Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 9, 2006

Prisoners of Ebensee, one of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen

The Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp grew to become a large group of Nazi concentration camps that were built around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria. Though initially it consisted of a single camp at Mauthausen, with time it was expanded to become one of the largest labour camp complexes in German-occupied Europe. Apart from the four main sub-camps at Mauthausen and nearby Gusen, more than 50 sub-camps of the camp complex, located in all parts of Austria and southern Germany used the inmates as slave labour. Several subordinate camps of the KZ Mauthausen complex included quarries, munitions factories, mines, arms factories and Me 262 fighter-plane assembly plants. In January 1945, the camps — directed from the central office in Mauthausen — had a total of roughly 85,000 inmates. The death toll remains unknown, although most sources place it between 122,766 and 320,000 for the entire complex. The camps formed one of the first massive concentration camp complexes in Nazi Germany, and were the last ones to be liberated by the Allies. (More...)

Recently featured: Nauru – Cædmon – Cystic fibrosis