Mauthausen — concentration camp and murder of the support network

A camp beside a granite quarry

1938–1945

The Nazi camp combined economic exploitation with the abuse and killing of prisoners.

The SS chose Mauthausen and nearby Gusen partly for their granite quarries. Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke exploited prisoners’ forced labour to extract and transport stone. The Mauthausen Memorial stresses that the quarries also served to exhaust and deliberately kill prisoners. The camp’s history therefore extends well beyond the October execution of Czech resistance supporters.

The group arrives from Terezín

22–23 October 1942

The prison label ‘parachutists’ mostly described people who had helped them.

The transport left Terezín’s Small Fortress on 22 October and reached Mauthausen during the night. It carried the parachutists’ helpers and relatives; ‘parachutists’ was a prison shorthand, not an accurate description of everyone transported. Recorded separations of the group after arrival preceded the mass murder.

Mass murder

24 October 1942

Sources differ on the number of victims and some circumstances of their deaths.

The Ministry of Defence gives 262 victims and describes killings by shots to the back of the neck during a sham medical examination. The Terezín Memorial describes the principal killing of 252 people sentenced in absentia, distinguishing men who were shot from women killed in a gas chamber. Without a shared list of names, these definitions and accounts cannot be treated as interchangeable.

Those murdered included members of households that had provided shelter, transport and supplies: the Moravec, Novák, Fafek, Svatoš and Khodl families, among others. The killings also struck families and collaborators of other parachute teams, not only people connected with ANTHROPOID.

Further killings and differing totals

26 January 1943 and later

The October executions did not end the persecution of the network.

Atentát gives 257 victims for 24 October, another 31 killed on 26 January 1943, and 288 across those two groups. Jindra’s study gives 294 Czechoslovak patriots in three waves, the last on 3 February 1944. These totals, like the October figures of 262 and 252, concern differently defined groups. A single overall total cannot be chosen without reconciling the named victims.