After the end of the Great War in 1918 and the collapse of the
multi-ethnic state of Austro-Hungary, the new Republic of German Austria
established “Upper Austria” as the region's official name. A year after
Austria's annexation to the German Reich on March 13, 1938, the
Reichsgau Oberdonau was formed on May 1, 1939 in the Upper Austria area,
which also included the German-settled South Bohemian areas in
accordance with the Munich Agreement, as well as Ausseer, which was
separated from Styria. After the Second World War, these areas were
reorganised in 1945 with Upper Austria south of the Danube, including the
Ausseer, becoming part of the American occupation zone until 1955,
and north of the Danube occupied by the Soviets until 1955.
Even before the Anschluß, cities in Austria had attempted to capitalise on their ties to the Führer. Hitler’s plans for Linz are well known. He wanted to transform the city on the Danube into a cultural metropolis, with theatres, museums, art galleries and an enormous stadium. Tourism officials there saw a way to cash in on Hitler’s affection for his boyhood town. Linz styled itself first as the ‘City of the Führer’s Youth’, then as the ‘Hometown of the Führer’, and finally as the ‘City of the Foundation of the Greater German Reich’ (Gründungsstadt des Großdeutschen Reichs). When Hitler announced in March 1938 that he was personally adopting the city, it quickly became the ‘Adopted City of the Führer’. While the entire region of Upper Austria called itself the ‘Führer’s Home District’, individual Austrian towns highlighted their early support for Nazism. Graz was especially gratified when Hitler bestowed the honorary title ‘City of the People’s Uprising (Volkserhebung)’. It used this designation often in its own publicity. A Shell roadmap also referred to Graz as the ‘City of the People’s Uprising’, noting that the town had received this appellation from Hitler in recognition for its ‘self-sacrificing, tenacious perseverance in the fight for Greater Germany’.
Semmens (68)
Braunau am Inn

Hitler's
birthplace during the Nazi era and today. It was here in a room on the
first floor of that Hitler’s mother Klara gave birth to him on April 20,
1889.


The room in which Hitler was born, shown on the right in a 1938 postcard.
Before the anschluß...


...and the year after, still displaying the name Gasthof des Josef Pomme under the swastika


According to UPI,
the initials "MB" on the wrought iron front door are for Hitler's
private secretary Martin Bormann and provide the only evidence, other
than the reputation, of the building's history. Bormann bought the
house in 1938 from the Pommer family for an astonishing 150,000
Reichmarks (four times its actual value) for the purpose, according to Der Spiegel,
"in the hopes of eventually turning it into a monument on par with the
birthplaces of Stalin and Mussolini." The building was renovated and
transformed into a cultural centre with a Volksbücherei- the original
sign remains on the façade. The house was opened to the public on April
18 1943 as a library on the ground floor and as a gallery on the 1st and
2nd floors. From spring 1943 to late summer 1944 exhibitions took place
in the "Braunau Gallery in the Führer-Geburtshaus", where pictures and
sculptures were shown by artists from Braunau and the surrounding
area.
The stone memorial in front was erected a fortnight before the centenary
of Hitler's birth from a quarry on the grounds of the former Mauthausen
Concentration Camp, near Linz. The inscription reads: "For Peace,
Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Remind
[us]".


The rear of the house as it appears in Hoffmann's Wie die Ostmark ihre Befreiung erlebte - Adolf Hitler und sein Weg zu Grossdeutschland (1940) and today. On the right is the view from the balcony in 1938.
His
birthplace was returned in the early 1950s to the
former owners, who had bought the house during the annexation of
Austria, as part of a reserve comparison from the Republic of Austria.
In 2012, a Russian Duma deputy wanted to buy the house and demolish it.
After unsuccessful negotiations, the Ministry of Interior in 2016
considered expropriation of the owner to gain control over the use of
the building. In an interview in October 2016, the Austrian
Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Sobotka, declared that the house was
to be demolished and a new building built. Sobotka referred to an
alleged recommendation by a historian commission. Hannes Waidbacher, the
mayor of Braunau who was sitting in the Historian Commission,
contradicted the fact that in the Commission's recommendation "nothing
was a demolition", but a "profound architectural transformation" was
recommended which would be the "recognition and symbolic power of the
building permanently." Cornelia Sulzbacher, head of the
Upper Austrian Provincial Archives, also surprised herself with the
statements of the minister and also said that there was only the
recommendation to change the appearance so that the house could no
longer be used as a symbol.
Adolf-Hitler-Straße in 1938 and today.


