The concentration camp of Mauthausen, in Austria, was, with its annexed camps such as Gusen, Melk and Ebensee, one of the hardest of the Third Reich. In these camps, which were mainly reserved for political prisoners, but also for Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and so-called “asocials”, about 120,000 men and women were put to death out of 200,000 prisoners. German-speaking prisoners (Austrians and Germans) made up only 8% of the prisoners. Out of almost 50 nationalities, there were many Poles, Russians, French, Spanish, but also some 170 Luxembourgers.

They were killed by working in stone quarries, executed or murdered in the gas chambers of the camps. In this hell, a special service called Erkennungsdienst was responsible for taking photographs and documenting the daily life in the camps.

If these were taken in all the camps of the Third Reich, most of them were destroyed from 1944, when the Nazi defeat was announced.

In Mauthausen and its annexed camps, a good part of these pictures, proof of the crimes committed, escaped destruction. An unparalleled adventure allowed hundreds of original negatives camouflaged and stolen by the prisoners to reach an inhabitant of the village of Mauthausen. Recovered at the Liberation, most of these negatives were later brought back to France, in the hope that they would one day serve as a testimony to the world.

The exhibition The Visible Part of the Camps brings together five hundred photographs from several collections (of SS officers, liberated prisoners, American liberators and those taken by the Spanish prisoner Francisco Boix).

The film Les Résistants de Mauthausen (2021, Arte) will be screened on the day of the opening of the exhibition: it illustrates how these photos taken by Francisco Boix were used as evidence of Nazi crimes at the Nuremberg trials. A series of screenings on the subject of camps and resistance fighters will also be offered for the duration of the exhibition. The schedule and locations of the screenings will be communicated at a later date