About the project
At least 90,000 people were murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps between August 1938 and May 1945, or died immediately after liberation as a result of their imprisonment. Remembrance of the dead is one of the central commitments and tasks of the Mauthausen Memorial; but it also represents a wider social responsibility and a shared endeavour.
Through the project 'Room of Names' ('Digital Memorial Book'), the memorial museum has sought to commemorate the dead of the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps in digital form. This project is part of the overall 'Memorial Book for the Dead of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and its Subcamps' project, which is made up of this website and the publication in May 2016 of a printed edition. The project reproduces the 'Room of Names' at the Mauthausen Memorial, which opened to the public in 2013.
The project was carried out by the Association for Remembrance and Historical Research in Austrian Concentration Camp Memorials in cooperation with the Mauthausen Memorial. It was supported and financed by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism and the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria.
The project represents the interim conclusion to research work carried out continuously over several years to reconstruct the names and dates of those who died. An extraordinary level of international cooperation meant that numerous Austrian and international institutions and people were involved - survivors and survivor organisations, academic institutions and archives, researchers and relatives of the victims, as well as several embassies in their native countries. This made it possible to reconstruct the majority of the names (over 82,000 to date) in their most likely original form - and this in spite of the destruction of many sources by the SS in the final days of the war.
The ongoing additions and revisions to the list of names will remain an important task for the memorial museum and this project in the coming years. With this in mind, and in the spirit of a remembrance free from hierarchy, we will continue to emphasise openness, collaboration and cooperation in our work and, through this website, we can now offer a straight-forward way to submit further information to the Archive of the Mauthausen Memorial.
As well as trying to complete the collation of basic data for each person (family and first name(s), date and place of birth and death), one of the main aims of the project is the (re)personalisation and individualisation of commemoration The 'biography project' is therefore an important and integral element of the Digital Memorial Book. So far we have received a total of 1,825 biographies of people who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps, written by just under 250 authors and institutions.
In order to keep expanding the number of biographies, we hope that as many visitors to the website as possible will participate and assist us, and we cordially invite you to send us information, materials, images and any other data: gedenkbuch(at)mauthausen-memorial.org
An overview of the project’s history and its main sources is provided in the sample chapters of the Memorial Book’s print version. The full version is available on the publisher’s website