The
Stadttorturm, Salzburger Tor, adorned with the swastika before the war.
The mural on the building beside the gate commemorates the execution of
Johann Philipp Palm by the French on August 26, 1806 in Braunau. The
image on the right shows his arrest
beside a photo of an alley today.

this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German history. At the time of our Fatherland's deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under Herr Severing's regime.



[s]hortly before 4p.m. that afternoon, Hitler crossed the Austrian border over the narrow bridge at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn. The church‑bells were ringing. Tens of thousands of people (most of them from outside Braunau), in ecstasies of joy, lined the streets of the small town. But Hitler did not linger. Propaganda value, not sentiment, had dictated his visit. Braunau played its brief symbolic part. That sufficed. The cavalcade passed on its triumphal progression to Linz.


Hitler's
visit inspired the stamp commemorating his 50th birthday which was
issued on April 13, 1939. It can be seen that the stamp and photograph
were taken at slightly different times along the route.
Linz

With the invasion of the German troops on March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler embarked on a “triumphal journey” from his hometown of Braunau to Vienna and spoke for the first time in Linz as Chancellor on Austrian soil. Only here, in view of the cheers in the population and the reluctant reactions from abroad, did he decide to immediately and completely complete Austria's annexation to the German Reich. Because of his emotional connection to Linz, Hitler took over the "sponsorship" of Linz that day (which also became one of the five führer cities ) and promised investments by the Reich. On March 13, 1938, Hitler signed the Act of union in the town's Hotel Weinzinger. Therefore, after the anschluß Hitler intended to develop his ‘home town’, Führerstadt Linz, into the cultural metropolis of the Danube region, which was to receive a university and become a centre at which the ‘three cosmologies of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Hörbiger (glacial theory)’ would be taught according to Fest (27). The expansion plans included a boulevard with magnificent buildings such as Opera, theatres and galleries, but especially the "Führer Museum", which was to house the world's largest art and art gallery. Linz was to surpass Vienna’s splendour, being expanded in size three or four times over. Trevor- Roper relates (421–3) his extravagant ideas for locating houses along the banks of the Danube and for a major new observatory built in classical style. There would be a new hotel (built in the Renaissance style) for exclusive use of the ‘Strength through Joy’ movement, new municipal buildings, a Party House, a new army headquarters, an Olympic Stadium and (fulfilling the teenage vision) a massive suspension bridge. At the heart of the city would be a central avenue running between two great squares. Along it would be new theatres, concert halls, restaurants, museums and libraries, not to mention a railway station, post office and an air-raid shelter. Linz was even to house Hitler’s tomb within a crypt beneath a tower (Taylor, 50–1). In addition, Linz would become an industrial and administrative centre with oversized Nazi Party administrative buildings. This would have meant extensive sweeping of the historical building stock on both Linz and Urfahrer. Apart from a few exceptions such as the Nibelungen Bridge , the bridgehead buildings and today's Heinrich Gleissner House , the plans pushed by Albert Speer were not put into practice. "Hermann Göring" Linz was built in 1938 as was the nitrogen works Ostmark. The residents of the village of St. Peter-Zizlau were relocated and the buildings were demolished for the construction of the factory site and for the construction of the port provided there.The Hitlers had moved house several times within Braunau, and had subsequently been uprooted on a number of occasions. In November 1898, a final move for Alois took place when he bought a house with a small plot of attached land in Leonding, a village on the outskirts of Linz. From now on, the family settled in the Linz area, and Adolf – down to his days in the bunker in 1945 – looked upon Linz as his home town. Linz reminded him of the happy, carefree days of his youth. It held associations with his mother. And it was the most ‘German’ town of the Austrian Empire. It evidently symbolized for him the provincial small-town Germanic idyll – the image he would throughout his life set against the city he would soon come to know, and detest: Vienna.Kershaw (7)
The former office of the Hitler family doctor, Dr. Eduard Bloch. In fact, the first member of the Hitler family Bloch was to see was Adolf Hitler. In 1904, Hitler had become seriously ill and was bedridden due to a serious lung ailment which enabled him to abandon his school career and return home. However, Walter C. Langer writes in The Mind of Adolf Hitler (127-128) that after checking Hitler's files, Bloch later maintained that he had treated the youth for only minor ailments, cold or tonsilitis and that Hitler had been neither robust nor sickly. He also stated that Hitler did not have any illness whatsoever, let alone a lung disease. However, in 1907, Hitler's mother Klara was diagnosed with breast cancer dying on December 21 after intense suffering involving daily medication with iodoform, a foul-smelling and painful corrosive treatment typically used at the time and administered by Bloch. Because of the poor economic situation of the Hitler family, Bloch charged reduced prices, sometimes taking no fee at all. Hitler, then 18 years old, granted him his "everlasting gratitude" ("Ich werde Ihnen ewig dankbar sein") for this which was shown in 1908 when Hitler wrote Bloch a postcard assuring him of his gratitude and reverence which he expressed with handmade gifts, as for example, a large wall painting. Even in 1937, Hitler inquired about Bloch's well-being and called him an "Edeljude" ("noble Jew").
It was also shown after the anschluß when the 66-year-old Bloch wrote a letter to Hitler asking for help after his medical practice was closed on October 1, 1938 and was as a consequence put under special protection by the Gestapo. He was the only Jew in Linz with this status. Without any interference from the authorities, he and his wife were able to sell their family home at market value, highly unusual with the distress sales of emigrating Jews at the time. Moreover, they were allowed to take the equivalent of 16 Reichsmarks out of the country; the usual amount allowed to Jews was a mere 10 Reichsmark. In 1940, Bloch emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City but was no longer able to practice medicine because his medical degree from Austria-Hungary was not recognised, eventually dying of stomach cancer in 1945 at age 73, barely a month after Hitler's death.
In the execreble TV mini-series Hitler: Rise of Evil Bloch is depicted as noticeably Hasidic even though he, like most Austrian Jews of the turn of the century, were among the most assimilated in Europe.


