Mauthausen enters the diary’s postwar account as the final destination of Peter van Pels’s forced journey from Auschwitz: sent on a death march in January 1945, he died there on May 5, three days before the camp was liberated. The place is named briefly, but that chronology makes it a stark endpoint in the fate of one of the eight people who had hidden in the Secret Annex.

Place in the deportation chronology

After the residents of the Secret Annex were arrested, they were taken first to a prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of the Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were deported in the last transport to leave Westerbork; three days later they arrived at Auschwitz. Mauthausen appears later in this sequence, not as part of the Annex’s hidden daily life but in the account of what happened to Peter after Auschwitz.

Peter van Pels’s final journey

Peter was forced to take part in the January 16, 1945 death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen. The account identifies the march as a compelled transfer and gives its date, linking his final months to the wider dispersal of the Annex residents after deportation. It does not supply details of the journey itself, so Mauthausen’s significance here rests on the documented route and outcome rather than a description of camp conditions.

Death and historical significance

Peter died at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, three days before the camp was liberated. The narrow interval between his death and liberation gives the entry its particular force: liberation did not arrive in time for him. In the diary’s postwar record, the camp’s name therefore marks both the end of Peter’s life and the unequal timing of survival and release among those sent into the concentration-camp system.