Mauthausen - The Rock Quarry Human beings labor in order to improve their lot, to enhance the quality of existence. The products of this labor usually help make things easier by creating a safer and more...

Photo credit: Mauthausen Museum Archives, USHMM Photo Archives Black and white photo taken just after liberation of the camp on May 8, 1945 by American Gen. George Patton’s troops. Color photo taken June 1996. Today the quarry where...

Often Prisoners were made to run up and down the stairs till most were dead. Sometimes the remaining ones would be made to jump off the top of the quarry. SS humor coined it "the...

On receiving a large block of marble from the quarry at Cararra, Michelangelo remarked that the sculpture he planned already existed within. All he had to do was take away what wasn’t necessary. Here, near...

Prisoners were forced to climb the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben with large blocks of granite on their backs. Often the blocks would fall, crushing limbs and bodies of those following, sometimes killing. The...

New arrivals at the “Klagemauer” (wailing wall) after a week long trip in open railway cars. Date: 1943-1944 Photo credit: National Archives, USHMM Photo Archives Newly arrived prisoners were subjected to an initiation ritual: standing at attention...

This window looks into the the hall at one end of the bunker, the isolation unit. If the Mauthausen camp was the end of the line, this cell block was the end of the line...

It is hard to imagine anything worse than being thrown into a concentration camp. But even in Mauthausen there was a deeper hell, an isolation unit. Here, in what was already the end of the line,...