Shortly after the end of World War II, on 1 October 1945, the organization named l'Amicale des déportés politiques de la Résistance de Mauthausen et de ses kommandos dépendants was founded. The original members were survivors of CC Mauthausen-Gusen and its subcamps.
Amicale de Mauthausen discovered that 198,000 people of 25 different nationalities (10,000 of them French) were deported to CC Mauthausen. 118,000 people died from forced labor or in one of the gas chambers, which were installed inside of the camp. Particularly in the postwar years, but also today, the Amicale helps families of the missing and their children.
Since its founding, Amicale has been teaching about the crimes of national socialism. Amicale appears at various international events, e.g., commemorations of the liberation of Mauthausen. They also arrange excursions to Mauthausen.
In the year 2000, there was an official generation change. Because of their age, the survivors of the camp handed over their functions to their children. There are still about 500 deportees and their families working for the association to commemorate their suffering.
The French Amical is a member of the Comité International de Mauthausen with around 1700 members in total. The head office is in Paris, but there are many members elsewhere too.
At the head office, there is the possibility for Austrians to serve for a short time instead of the military service as an Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servant. The first Austrian Holocaust Memorial Servant started to work in Paris on 1 September 2008.
Mauthausen was a concentration camp that first appeared in 1938, and the original Mauthausen camp was not situated precisely on the same spot as the latter more commonly known Mauthausen. The latter Mauthausen was situated on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
Drancy internment camp was an assembly and detention camp for confining Jews who were later deported to the extermination camps during the German occupation of France during World War II. Originally conceived and built as a modernist urban community under the name La Cité de la Muette, it was located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, France.
Gedenkdienst is the concept of facing and taking responsibility for the darkest chapters of one's own country's history while ideally being financially supported by one's own country's government to do so. Founded in Austria in 1992 by Andreas Maislinger, the Gedenkdienst is an alternative to Austria's compulsory national military service as well as a volunteering platform for Austrians to work in Holocaust and Jewish culture-related institutions around the world with governmental financial support. In Austria it is also referred to as Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service provided by the Austrian Service Abroad. The Austrian Gedenkdienst serves the remembrance of the crimes of Nazism, commemorates its victims and supports Jewish cultural future. The program is rooted in the acknowledgment of responsibility by the Austrian government for the crimes committed by National Socialism.
The Austrian Service Abroad is a non-profit organization funded by the Austrian government which sends young Austrians to work in partner institutions worldwide serving Holocaust commemoration in form of the Gedenkdienst, supporting vulnerable social groups and sustainability initiatives in form of the Austrian Social Service and realizing projects of peace within the framework of the Austrian Peace Service. The Austrian Service Abroad is the issuer of the annually conferred Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award.
Ebensee was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp established by the SS to build tunnels for armaments storage near the town of Ebensee, Austria, in 1943. The camp held a total of 27,278 male inmates from 1943 until 1945. Between 8,500 and 11,000 prisoners died in the camp, most from hunger or malnutrition. Political prisoners were most common, and prisoners came from many different countries. Conditions were poor, and along with the lack of food, exposure to cold weather and forced hard labor made survival difficult. American troops of the 80th Infantry Division liberated the camp on 6 May 1945.
The Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation was founded on 17 October 1990 on the initiative of French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and the former Minister of the Interior. It is based in Paris.
Père (Father) Jacques de Jésus, OCD, was a French Roman Catholic priest and Discalced Carmelite friar. While serving as headmaster of a boarding school run by his order, he took in several Jewish refugees to protect them from the Nazi government of occupation, for which he was arrested and imprisoned in various concentration camps.
The Museo e Centro di Documentazione della Deportazione e Resistenza is a museum in Prato, central Italy, dedicated to the history of Fascism's occurrence and rise to power in Italy. The director of the foundation is Camilla Brunelli.
Siggi B. Wilzig, born Siegbert Wilzig, was a survivor of concentration camps Auschwitz and Mauthausen who arrived in the USA in 1947 with little money and only a grade school education. By the time of his death in 2003, he had created an empire in oil and banking with more than $4 billion in assets. Wilzig was a frequent lecturer on the importance of Holocaust memory, an outspoken opponent of Holocaust denial, and instrumental in building the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Yehuda Bacon is an Israeli artist who survived the Holocaust.
International concentration camp committees are organizations composed of former inmates of the various Nazi concentration camps, formed at various times, primarily after the Second World War. Although most survivors have since died and those who are still alive are generally octogenarians, the committees are still active.
The Austrian SS was that portion of the Schutzstaffel (SS) membership from Austria. The term and title was used unofficially. They were never officially recognized as a separate branch of the SS. Austrian SS members were seen as regular personnel and they served in every branch of the SS.
Rudolf Anton Haunschmied is an Austrian author and local historian.
The Austrian Mauthausen Committee is responsible for scientific and educational work concerning the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and its satellite camps in Austria. This association was founded in 1997 and is the subsequent organisation of the Austrian Concentration Camp Community Mauthausen.
Roger Souchère was a French architect who participated in the French Resistance during World War II (1939–45).
The International Ravensbrück Committee (IRC) is an association of former prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest concentration camp for women in the German Altreich during the Nazi period.
Gusen was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp operated by the SS between the villages of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and Langestein in the Reichsgau Ostmark. Primarily populated by Polish prisoners, there were also large numbers of Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens, and Italians. Initially, prisoners worked in nearby quarries, producing granite which was sold by the SS company DEST.
Denise Holstein is an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor and Holocaust witness, who was liberated on 15 April 1945. As a Holocaust witness, Holstein tells her story in two books and in a documentary made by a student from the Lycée Corneille in Rouen. For almost fifty years, Holstein never spoke about her life before writing about it. As a Holocaust witness, Holstein visits school children, to describe and share her experiences.
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