ABSTRACT
The Mauthausen concentration camp was largely intact at the time of its liberation by the US forces. The Commission is fully aware of the cost which such a reconfiguration of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial entails. The exploitation of the inmates as forced laborers in the German armaments industry led to the establishment of numerous subsidiary camps around the central Mauthausen site from 1942 onwards. In July 1964 the Federal Government sanctioned the founding of a museum at the Mauthausen Public Memorial in collaboration with the Mauthausen camp association, with the intention of installing a permanent historical exhibit. The broader connection between the establishment of the Mauthausen concentration camp and the extension of the camp system during the territorial expansion of National Socialist Germany should be more strongly emphasized. The inmates, who were overwhelmingly males of widely varying social origins, were deported to Mauthausen from all the lands which lay under Nazi domination.