Hitler’s triumphant ride from Braunau to Linz took nearly four hours, since the Mercedes could barely work its way through the jubilant crowds. Fifteen kilometres out of Linz, Seyss-Inquart, Glaise- Horstenau and Himmler, together with other National Socialists, awaited the Führer. Here is is being driven through the hauptplatz where an enormous crowd had gathered at the market place to await Hitler’s arrival. Tremendous enthusiasm was evident in Ward Price’s impressive live radio report. Speaking in German on the Austrian broadcast services, the British journalist congratulated the Austrian people on the advent of this day.


Immediately
after the main square became renamed Adolf-Hitler-platz as shown in
these period postcards.

Linz was also a centre of persecution: more than 100,000 people from all over Europe died in the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps. There were a total of three satellite camps of the Mauthausen concentration camp and 77 camps for forced labourers in the city of Linz. The 600 Jews had to leave Linz - 150 of them were murdered by the National Socialists. Hundreds of victims of Nazi euthanasia were found in the Niedernhart medical and nursing home in Linz, which is now the State Psychiatric Clinic Wagner-Jauregg , and from there were taken to the Hartheim NS euthanasia center relocated to Linz. Ultimately, those who had served the regime out of enthusiasm or out of loyalty had to suffer from the consequences of National Socialist politics. In Linz, the construction of air-raid shelters for the population was not forced until the end of 1943 for propaganda reasons. In November 1944, entire neighborhoods were still uncovered in air raids. Over 1,600 people died in the 22 bombing raids on Linz between July 1944 and April 1945, thousands of Linzers lost their lives as members of the German Wehrmacht .In Linz, tanks were built in the Goering factories and submarines were built in the area of the port.
On May 4 and 5, 1945, the city was under American artillery fire and Gauleiter August Eigruber settled in southern Upper Austria. The original plan to defend the city in house-to-house combat was abandoned. On May 5, at 11.07, the first American tanks arrived in the main square.
Standing
in front of the town hall in Linz. According to Kubizek (86), "[t]he
Town Hall, which stood on the square, he thought unworthy of a rising
town like Linz. He visualised a new, stately town hall, to be built in a
modern style, far removed from the neo-Gothic style which at that time
was the vogue for town halls, in Vienna and Munich, for instance."
As can be seen in the original photo, when Hitler's car finally reached Linz, it was dark. He stepped out upon the small balcony of the City Hall in Linz and listened to the welcoming address by Seyss-Inquart. Thereupon, Hitler gave a speech that was frequently disrupted by thunders of applause from the audience below:
As can be seen in the original photo, when Hitler's car finally reached Linz, it was dark. He stepped out upon the small balcony of the City Hall in Linz and listened to the welcoming address by Seyss-Inquart. Thereupon, Hitler gave a speech that was frequently disrupted by thunders of applause from the audience below:
Germans! German Volksgenossen! Herr Bundeskanzler!I thank you for your words of greeting. But above all I thank you who have assembled here and testified to the fact that it is not the will and desire of only a few to establish this great Reich of the German race, but the wish and the will of the German Volk!May there be those among you this evening, our reputed international truth-seekers, who will not only perceive for themselves this reality, but admit it afterwards, too. When I first set forth from this city, I carried within me exactly the same devout pledge that fills me today. Try to fathom my inner emotion at having finally made this faithful pledge come true after so many long years.The fact that Providence once summoned me forth from this city to the leadership of the Reich, must have meant it was giving me a special assignment, and it can only have been the assignment of restoring my cherished home to the German Reich! I have believed in this assignment, I have lived and fought for it, and I believe I have now fulfilled it! May you all witness and vouch for this!I do not know when you yourselves will be summoned. I hope the time is not far off. Then you shall be asked to stand up to your own pledge, and it is my belief that I will then be able to point to my homeland with pride before the entire German Volk.The outcome must then prove to the world that any further attempt to tear this Volk asunder will be in vain. Just as you will then be under an obligation to make your contribution to this German future, the whole of Germany is likewise willing to make its contribution. And this it is already doing today!May you see in the German soldiers who are marching here this very hour from all the Gaus of the Reich fighters willing and prepared to make sacrifices for the unity of the great German Volk as a whole, and for the power and the glory and the splendour of the Reich, now and forever! Deutschland, Sieg Heil!


