Research Centre

The Research Center of the Mauthausen Memorial is responsible for carrying out, coordinating and publishing research on the history of the Mauthausen concentration camp complex.

Since the 1990s, the Mauthausen Memorial has built on its administrative remit and developed into a research institution. It has launched its own publication series ("Mauthausen-Studien" and "Mauthausen-Erinnerungen") and published initial research findings based on projects financed by the Mauthausen Memorial. One direct result of a greater focus on research since 2000 has been the permanent exhibitions opened in 2013 with their accompanying Catalogues, which drew on and incorporated several years of basic research. In addition to its own publications, the Mauthausen Memorial has increasingly established itself as a platform and hub for a growing number of cooperation partners. In the Yearbook, which has appeared annually since 2008 until 2017, the staff of the Mauthausen Memorial not only published their own recent research findings but also provided commentaries on historical documents and gave information about the activities and events at the memorial site over the previous year. For several years, the Yearbook has also functioned successfully as a forum and publication outlet for organisations and people who engaged with the Mauthausen Memorial as a place of memory, a cemetery and a museum.

Through its research projects, the Mauthausen Memorial aims to make its own research activities visible, to encourage new research and to offer cooperation partners a platform for the publication of their research. For the research project "Memorial Book of the Dead of the Mauthausen Memorial and its Subcamps", including the associated website ("Virtual Room of Names"), the involvement of over 250 authors guaranteed both strong international networks and the integration of research and commemoration. Projects such as the Memorial Book represent prominent, nationally and internationally regarded publications and series that will form the backbone of the Mauthausen Memorial's publishing activities into the future and will require ongoing editorial support.

With regard to its research and publishing activities, the Research Center of the Mauthausen Memorial strives to achieve a synthesis between closing gaps in the research on the history of the Mauthausen concentration camp complex and opening up new fields of research, with the aim of bridging the gap between the past and current social issues. To this end, a stronger focus on initiating, coordinating and supporting commissioned research projects needs to be linked to greater levels of cooperation as part of third-party funded projects. The Mauthausen Memorial also aims for a balanced relationship between basic and project-based research: more comprehensive publishing activity is dependent on a commitment to basic research, for example the project to compile the names of all those deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. (This is based on the digitalisation and cataloguing of surviving sources and is not directly linked to publication per se. Rather its purpose is to enable humanitarian enquiries to be dealt with faster and to improve research facilities for survivors, the families of those deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp and academic researchers.)

Since 2022, the Research Center has been publishing the open access journal coMMents.