Gunskirchen 4.68

Gunskirchen is a town in the Austrian state of Upper Austria.GeographyGunskirchen lies in the Hausruckviertel. About 11 percent of the municipality is forest, and 78 percent is farmland. Internal combustion engine maker Rotax has been headquartered at Gunskirchen since 1947.HistoryWorld War IIDuring World War II one of the sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp was located in the village. On May 4, 1945, the 71st Infantry Division liberated Gunskirchen. The camp was rather short-lived. In December 1944, construction for the Gunskirchen camp began. The camp was planned to house several hundred slave laborers. When the camp was opened in April 1945, however, thousands of prisoners evacuated on death marches from Mauthausen started to flood Gunskirchen. In these overcrowded conditions, diseases such as typhus and dysentery spread rapidly through the starving and weakened camp population. The prisoners were—with the exception of 400 political prisoners—Jews from Hungary whom the Germans had forced to march on foot from their homeland to Austria, where they were to be used for forced labor. Some 17,000 Hungarian Jews reportedly passed through the Gunskirchen camp. When troops of the 71st entered the camp, they learned that the SS guards had fled the corpse-littered camp days before. Some 15,000 prisoners were still in the camp. In the months following the liberation, some 1,500 former prisoners died as a consequence of their mistreatment by the Nazis. One member of the 71st Infantry recounted his first impressions of Gunskirchen: