Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Gunskirchen, wasone of the 49 satellite camps of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, located in the village. of Gunskirchen.

In December, 1944, construction for the Gunskirchen camp began.
The camp was planned to house several hundred slave laborers.
Established on March 12, 1945, Gunskirchen was opened, thousands of prisoners, mostly Hungarian and Rumanian Jews, who had assisted in the construction of the so-called “Südostwall” (or "south-east wall", a chain of fortifications along the border between the German Reich and Hungary, evacuated on death marches from Mauthausen flooded into Gunskirchen.

On May 4, 1945, the 71st Infantry Division liberated Gunskirchen., the day after the SS guards fled the corpse-littered camp.
About 15,000 prisoners were still in the camp. In the months following the liberation, of whom 1,500 former prisoners died as a from the mistreatment by the Nazis.
A member of the 71st Infantry Division, Captain J. D. Pletcher, cited:
“As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn't let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms—perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn't walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn't even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans."

In 1979, in the woods near Gunskirchen, the remains of 1,227 dead were exhumed from a mass grave, and reburied near the former barracks 19.