The Mauthausen concentration camp commemoration has been held since 1946 by the survivors of the camp and their associations.
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Thousands of people took part Sunday in the solemn ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, an event that has been held annually since 1946 on the initiative of the survivors and their associations.
The slave labour camp in upper Austria was known for its extremely harsh conditions, considered to be even more severe than in other Nazi German death camps. It held nearly 190,000 prisoners during World War II, half of whom did not survive.
Those who died in the camp must not be forgotten, as the organisers of the event insisted.
"Nothing can be erased. Neither the transports, nor the forced labour, imprisonment, barracks, illness, cold, lack of sleep, hunger, humiliation, degradation, beatings, screams. Nothing can, nothing must be forgotten," said Guy Dockendorf, president of the International Mauthausen Committee (CIM).
Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen and several members of the Austrian government, including Chancellor Stocker, Vice Chancellor Babler and Foreign Minister Meinl-Reisinger, were in attendance.
Many high-ranking international guests, including the king and queen of Spain, attended the ceremony.
The concentration camp — which targeted Jewish and Romani people, socialists, anarchists and homosexuals, but also others who posed a threat to the Nazi regime — mostly consisted of inmates from Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as Spanish Republican fighters and Yugoslav partisans, majority of which were deported from today's Slovenia and Serbia.
The event, organised by the Mauthausen Committee Austria, the successor of the Austrian Mauthausen Survivors' Association, brought together international representatives to honour the memory of the victims and renew the commitment to the values of freedom, human dignity and mutual respect.
The first official commemoration in Mauthausen — the last Nazi concentration camp to be liberated — took place in 1946, barely a year after liberation.
More than 10,000 people gathered at the foot of the "Todesstiege" ("Death Stairs") in the camp's quarry. On that occasion, the national delegates signed an official document stating that this commemoration would be held annually.
For decades, the commemoration ceremonies were mainly a matter for the survivors, always maintaining an international character but with little impact on Austrian society.
Over time, the Austrian Mauthausen Committee has taken over the event's organisation in cooperation with the International Mauthausen Committee and the Austrian Lagermeinschaft Association, with public financial support and, to a greater extent, private donations.