Fest
wrote how (526) Hitler had dreamed of this bridge rising 270 feet above
the Danube – making it unrivalled in the world. Sketches that have been
received show that Hitler had concrete ideas of a new bridge as early
as 1925. Eventually it was constructed according to plans by Karl
Schaechterle and Friedrich Tamms between 1938 and 1940, spanning 250
metres in length and thirty metres in width beside the site where the
first and for a long time only Linz bridge built in 1497. The old one
was torn down after the new one was completed. After the war the statues
at the end were thrown into the Danube. The actual origin of the name
"Nibelungen Bridge" given it by Hitler is unclear although according to
the myth of the “ Nibelungenweg, ” the Germanic mythical characters
Kriemhild and their brothers are said to have grazed the area of
today's Linz on the way to the Hun king Etzel . Further reference to
the Nibelung legend was seen in the four equestrian statues from the
sculptor Bernhard Graf Plettenberg six and a half meters in height of
Siegfried, Kriemhild, Gunter and Brunhild). Two other statues, "Hagen"
and "Volker", were supposed to decorate the stairs leading up to the
bridge but prevented from being executed due to the war.
With the construction of the Nibelungen Bridge, some buildings on both banks of the Danube were demolished to make room for the wider and higher bridge resulting in several historic buildings being torn down on the Linz main square directly adjacent to the Nibelungen Bridge in order to be replaced by the Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead buildings) that still exist today, built according to plans by Roderich Fick between 1940 and 1943. The two structurally identical buildings housed parts of the Linz Art University and the Linz tax office until May 2008.
With the construction of the Nibelungen Bridge, some buildings on both banks of the Danube were demolished to make room for the wider and higher bridge resulting in several historic buildings being torn down on the Linz main square directly adjacent to the Nibelungen Bridge in order to be replaced by the Brückenkopfgebäude (bridgehead buildings) that still exist today, built according to plans by Roderich Fick between 1940 and 1943. The two structurally identical buildings housed parts of the Linz Art University and the Linz tax office until May 2008.


A
couple of miles west of Linz overlooking the Danube is the
Burschenschafterturm (also known as the Anschlussturm) which had
orginally formed part of the Maximilian tower line built in the early
19th century fortifying the Danube. Today it serves as a memorial and
museum of the German fraternity. By 1917 the dilapidated structure was
acquired by Karl Beurle in 1917 in order to be designed as a memorial
for the fallen of the First World War. In 1932 the inscription "One
people, one empire" was affixed to the facade as shown on the left.
After Austria's annexation to Germany, on Hitler's fiftieth birthday in
1939 the inscription was expanded to "One people, one empire, one
leader" as shown in the postcard on the right. After 1945 it was
removed. The large red logo of the "Deutsche Burschenschaft"was added by
the current owner in 2006 without official approval whih led to questions raised in Parliament
in June 2018 and the Federal Monuments Office being instructed to
initiate proceedings. Nevertheless, in August 2018 the office suddenly
subsequently approved the attached logo on the grounds that there was
originally “plastic lettering at the appropriate place, which was
expanded during the time of the National Socialist regime. After the
Second World War, the lettering was knocked off and a 'circle' (logo of
the owners) was attached. ” However, none of these words and symbols
previously attached to the tower were approved by the preservation law.
Today the tower serves as "a memorial to those who died in both world
wars, a museum of fraternity history and fraternity ideas and a place of
remembrance that there is a spiritual bond that spans borders and
nationality, which encompasses the entire German people and cultural
space. " The Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance protests that the tower is instead serving as 'Greater German' propaganda
and is thus as a "permanent violation of the state treaty", which
Austria is obliged by law to stop, allowing "the ethnic (German national
to extreme right) milieu to this day a place of pilgrimage and place of
Great German propaganda".


