainees that seem to work without  surveillance or reprisales,as if the daily violence didn’t exist.

for example ,there are no photos of the dogs that were kept there to attack the prisoners.

But other photos reveal the true horror of  Mauthausen,photos of agandoned bodies , SS records caption them as attempted escape.

In very  few of these ,cases,it was really an attempt to escape by the prisoners, SS and also prisoner functionaries itentionally tried to force prisoners  towards the camp fence.

The body of a Russian prisoner on Mauthausen’s electrified fence.

For example, by taken their cap and throwing  it closeto  fence, which then in turn would be interpreted by a guard in the watchtower as an attempt to flee.

There was no exit, so to say…

In 1943, as the balance  of between the Third Reich and the  Allied forces began to shift.

Berlin gave orders to destroy all the negatives from the camps to erase any evidence of crimes that were committed there.

At the  time , francisco Boix a  spanish political prisoner,worked with a few other  detainees in the camp’s photo lab,risking their lives, they decided to  save certain negatives from being destroyed.

it was sensitive material,an undeniable proof of what had  actually taken place in the concentration camp.

They carefully wrapped the negatives and smuggled them out of the lab , passing them from hand to hand.

while on work assignment outside the camp,they took  advantage to hide them until the liberation.

with the help of Anna Pointner, an opponent of the Nazi regime.

Anna pointner’s house had a wall out back and they managed to hide  packets of  negatives in betweenthe stones of that wall.

Anna pointner, Fransisco Boix,  and his co-detaines  saved more than 2,000 photos.

We have a lot of  archives from Mauthausen that we don’t have from the other camps.

But despite the large quantity of photos saved from destruction,certain sectors of the  Mauthausen camp  don’t appear in any of them.

Buildings that are still there today, but which the SS attempted to erase from history.places  specially designed for torture and murder.

In January 1941, Mauthausen was determined to  be a camp of  no return. if you were sent to Mauthausen ,you were not going to get out .

The camp’s building that was dedicated to extermination was known as the bunker.

The upper secton contained cramped cells meant to hold a specific type of prisoner.

Important people were held in those  cells, these were  special detainees who had information that the Nazis wanted ,they were condemned to death, but while they waited,they were tortured and made to talk, that was the prison.

The basement contained the rooms used to exterminate the prisoners, they were killed individually with a bullet  or in groups in a gas chamber.

The vcitms all followed a predetermined path,first, they were taken to a room to be examined, then they were led through other rooms  until they came to a door that only opened from the outside which led to a shower.

we’re in the gas chamber,they  would cram at least 50 people  into this 13 square m room, once the door closed ,a toxic gas known as cyclon B was sent into the  chamber from a room next door.

from the moment when the gas  was introduced into the gas chamber by a ventilation system,it took between 5 to 15 minutes  until all the prisoners were dead.

A peephole in the door allowed the SS  to watch the prisoners die.

A trap door  allowed them to went the gas once the  deed was done.

The trap was opened with a lever that passed through a conduit to the other side where it could be opened with a handle,when the trap was opened,ventilation carried the toxic gas outside and an hour or two later,they could open the door on this side again.

Only 10%  of people who passed through that  door came out  alive,those 10% worked  here in the gas chambers

and the crematory ovens.

An estimated 8,000 people were gassed in this room.

inside the bunker were also a cold room for storing the bodies.

A dissection room for recuperting gold teeth or for carrying out  experiments.

and crematory ovens

On  average ,between 150 and 200 cadavers were incinerated every day.

The ashes of the dead meant nothing,they were used as fertilizer, as dirt to level roads or burial  grounds or dumped in public landfill.that’s it.

That’s  the great crime of the Nazis.

They stuffed their ovens with people treating  them like they were nothing.

That’s just unforgivable.

Not to far from the Mauthausen fortess , a sub camp was built to house  detainees who were  extracting the stone. just  5 km to the west ,it was also next to a granite quarry and it was  Gusen.

Before the sub camp was built,Mauthausen detaininees walke to the quarry under SS surveillance,marching prisoners to and  from Mauthausen took up time and it also  killed them,before they could do the work.  that killed  them.

