Léon Gloden, Luxembourg's Minister for Home Affairs;
Credit: © SIP / Claude Piscitelli
Luxembourg's Ministry of State and the Second World War Remembrance Service (Service de la Mémoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale) have announced that Léon Gloden, Minister for Home Affairs, will represent the Luxembourg government at the international ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria on Sunday 11 May 2025.
On the occasion of the commemoration, Minister Gloden will also meet with a group of young students from the Lycée de Garçons d'Esch-sur-Alzette (LGE), who are in Mauthausen as part of a school visit to the concentration camp, supervised by the association of former Luxembourg political prisoners of Mauthausen (Amicale des Anciens Prisonniers Politiques Luxembourgeois de Mauthausen) and the International Mauthausen Committee (Comité International de Mauthausen - CIM).
As the Luxembourg authorities noted, Mauthausen was one of the harshest concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Established in August 1938, it was primarily intended for political and ideological opponents. Here and in its many subcamps, such as Gusen, Melk, Ebensee and Schloss Hartheim, inmates were brutally exploited as laborers in quarries, munitions factories and other industries.
On 5 May 1945, US troops liberated the camp. Nearly 190,000 people had been deported to the Mauthausen complex between 1938 and 1945. At least 90,000 inmates died there, half of them in the last four months before liberation.
An estimated 176 Luxembourgers were deported to Mauthausen and its many subcamps; 62 of them never returned home. "Their commitment and suffering are not forgotten," stressed the Luxembourg authorities.
