My blog post today was prompted by this news article: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/236444
Mauthausen concentration camp

Main entrance into Mauthausen camp
I have been reading recent news articles about the Mauthausen concentration camp. I have visited this camp and I have previously written about it on my website and on my blog.
If you want to know more about Mauthausen, start reading about it on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Mauthausen/KZMauthausen/History/FirstPrisoners.html
The following quote is from the web page cited above:
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First prisoners at Mauthausen
The first prisoners to be registered in the Mauthausen concentration camp were 300 German criminals who arrived on August 8, 1938 after being transferred from the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich. By the end of the year, 780 more prisoners had been transferred to Mauthausen from the Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps. Many of these early prisoners had been sentenced by the German courts to hard labor after being convicted of committing a violent crime.
According to Christian Bernadac, a former inmate of the camp, who wrote a book called “The 186 Steps,” the first prisoner to be registered at Mauthausen was Wilhelm Baier who was assigned the number 3. The numbers 1 and 2 were not used. Baier had been sentenced to 30 years hard labor in 1920 after committing what Bernadac called a “blood crime.” Prisoner number 4 was Joseph Wboblowski. The next three prisoners to be registered were Baum, Bartel and Bartosch, all convicted German criminals who had been sentenced to hard labor.
Another category of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were the so-called “career criminals.” On June 17, 1936, Adolf Hitler had signed a decree which made Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the new Chief of the German Police within the Reich Ministry of Interior. According to Peter Padfield, author of the book “Himmler,” the new Police Chief “saw his task as preventing crime before it happened by shutting away habitual criminals, preserving the Volk from contamination by shutting away subversives who might corrupt them, picking up vagrants, the ‘work shy’ and ‘anti-socials’ and putting them to work in his camps, and in addition supervising public morals.”
Padfield wrote that Himmler’s first large-scale action as Police Chief was the “nationwide round-up of professional criminals.” On March 9, 1937, Himmler gave the order to arrest around 2,000 “professional criminals” who had committed two or more crimes, but were now free after having served their sentences. They were arrested without charges and sent to a concentration camp for an indeterminate time.
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School children in America today are taught that the Germans were bad people because they put homosexuals in prison.
The following quote is from my website:
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Another category of German citizens, who were persecuted by Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as Chief of the German Police, was homosexuals.
Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which had been in effect since 1871, made it a crime for men to publicly engage in gay sex or for male prostitutes to solicit men for sex.
Himmler began enforcing this law and a total of about 10,000 homosexuals were eventually sent to concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen for at least 6 months of “rehabilitation.”
According to Bernadac, they “received regular visits from the medical commissions” who attempted to change their sexual orientation because the Nazis believed that these prisoners were gay by choice.
The first homosexual prisoner to be registered at Mauthausen was Georg Bautler, Prisoner No. 130. The first Jew to be sent to Mauthausen was also incarcerated because he had broken the German law under Paragraph 175.
End quote from my website