Hitler revisiting Leonding, where from 1898 at the age of nine to 1905
he lived whilst attending the local
primary school and later a grammar school in nearby Linz, during the
anschluß at noon on March 13, 1938 with St. Michael's church in the background.
Hitler had been a choirboy at the church.


He
proceeded to pay his respects at his parents' grave; his brother
Edmund, who died of measles, was buried there too. The grave was
recently destroyed by the municipal authorities in 2012, when a relative
of Alois Hitler's first wife, Anna, did not renew the lease leaving the
grave to be dissolved. Robert Eiter, with the Upper Austrian Network
Against Racism and Right-Extremism, said the latest incident was on All
Saints day, on November 1, last year, when an urn was left with the
inscription "Unvergesslich" – German for "unforgettable" and alluding to
the ϟϟ, given both 's's had been highlighted in partiular. Eiter
described how "[a] lot of flowers and wreaths were deposited there from
people who clearly were admirers. It had to do with the son and not the
parents." Brunner, the mayor, said he was happy with the decision to
remove the tombstone and Eiter said most Leonding residents also
supported it.

Directly
across the street from the cemetery is Hitler's
house on Michaelsbergstraße16. It remains as it was with Hitler in
front March
1938 on the left and as it appeared, decorated during the Nazi era, on
the right. Apparently the house is now owned by the cemetery which uses
it as an office. It was in his house on February 2, 1900 that Hitler’s
younger brother Edmund, born in 1894, died. It has been claimed
that young Adolf was obseerved sitting on the fence at night, staring
up at the stars, after attending his brother's funeral. Kubizek
recalled in The Young Hitler I Knew (49-50) that "[w]hilst,
naturally, Adolf had no recollection of the first three children born in
Braunau and never spoke of them, he could clearly remember his brother
Edmund, at the time of whose death he was already eleven years old. He
told me once that Edmund had died of diphtheria." Welch (8) writes that
"it should be noted that as an adolescent he was disturbed by the deaths
of his younger brother Edmund (1900), his father (1903) and his beloved
mother (1908). Without delving too deeply into psychological
speculation about Hitler’s state of mind, some biographers have
suggested that these deaths (and his own survival) convinced Hitler that
he was marked out by destiny for a special future."
The
former pub further down Michaelsbergstraße at number 1 where Hitler's
father died. Formerly the Gasthaus Stiefler, his favourite tavern in
Leonding, it is now an Italian restaurant. According to Fest,



in January, 1903, he took a first sip from a glass of wine in the Wiesinger tavern in Leonding and fell over to one side. He was carried into an adjoining room, where he died immediately, before a doctor and a priest could be sent for. The liberal Linz Tagespost gave him a lengthy obituary, referring to his progressive ideas, his sturdy cheerfulness, and his energetic civic sense. It praised him as a “friend of song,” an authority on beekeeping, and a temperate family man. By the time his son gave up school out of disgust and capriciousness, Alois Hitler had already been dead for two and a half years. Nor could Adolf’s sickly mother have tried to force the boy into a civil servant’s career.In Mein Kampf Hitler described the number of times he had to retrieve his drunken father from here and trudge back with him home.
In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father. A stroke of apoplexy felled the old gentleman who was otherwise so hale, thus painlessly ending his earthly pilgrimage, plunging us all into the depths of grief. His most ardent desire had been to help his son forge his career, thus preserving him from his own bitter experience. In this, to all appearances, he had not succeeded. But, though unwittingly, he had sown the seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have comprehended. For the moment there was no outward change.G.M. Gilbert in his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship (19) wrote how
Nevertheless, Helmut Heiber in his 1961 biography maintains that Alois was no drunkard, but a respected and generally upstanding man (10). Hitler's childhood friend, August Kubizek, said Adolf genuinely respected his father in his 1955 memoirs (38). That there was anything at all wrong in the Hitler family home is doubted by Werner Maser who in his 1974 book described Hitler’s childhood as ‘exceedingly happy’ (5). But even if Adolf did contend with a violent father and an over-protective mother (a situation which lan Kershaw accepts), the effects need not have been so decisive as the psychologists imply.[h]is father suffered from an uncontrollable addiction to alcohol which often led to the most painful family experiences for the boy, Adolf Hitler. How often did this boy have to fetch his father late at night out of the tavern, after the latter had been guzzling alcohol for hours on end. Hitler himself related to me in 1930 – when we were speaking about his family relationships (in connection with a blackmail threat), ‘Even as a 10 or 12-year-old kid I always had to go late at night to this stinking, smoky dive. Without being spared any of the details, I would have to go to the table and shake him as he looked with a blank stare. Then I would say, “Father, you must come home! Come now, we’ve got to go!” And I often had to wait a quarter of an hour, begging, cursing, until I could get him to budge. Then I would support him and finally get him home. That was the most terrible shame I have ever experienced. Oh, Frank, I know what a devil Alcohol is! Through my father it became my greatest enemy in my youth!’
Fischlham