They decidedto build a camp at Gusen in order to improve productivity at the Gusen quarry.

In 1940,a new camp was built to the north of Gusen,due to the influx of prisoners,it grew even faster than Mauthausen had until it became the largest concentration camp in Austria.

By the end of 1941 , there were actually 1,000 more prisoners at Gusen then it there were at Mauthausen.

After the war ,the Gusen camp was raised .

A few pld buildings that were  part of the camp where transformed into housing.

Like The “Jourhaus” ,the old main entrance to the camp.

Almost nothing remains of the roll call square,Nothing remains of the many crimes that  happened here.

There were two gallows for hanging,some prisoners.

and still remaining is the basement of the kitchen.the granite quarry is no longer used.

but the industrial area around it .

still contains a lasting vestage dating from World War II.

The Nazis called it,the biggest one of all Europe, there was an elevator on the back side and  small basins filled the interior of this mill and they were cut into pebbles.

and sometimes humans were cut into pieces inside.

They were not sent here for work only,time of work and then time of  death …

That’s the idea,dying by working.

If  someone  survived Gusen ,this was a very special chance.

We naively thought those thugs at  Mauthausen  were the  best  at perpetrating these  horrific acts, but we quickly learned that those at Gusen were even better.

The Gusen camp was run by SS commander Karl Chmielewski  ,who is known for being  merciless,.

Walter Chmielewski was 11 years old when his parents moved to Gusen.

Back then ,his father had just  been named the camp director:

“that’s my father,at home ,he was someone else,but when he put on his uniform, he became a monster, everyone in the camp was afraid of him,he was known as the devil of Guzen amongst the prisoners.”

They didn’t speak of his father’s work at home,but walter passed through the SS part of the camp on occasion to go to the doctor or to get a haircut.

Sometimes on his way home,he’d walk along the barbed wire that sealed in the prisoners,that’s when he saw things , when it was below zero, he saw half naked prisoners being sprayed with cold wather.

people died  right there,or they died a few days later,when they got pneumonia.

One day he asked his father”why do you do that?why do you treat people like that”

And he said” they’re all parasites and criminals who want to destroy the Third Reich, don’t worry ,they get what they deserve”.

At the end of 1941 the Gusen camp counted almost 8,500 prisoners and Mauthausen around 7,500.most of whom worked in the granite quaries.

But as activity at the camps ramped  up on the Warfront forced Berlin to modify its stragedy.

In 1942 combat was raging between the Third Reich and the  Russian forces,Hitler demanded that every available resource be mobilized to help arm the Third Reich forces

Deporties from all over Europe were sent to the Austrian camps at  Mauthausen aand Gusen to participate in the  War effort .

New satellite camps were formed to train them in what became known as the Mauthausen  system.

A huge network of more than 40 sub  camps of  Mauthausen was created   all over the eastern part of the Austrian territories,mostly at places where there already was important armorament or War industry.

Between 1942 and 1943,the Allied air force  carried out  large-scale bombings all over   Nazi territory, in just a few months,over 200,000 bombs were dropped on Third Reich cities and factories.

To protect his arms industry,Hitler had to move all of his factories and hide them underground.

Immense subterranean infrastructure was built in record time by Third Reich engineers,using the camp prisoners as workers at the cost of many lives.

One of these colossal work sites was  located near Camp Gusen,close to the small village of Sankt Georgen.

It was here in 1943 that Guzen II became to be, over many  months, thousands of War prisoners dug tunnels 40 meters below the earth to create a gigantic underground complex known as the “BERGKRISTALL” .

The Bergkristall tunnels were really steate – of -the -art tunnels were dug by slav labor and then reinforced  with reinforced  concrete.

This was a pretty new project,it’sestimated that perhaps up to 9,000 prisoners died in constructing the tunnels.

Between March 1944 and May 1945, Guzen II prisoners dug 8  and a half kilometers of tunnels, while most were destroyed after the war,2 km  of them remain  today.

This immense underground complex was built to meet the needs of German Air Force, this was where the  Messerschmitt company assembled the ME 262 ,the world first  operational jet powered fighter aircraft.

The ME 262  might have chaged the course of the War or certainly delayed the Allied victory had it been  produced earlier in the War.

