The open field outside the prisoners’ camp was the site of a tent camp from August 1944 onwards. It provided makeshift accommodation for large groups of newly-arrived prisoners.

In early 1945, Jewish forced labourers from Hungary, men, women and children, were herded together here. Some had been forced to march on foot from the border region between the German Reich and Hungary to Mauthausen. During these marches, those exhausted or ill were shot by the guards.

Stephan Virányi describes the situation in the tent camp:

‘The tents were made for 800 people at most, [but] they crowded over 2,000 people into one tent. […] There was neither straw nor wood underfoot and the fortunate were those who, besides their blankets, had [another] to spread out on the bare ground.

Every day we spent 1 – 1 ½ hours on de-lousing. [For those], who couldn’t muster the necessary strength of will […], as their spiritual strength quickly disappeared, so too their physical strength, resulting in [their] silent [deaths] within a short time. […] In the mornings we had to cross countless corpses to get outside, where [a] load of [other] corpses were already waiting for us […].’

Most of the Jewish prisoners were then forced to march from the tent camp to the provisional holding camp at Gunskirchen near Wels. The conditions there were no better.