Wall around Barrack 20: 'Death Block'.

This part of the camp, where barracks 16 to 20 stood during the camp’s existence, was set up as a separate area in autumn 1941 for Soviet prisoners of war. The National Socialists considered them to be ideological enemies. They were given hardly anything to eat and yet were forced to carry out back-breaking hard labour. Many were transferred to the concentration camps in order to be killed here by the SS. For this purpose, an apparatus for shooting people in the back of the neck and a gas chamber were constructed.

Block 20 was considered a ‘death block’. In 1944 and 1945, prisoners of war were interned here under horrific conditions.

Seeing that their situation was hopeless, around 500 prisoners from block 20 staged an escape attempt in the night of February 1st to 2nd, 1945. They attacked the two watchtowers with fire extinguishers and missiles and short-circuited the electric fence with wet blankets and clothes. Some of the prisoners were quickly killed by the machine gun fire of the guard units.

Over 400 were able to escape. They were hunted, searched out and usually killed on sight by the SS, the police and the local population. The events came to be known cynically as the ‘Mühlviertler Hasenjagd’, the ‘Mühlviertel Hare Hunt’. Only eleven prisoners survived.

Josef Radgeb, the priest at Allerheiligen, 12 km northeast of Mauthausen, wrote in his diary:

‘2.2.1945 … 400 prisoners are said to have broken out of Mauthausen. […] The prisoners are being hunted like dangerous criminals. They have fled without shoes. For three days they have had nothing to eat … You keep hearing shots from the woods. […] People are afraid and give nothing, although they are not dangerous criminals and have done nothing to anyone. Compassion pales before such cowardice, and some of our people are copying the SS, who shoot down all who are caught without mercy.’