It presented  a real threat to both bombers and Allied fighter planes.

All of the industrial components have now disappeared, having been carried off by the americans and the soviets after the War.

In total , over 950 ME 262 fuselages were produced here.

Approximately 80 % of every  fuselage ever produced for this type of aircraft was produced by inmates of Guzen II here in this huge underground  facility,so it was  of extreme importance.

Is certainly one of the largest if not the largest underground secret weapons factory of the Third Reich.

Allthough the ME 263s were built near  their Guzen II ,they were not the only miracle weapon Hitler built using prisoners from Austria’s concentration camps.

Another  weapon in the Mauthausen system  captured everyone’s attention.

The V2 missile.

The V2 ,was  actually the first  long range missile ever produced.

It was propulsed by liquid fuel,there were some 5,000 missiles alltogether produced and used in the war.these 13 ton missiles could carry 800 kg of explosives over  a distance of  300  Km.

It was a revolution missile which was designed  to be able to strike London from the Netherlands.

As part of the V2 development plan,multiple subcamps of  Mauthausen were built in Austria, Wiener Neustadt,Ebensee, Redl- Zipf.

In addition to being close to the railway tracks, the small  village of  Zipf  had another advantage, a brewery at a foot of the hill .

Equipped with underground chambers for producing and storing beer.

In 1943,the brewery was requisitioned by the SS to serve as a V2  missile test site, and a new  sub camp was built in a neighboring field.

Redl- Zipf deporties worked underground for 7 months to enlarge the chambers and built a 40 m vertical shaft…

which  connected the chambers to a hidden bunker in the  forest,this is where a key piece of the German army’s new weapon was tested.

the V2 missile propulsion unit.

Th propulsion units came by train directly into the tunnels to be unloaded in total secrecy,they were then taken by elevator up to the bunker.

Once the propulsion unit got to the top of the levator,it was brought to the bunker via  set of rails  and suspended  about  3 m high.

The bunker is still pretty well  preserved,you can notably see the  rails  they  used to  transport the unit from the elevator to the bunker.

And you can see the metal part that  supported the propulsion unit.

The propulsion  unite was then tilted so that the flame released during a test  would shoot into this large trench.

The first test at Redl- Zipf took place on May  1st, 1944.

Nazi scientists observed the experiment  from behind a window in an observation bunker.it was a success,for the  SS ,it was caise for a celebration.

Thanks to the infrastructure built by the prisoners,over 500 V2 propulsion units were tested in Redl- Zipf before being sent to the front lines.

There is a certain irony to it that prisoners had to work on weapons that would be used against  themselves and against their nations.

The SS records indicate there were over 300 inmate deaths in ZIPF during  the factory’s destruction.

Numerous other prisoners, exhausted  by the inhuman  conditions and  rendered incapable of work,were sent back to the main camp in Mauthausen to die.

some were then even taken to another location, a dedicated killing  facilitylocated 35  km west of  Mauthausen near a small town of  Alkoven, it was called the Hartheim euthanasia centre.

It was built inside a castle that was requisitioned by the Nazis before the War

And outfitted fot their action T4 project,which was designed to exterminate handicapped people.

But in 1941 , the Third Reich decided to end  the project,the Hartheim castle was then dedicated to another even deadlier plan ,action  14F13.

The staff  knew how to kill people in a very short  time in a very  efficient way,that’s why the Nazis used this knwohow in mass murder.

Hartheim became the extermination center for four concentration camps:

Dachau,Ravensbrück ,Guzen, Mauthausen .

Before the end of the  War,the SS tried to get rid of all evidence of crimes in Hartheim .

They destroyed the gas chamber,they destroyed the cremeatory oven,and blocked the chimney’s conduit.

 But nowdays, the archive depository  is packed with vestigages.

Recent ,digs carried out next yto the castle  revealed human remains and over 8,OOO objects,  including leftover pieces  of  infrastructure,dishes.

and personal Items.

Most of them are belongings of the victims

But from the  prisoners of the concentration camps, a few had  identification tags.

Most of the texts are from prisoners from Guzen concentration camps,but also some of Mauthausen concentration camp.

