A new stamp is to be issued on 6th May to honor those who were imprisoned in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp during World War II.
Mauthausen was a Level 3 Concentration Camp meaning it functioned as a death camp where prisoners were worked to death extracting materials from a quarry. Over 200,000 people were imprisoned at Mauthausen of which more than 100,000 died before it was liberated on 5th May 1945.
Adolf Tuma is responsible for the stamp’s stark design which features the Staircase of Death, 186 steps the prisoners were forced to climb on the way to the quarry each day.
The stone blocks and slabs which made up the staircase were loose and posed a lethal obstacle to the exhausted prisoners who were forced to carry blocks of granite over them. SS Officers would beat the prisoners or push them, forcing them to drop the blocks which would in turn roll down the staircase and kill the prisoner.
