Melk concentration camp

Melk concentration camp stood in Lower Austria, about 100 kilometres east of Linz. It occupied former Wehrmacht barracks near the town of Melk. The SS set up the camp in January 1944 as a forced labour unit for men under the main Mauthausen camp. Prisoners were put to work building an underground ball-bearing factory for Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG. They also constructed barracks and a Luftwaffe colony in Loosdorf, and cut pit props at a sawmill in Amstetten. The camp became one of the largest subcamps of Mauthausen. By January 1945 it held over ten thousand prisoners from at least twenty-six countries. Historians record that at least four thousand eight hundred prisoners died there. The dead came from every major national group in the camp, including Poles, Hungarians, French and Soviet citizens. A crematorium burned more than three thousand five hundred bodies between late 1944 and April 1945. Visitors find the former camp site now largely cleared. A few surviving buildings show where prisoners were housed in eighteen overcrowded blocks. The camp doctor’s death register lists the names and nationalities of those who perished. Nearby, the underground tunnels dug by prisoners still lie beneath the factory built by Steyr-Daimler-Puch. The site serves as a place of remembrance for the thousands who suffered and died there.