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Cooperation with the Mauthausen Memorial
The heads of the two institutions have signed a cooperation agreement between the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Mauthausen Memorial. It covers the sharing of more than 300 thousand digital records related to documents held by the archives in the two memorial sites.
The sharing of data is particularly important to scholars and will add to the knowledge about the stories of the people whom the Nazis imprisoned in the two concentration camps. About 33 thousand prisoners of the Auschwitz Nazi German concentration camp were transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex in Austria, which was annexed by the Third Reich, while about three thousand people were sent in the opposite direction.
“After the liberation of the Mauthausen-Gusen camps, the majority of the SS records found their way into the so-called national committees set up by liberated prisoners,” says Krzysztof Antończyk, director of the Digital Repository at the Auschwitz Museum. “In this way, fragments of the original camp documentation—thousands of lists and file cards containing information about the victims, ended up in Poland, Germany, France, Israel, and the U.S.A.,” he adds.
For years, the two memorial sites have been trying to reconstitute these archives scattered all over the world. This new agreement is an important step in reconstructing the most complete possible information on the victims of the two camps. “Comprehensive analysis and comparison will make it possible to carry out the kind of reconstruction that seemed impossible for many years after the war,” says Antończyk.
“I hope that today’s agreement will mark the beginning of broader cooperation between our institutions, says Barbara Schätz, head of the Mauthausen Museum. She feels that it will be possible in the future to exchange experiences on the educational or organizational levels.
Mauthausen Concentration Camp
Mauthausen, in Austria, was one of the many concentration camps that the Nazis set up in the years 1933-1945. It had dozens of sub-camps. About 200 thousand people were imprisoned in the complex during World War II. Fifty thousand of them were Poles, imprisoned mostly in Gusen, the largest sub-camp. The majority of them died.
Since 1954, a part of the Mauthausen card catalogue has been held in the Archives at the Museum in Oświęcim.
The Digital Repository
The digital repository of memory stores, compiles, and processes databases using information from the records in the Museum Archives with names of deportees to and former prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
See also: Digitalization and access to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Archives