Crosss referencing Nazi registers with  the plate registration numbers  fond at the castle made it possible to identify some of  the victims who were executed in Hartheim.

For example ,we have the prisoner tag with the number  8570, Heinrich lesinski.

he was a prisoner  from Poland at Guzen concentration camp.

Not a single hard -time survivor  could  provide  testimony after the War.

some 30 , 000 people were sent there and every single one of them was killed.

All the prisoners who were brought to  Hartheim Castle were killed in about 3 hours, no one of them stayed longer or stayed overnight  here in the castle.

At the end of 1944, Nazi Germany was in disarray and the  part-time euthanasia center was closed,but the camp at  Mauthausen was still active and the final months of the War  there were deadly.

some prisoner were specifically persecuted by the Nazis, and knew there was no way they could escape  death,many of them were Slavic  and notably Soviets.

In february 1945,almost 6OO soviet officers were locked in block 20 in Mauthausen, for weeks,the  SS gave them next to nothing to eat.

Knowing they were going to die,they decided to make a desperate  attempt.

One knight  in early February,they threw wet blankets over the  electrified  barbed wire and managed to climb over the enclosure wall by killing all capos and SS in their path.

Over 400 of them managed to escape.

A mass escape was pretty rare from a concentration camp, it really showed that these soviet  prisoners had no hope.

the Mauthausen camp commander mobilized all the local inhabitants to help the SS  hunt the fugitives and threatened to punish anyone who helped them.

The locals joined the SS in a bloody  manhunt, cynically nicknamed:

‘Mühlviertel Hare Hunt’

The day after the escape,  a dozen   kilometers  from the camp  in the village of  Schwertberg, 14  year old Anna Hackl was getting ready for church with her mother when two strangers arrived in their house.

They were scantily glad,  they wore  only tops and striped pants,they weren’t even wearing shoes  and there was a lot of  snow outside.it was really cold.

The two strangers only asked  for some food but seeing how they were dressed, Annas mother ,maria,immediately understood that the two men who  were named nikolai and  mikail  where escapes from the Mauthausen Camp.despite the danger,she agreed to let them into her home.

Much later they told her why they had thought the family inside that home might have been willing to come to their aid.

after fleeing Mauthausen through the forest  and the fields, they looked around  Anna’s house  and they saw the cross near the barn,and that made them think they could knock on their door and that they were good people.

Despite multiple raids by the SS , Nikolai and mikail  remained hidden in the barn for 3 months until the liberation, they  stayed  one more month and then they left with heavy hearts.because Anna and maria  had practicaly become family to them .

Mutual aid  and fear had created very strong tis between them.

Of the 400 soviet prisoners who  managed to escape Mauthausen block 20 only  11 surived the manhunt…

The day after the soviet forcescaptured the Reichtag as Hitler had committed suicide and the end of the War was eminent,the SS abandoned Mauthausen ,leaving it to Austrian authorities.

Two days later ,the 11th US armored divisions liberated their camps.

When they arrived at Mauthausen and Guzen, they  were somewhat prepared for what they would see.

But nobody could be prepared.

they were confronted ,yeah, with a very difficult situation, obviously ,many  starving, prisoners close to death.

and also at the same time  piles of dead prisoners.

it only took two days  for all  the  Mauthausen and Guzen sub camps to be liberated.

Signaling the end of the Nazi hell in Austria.

In less than 7 years ,the Mauthausen, concentration  camp  system had  exploited almost , 200,000 prisoners.

Of the 200, 000 ,we think, 120 ,000 died, Mauthausen had a reputation  as being one of the worst camps in the system.

It is important that th world learns that the high technology we are using  today life was developed  with blood of the deported people from many many  European nations.

The  Mauthausen fortress is one of the only remaining testaments to this dark part  of Austria’s history the other camps were distroyed  during the liberation  and even seem to have  been forgotten.

People go to Mauthausen and just a few ones have the idea there was  a second camp of Guzen because Guzen was dropped even the idea, the remnants of Guzen waa dropped  in Austria.

Today , multiple organizations and historians continue to fight preserve Mauthausen  remains,one of the worst  Nazi camp  systems that ever existed , to honor those who lost their lives.