Mauthausen Off The Beaten Path

If you visit Mauthausen during the winter and are staying in town for a few days and like to snowboard or ski why not take a small excursion over to the local mountain of Hinterstoder. Drive into Lintz only 20 miles away or take the train to Lintz from Mauthausen. If you have a car park it at the train station in Lintz and take a train up to Hinterstoder mountain.

GREIN an der Donau - is a small town about 20 km downsteam from Mauthausen. There are 2 main attractions there :
1)Austria's oldest theatre, it was founded in Baroque times and is still used today on a regular basis, although the town is very small (maybe 4000 inhabitants)
2)Schloss Geinburg with a great architecture inside, a nice innercourt with arcades, a large reception-hall, a marble-room and a grotto, decorated with millions of shells.

Enns is a small town about 5 km south of Mauthausen and it has plenty of beautiful baroque buildings in the centre.
Enns got the "Stadtrecht" already about 960 A.D. and is the oldest town in Austria!
"Stadtrecht" means certain priviledges (mainly regarding taxes), only a town would have.
Already the old Romans had settled in Enns and in the area many remains of them were found - see the Roman museum next to the tower on my picture !.Climb up the belltower - but be careful : The clock will work every 15 minutes and at certain places inside the tower it will be simply much too loud - but the view from the top of the tower is worth the many steps you have to climb

Enns is situated about 20 Km south-east of LINZ and 5 km south of Mauthausen. In Mauthausen you will find one of the very few bridges over the Danube .

The memorial made by the former DDR (East Germany) is the biggest of all memorials and it shows a giant barbed-wire and a wise sentance by Bertold Brecht :

Oh Deutschland bleiche Mutter,
wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet, dass du unter den Volkern sitzest
ein Gespött oder eine Furcht!"
This memorial was errected in 1966, just shortly after they had started themselves to build the Berlin-Wall and shoot people, who simply wanted to leave their territory...

This is the most touching memorial as it is ment for the babies and children, who were killed immediately when they arrived with their parents in the KZ Mauthausen. The monument wants to express the lost childhood-years and the games they were never able to play...

There are various monuments between the Todestiege and the Museum and the one for the jewish victims - on the left of my picture - is maybe the most impressive. When you enlarge my picture, you will see 2 persons standing next to it and may considder the size of that giant monument.
The monument on the right was built by the state of Bulgaria.

Mauthausen was not only ment for jews, but also for other confessions like e.g. Zeugen Jehovas / Jehovas Witnesses, gypsies, communists, politcal prisoners, politicians etc. A total of 122765 people were killed in this KZ, partly by the hard work, partly in gas-chambers and lots of them died, when climbing up and down the Todesstiege (steps of death).
Most of the victims were burned in these ovens - you may still see some of them in the cellar of the KZ-memorial.

The quarry close by the KZ was the place, where the prisoners had to work during the day and many of them lost their lives there. On their shoulders they had to carry up heavy stones , climbing up the so-called "Todesstiege" (stairs of death), where the SS-officers were standing, hitting them and pushing them downhill again .
On my picture you may see the quarry and the place, where the steps had been. Today there are 200 steps, more or less even and still hard to walk for me on a hot summerday in june 2005. At the times of the Nazi-regime these steps were un-even, had different sizes and most of them were almost impossible to climb up - and the prisoners had to carry the heavy stones, although the quarry had also an easy entrance for the trucks to take away the stones...
It is a pity, that the dimensions of that quarry and the Todesstiege in the back cannot be perfectely shown on a picture...