The year his father retired from the customs service at the age of fifty-eight, the six-year-old Adolf entered the public school in the village of Fischlham, a short distance southwest of Linz. This was in 1895. For the next four or five years the restless old pensioner moved from one village to another in the vicinity of Linz. By the time the son was fifteen he could remember seven changes of address and five different schools. For two years he attended classes at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm. There he sang in the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own account,16 dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Finally the retired customs official settled down for good in the village of Leonding, on the southern outskirts of Linz, where the family occupied a modest house and garden.
MauthausenShirer (9-10)

Standing in front of the entrance. According to Wolfgang Sofsky in The Order of Terror (60), "[i]n a normal complex, the gatehouse would hardly have attracted any attention; in the camp, however, it towered over all other structures." Whilst the typical gatehouse type was realised in a pure form in Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Gusen, and Niederhagen, "[t]he gate in Mauthausen was an exception; it resembled a fortress. The gate was flanked by two mighty towers whose roofs extended outward. This fortress gate doubled the effect of security and control." This gate was used by the SS as a public site for torment where
the new arrivals who had been set apart as unfit for work were lined up, half-naked, after disinfection and a shower, in front of the “wailing wall” next to the gatehouse. During the summer, the guards would wait until the exhausted prisoners col- lapsed in the searing heat; in the winter, they poured cold water over them several times until they had finally frozen into pillars of ice. In many camps, those who committed minor transgressions were punished by having to stand at the gate. While the Kommandos filed out, the offenders were brought to the gate in the early morning and forced to stand there, rigid and motionless, the entire day—a Stehkommando. Soon, some began to sway like drunks, and leaned their heads against the wall; others were forced to squat, their hands clasped behind their necks in a “Saxon salute.” If a guard came by, these prisoners summoned up the last bit of strength in an effort to stand at attention. Otherwise they would be kicked, or prisoners’ heads might be pounded against the stone wall until their noses were broken. Standing at the gate was a static mode of torture without technical aids, a torment of silence; the prisoners formed a public statuary in stasis, at a site dominated by the flow of people coming and going.
Sofsky (62)

The camp population did not rise significantly until March 1940, with the transfer of the first Polish prisoners from Buchenwald. About eight thousand Poles were incarcerated in Mauthausen that year, augmented from 1940 to 1942 by some seventy-eight hundred Republican Spanish prisoners. Although the mortality figures the first year resembled those in Sachsenhausen, the annihilatory pressure in subsequent years at Mauthausen far exceeded that in any other main camp. Because of a dysentery epidemic as early as September 1939, a special sick bay was set up and during the two following years, prisoners sick with dysentery were gathered together in a room of Block 20. The only beds were for personnel. Some of the sick lay on the barracks floor; initially, it was covered with a thin layer of straw, and later with paper sacks filled with straw and smeared with pus, blood, and excrement. Between 1939 and March 1945, up to twenty weakened prisoners were weeded out in regular selections once or twice a month and then killed by an injection into the heart. In nearby Gusen, this was done almost on a daily basis.
As at other Nazi concentration camps, the inmates at Mauthausen and its subcamps were forced to work as slave labour, under conditions that caused many deaths. Mauthausen and its subcamps included quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms factories and plants assembling Me 262 fighter aircraft. In January 1945, the camps contained roughly 85,000 inmates. The death toll remains unknown, although most sources place it between 122,766 and 320,000 for the entire complex.



