Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen in Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp was established in 1938 in the same municipality where the Austro-Hungarian WWI POW camp had previously operated, holding a total of around 40,000 prisoners, out of whom 8,256 Serbs and up to 5,000 Italians died from 1915 to 1918.