On May 5, 1945, the American soldiers liberated the camp.

Thousands were also killed by shooting, hanging, mistreatment, and harsh conditions.

The first women who were registered as prisoners arrived October 5, 1943. By the end of September 1944, 459 women were in the main camp. On March 31, 1945 the SS reported 2,252 women in the Mauthausen system. By February 1945 there had been 3 barracks set aside in the main camp for female prisoners.

1933-39: On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland; a day later, they entered Henia's town. Her family tried to escape to Warsaw but the German forces quickly overtook them and ordered them back to Krzepice. Several days later the Germans set up a ghetto in Krzepice. Henia and her family weren't allowed to leave the ghetto on penalty of death. Many people were shot for doing so, but rather than starve, Henia sometimes sneaked out to search for food.

1940-44: In 1941, hearing that the Germans were seizing people for work details, Henia escaped to a nearby village. But she missed her parents so she returned. Searching for them, she was arrested and eventually deported to the Mauthausen camp. While digging a ditch in a field Henia tried to escape into the woods. After two days, SS guards with dogs hunted her down. They beat her ruthlessly, breaking her nose. As she lay on the ground she heard the guards say, "Don't waste a bullet on her, she's dying." Later, Henia crawled back to the barracks.

Henia was then deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp. She was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945. After recuperating in Sweden, she immigrated to the United States in 1947." (Holocaust Encyclopedia - see 6th link.)

SS Colonel Franz Zieris replaced Sauer and remained the commandant until May 1945.

After March 1940, SS Captain Georg Backmayer was 1st Protective Detention Camp commandant, with responsibility for the prisoners while they were inside the camp.

In 1938-1939, the 4th Regiment of the SS Death's-Head Units guarded th perimeter of the Mauthausen concentration camp as well as prisoners work detachments deployed outside the camp.

in 1940-1941, the guard unit, renamed the SS Death's-Head Battalion and upgraded in strength to battalion size, was administratively subordinated to the Waffen SS, though the camp commandant still issued all operational orders to the battalion.

During the course of 1944, French, Czech, and Austrian camp inmates, primarily communists, formed networks of self-help and resistance. In winter 1944-45 the formation of another resistance network of Czech, Polish, German, and Austrian inmates is documented for the "infirmary" camp.

Their most effective activities involved providing food for starving prisoners, hiding prisoners temporarily, often in the infirmary, and protecting prisoners against arbitrary torture and mistreatment from Kapos.

Self-resistance groups developed a long lines of nationality. During the night of February 1-2, 1945, more than 400 Soviet prisoners of war incarcerated in barrack 20 killed the SS appointed administrators and broke out of the camp.

On March 23, 1945, several hundred female prisoners of sub camps Amstetten, whom the SS authorities had withdrawn to Mauthausen after the Allies bombed the train station in Amstetten and killed 34 women, refused to return to Amstetten, despite the threats of Protective Detention Camp Commandant Bachmayer. This was the first and only case of mass refusal to deploy to work.

On May 3, 1945, the SS abandoned the camp to the custody of a guard unit of 50 Viennese firefighters, who remained on the perimeter of the camp. Members of an "International Committee" formed by the prisoners in the last day of April administrated the camp as units of the US Army arrived at the camp and secured the surrounding area on May 5. Further units, including the 11th Armored Division of the Third Army, arrived in the succeeding days.

Numerous members of the camp administrative staff and the guard nits were prosecuted on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, a US Military Tribunal prosecuted deputy preventative detention camp commandant Hans Altfuldisch and 60 other defendants associated with Mauthausen in the spring of 1946. The Tribunal convicted all 61 defendants, sentenced 58 to death and three to life imprisonment May 13, 1946. On appeal, nine of the death sentences were commuted to prison sentences. US authorities executed 49 of the defendants and released the remaining twelve convicts in 1950 and 1951.