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Soviet guarding stairs after the war |
In June 1941, 348 Dutch Jews arrived in Mauthausen. Three weeks later, not a single one of them was still alive. Most had fallen victim to a method of killing that was considered a Mauthausen specialty: “parachute jumping.” In the stone quarry called Wiener Graben, boards were placed on the prisoners’ shoulders and loaded down with extremely heavy stones. Then the prisoners were forced to ascend the “death stairway,” a series of 186 stairs fashioned of irregular rocks at the edge of the abyss. After a few steps, the stones fell off the boards, crushing the feet of those climbing up beneath them. Many lost their balance on the rock stairs, plunging down the rock face after being giving a helping shove by a supervisor. Others committed suicide by hurling themselves to their deaths, or were pulled down by their fellow prisoners. In these excesses managed from a distance, the perpetrators needed to do little or nothing. They could calmly watch what was happening. Their triumph was less the act of killing itself than the mortal agony that gripped the victims. The victims toiled to the point of exhaustion; the perpetrators waited. The victims ran for their lives, collapsed, dragged themselves to their feet again, and fell once more. The executioners observed the event, laughing. The end was preprogrammed and unavoidable. All tribulation and torment were ultimately in vain. But the perpetrators acted as though their victims still had a chance. They let the victims wriggle and run—and were always there, watching and waiting. The mortal agony gave them a kick; it was a source of amusement. And the less they had to do themselves, the greater was the triumph of power. Prisoners were harassed to death, without the perpetrators having to expend much physical effort—just a voice, a shout, a command barked from a distance. The word was lethal. Thus, many deeds of excess were carried out less on orders than through orders.
Sofsky (238-239)

Hunts took place after attempted escapes and during the death marches that marked the final stage of the concentration camp system. One of the most infamous was given by the SS the name of the “Mühlviertel rabbit hunt” when, on the night of February 2, 1945, some 500 Soviet POWs, many of them officers, broke out of the camp by throwing wet blankets and pieces of clothing over the electrified barbed wire fencing, thus shorting out its circuitry. Using fire extinguishers, they managed to capture a guard tower, and were able to put a second out of commission by machine-gun fire. A total of 419 prisoners escaped from the camp area. But many only got a few metres from the camp. They left a trail in the snow and were soon captured and beaten to death or shot. The SS then ordered a large- scale hunt with instructions “not to bring back prisoners captured to the camp alive.” Along with the camp SS, units of the Wehrmacht, the SA, and the Nazi party, groups of Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm, local fire departments, and many civilians from the surrounding area took part in the search. A form of mass hysteria had spread throughout the population because the escapees had been labelled “dangerous criminals.” So a general hunt was declared: one and all could join in to track down the Russians. A report prepared by the gendarmerie in Schwertberg a few weeks later gives a graphic account of events:
The slush in the street turned red from the blood of the men who had been shot. Everywhere people encountered them—in homes, car sheds, stables, up in the loft, down in the cellar—if they weren’t dragged out and killed at the next house corner, they were shot right on the spot, no matter who happened to be present. . . . A few had their heads split open with an axe. . . . The bodies remained lying where they fell. . . . Intestines and genitals were exposed to open view. The next morning, the murdering continued. Again, blood was shed, atrocities were committed that one could never have expected the Mühlviertel population capable of. . . . At the Lem villa, there was a certain Mr.———. . . . During the evening, his wife had heard some suspicious sounds in the barn while feeding the goats. She went and got her husband, who dragged an escaped prisoner from his hiding place. . . . The farmer then stabbed the poor man in the neck with his pocket knife, and blood began to gush out. His wife joined in, punching the dying man in the face.
Of the five hundred who originally escaped, only seventeen survived the Mühlviertel massacre.
(233-234)


After
the war Austrians from the nearby towns were ordered to come to the
camp, forced to wear their best clothes to bury the bodies. Graves were
then dug by them here on the main camp's sportplatz, used by the SS as
its football pitch. In fact, in Mauthausen and Gusen, there were
national soccer teams
of Germans, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, and Poles; in 1943 and 1944, they
competed almost every Sunday afternoon and the guide I spoke to remarked
how locals would regularly visit to watch the games. Roughly 2,600
would be buried here, eventually being exhumed and either repatriated or
reburied elsewhere.

After the site was handed over to the Republic in 1955, Austria decided to destroy the remains to build housing estates. The location of the crematorium oven was a special case as a visible memorial to the survivors and initially it was planned to relocate this memorial site to Mauthausen along with the crematorium furnace which would have destroyed the last memorial in Gusen. The French and Polish embassies and the International Mauthausen Committee protested; victims themselves were forced to buy the land to finally set up a monument around the crematorium furnace in 1965. It was financed by the survivors' associations and planned by former Gusen prisoners. It's currently in the middle of the residential area of Gusen, and remains little accepted by the local population.
Dürnstein

