In Constant Motion – Mauthausen Prisoners in the ‘Spider Web’ of Nazi Camps 1944

Date

05 Feb 2025, 10:15 – 05 Feb 2025, 10:45

Location

Topography of Terror Documentation Centre, Niederkirchnerstr. 8, 10964 Berlin

Vortrag von Alexander Prenninger” auf der Tagung “Europe in the Concentration Camps. The Expanded Camp System 1944, Berlin, 2.-5. Februar 2025

The arrival lists of Mauthausen concentration camp show, that in 1944 almost every day new prisoners arrived in the camp, from one single prisoner up to several thousand a day. In total, more than 70,000 prisoners arrived in that year (c. 40% of all Mauthausen prisoners).

The proposed paper will investigate the trajectories of a sample of prisoners through the Nazi camp archipelago in the year 1944, essentially asking where had they been interned, through with camps did they go, how was their reception in Mauthausen, what was their further path through the complex of Mauthausen sub-camps, and what were their experiences.

Drawn from the c. 850 interviews of the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project, the sample reflects the overall trend with ca. 42% of all MSDP interviewees having arrived in 1944. It is shaped by an extreme diversity of national, ethnic and social origin, reasons of arrests, and includes both male and female survivors.

The investigation of their trajectories is based on a combination of network analysis and oral history. The network approach allows to trace the routes of these prisoners through the Nazi camp archipelago, thus showing connections between different places and types of camps and other detention facilities, and to ask if there was something like a “logic” in transporting prisoners from one camp to the other. The oral history part, on the other side, will focus on the experiences of prisoners. Narrative focal points are essentially departure from one camp, transport, and arrival at a new camp – all connected with fears and hopes. The experiences of prisoners arriving in 1944 are specific both in respect to the maximum expansion, the Mauthausen complex had reached then, and to previous and later periods of the camp.

In the presentation I will focus on a collection of 850 interviews with survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp conducted in 2002/03. I will show that a quantitative approach to oral history interviews is a fruitful way to complement the level of individual experiences with supra-individual structures – a method already proposed by Gerhard Botz in 1988. For my research, I used a database created together with the collection of interviews. This database was enriched with information on the interviewees found in “perpetrator’s sources” enabling to contrast information given by survivors with the latter sources (e.g. on the reason of persecution and the trajectories through the Nazi camp archipelago). Thus, the creation of “epistemical individuals” (Bourdieu) allowed the construction of sub-samples for specific qualitative research questions (e.g. experiences on a death march; skills and professions before, during and after persecution). I will also raise the limits of such an approach, namely the question of representativity of the interview collection and the problem of missing data.

Programm
a. Vortrag: In Constant Motion