Supposed painting by Hitler of the town gate, dated 1921, which was to have gone up for auction at the Ludlow Racecourse in Shropshire in 2017 and was expected to get £6,000. In the end, the paintings sold collectively for £97,672, which included another scene believed to be of Dürnstein. An Austrian expert issued certificates of authenticity for the pictures, which once belonged to a British soldier who was stationed in Essen in 1945; on the back of this painting is stamped "H.O.A. Horvath, Archiv für NS Zeitgeschichte" (Archive for NS contemporary history). As can be seen today and when compared with images from the Nazi-era below, the scene shown in the painting bears little resemblance to how it currently appears. In any event, as Dutch journalist Bart FM Droog contends, such a claim is rubbish and most of the works attributed to Hitler worldwide are not authentic because the style and materials of the works do not match. According to him, "[t]he majority of 'Hitlers' which surfaced after 1945 can be dismissed at first sight as forgeries.“I don’t want people to be buying this rubbish – almost all alleged Hitler artworks and other Hitler items offered by auction houses are fakes. Between 1910 and 1913 Hitler only produced watercolours depicting Viennese city sights, and only signed these works with 'A. Hitler' or 'A.H’. From his WWI period only one authentic Hitler work is known – a very clumsy watercolour portrait of one of his army comrades, made in 1915. But as far as we can tell, Hitler only ever painted in watercolour, whereas the portraits sold by Mullocks are also in oil and pencil."


Melk




St. Pölten



Before
midnight, the Nazis occupied the town hall. A day later, the Wehrmacht
marching into Austria came to St. Pölten on its way to Vienna, where it
was greeted with cheers. Here Hitler
is seen arriving at the main train station March 14, 1938, and at what had been
the Hotel Pittner where he had lunch with Heinrich
Himmler, Wilhelm Keitel and Martin Bormann whilst travelling from Linz to
Vienna, March 14, 1938

In
the course of the war, the conversion of industrial production to
armaments also took place to a large extent in St. Pölten. Numerous
companies, including the largest, increased their production and number
of employees considerably. Since not only the Jews had disappeared from
the city, but also large parts of the remaining male population having
enlisted into the Wehrmacht, women and forced labourers were also used
on a large scale in St. Pölten. This happened in almost all businesses
in the city, and - as in the camp for Jews deported from Hungary in the
Viehofner Au - there were at least 400 deaths or murders.
The
resistance against the Nazi regime in St. Pölten increased
significantly compared to the rest of Austria, even if it had no
concrete political or military success. The Catholic resistance was
mainly limited to illegal religious instruction, the Jehovah's Witnesses
refused to serve in the army and towards the end of the war, the
non-partisan resistance group Kirchl-Trauttmansdorff of approximately
400 conspirators primarily was set up which included members of the
upper class; their aim was to hand over the city to the Soviet troops
without a fight. However, the group was infiltrated and betrayed and so
on April 13, 1945, twelve members were sentenced to death and shot in
Hammerpark, where a memorial commemorates them today. The most
significant were the resistance groups that emerged from the previously
strong labour movement.

At the Soviet cemetery to the north of the town
Amstetten


The town hall on the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Today this tiny village is infamous as the place where Josef Fritzl imprisoned, raped and kidnapped his daughter Elisabeth for twenty-four years in a fallout shelter, fathering seven children with her. After the horrific story died down eventually, the town returned in the news after it was revealed that Hitler was still listed as an honorary citizen.



The Seegrotte in Hinterbrühl bei Mödling has changed besides the flags it flies. Under the Nazi regime, Amstetten served as the setting for the abuse and arrest of political opponents as well as the increasing disenfranchisement and expropriation of Jews and gypsies. At least sixteen of 43 Jews were deported and murdered. In the Amstetten hospital, as in the Mauer-Öhling nursing home, forced sterilisations were carried out on so-called Erbkranken (hereditary patients). Mauer-Öhling also served as a transit station, and from autumn 1944 also as the scene for numerous euthanasia murders. At the same time in parallel to the extermination program, the Nazi officials responsible for Amstetten pursued a comprehensive expansion programme for the city, which included housing estates, schools and impressive Nazi buildings. Only a few of these were realised due to the war, although industrial and rail systems in particular were expanded. From November 1944, Amstetten was the target of bombing raids. The construction of air-raid tunnels, which was pushed ahead in 1944, could only be implemented through the use of forced labourers, who were of great importance for trade and agriculture. In order to be able to repair the strategically important railway facilities in the urban area, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp was set up in March 1945 with up to three thousand male and 500 female prisoners.
Traismauer


A few miles outside the town is this doleful memorial to four borthers killed days after the end of the war. On May 14, 1945 four boys from nearby Radlberg aged between 9 and 14 were killed after finding ammunition and handled it resulting in an explosion in which the four boys were killed. A fifth boy survived seriously injured. To commemorate this misfortune seventy years earlier, members of the nature group Unser Radlberg and other volunteers set up this memorial at about the point where the accident occurred. It was unveiled and blessed on Sunday, August 23, 2015.