US nurse Mae Lopatin Herman summed up the horror of Mauthausen when she described her arrival at the Nazi concentration camp after its liberation 68 years ago this Sunday. "We could smell (the camp) from a long way off," the former member of a US medical unit recalled. "In the middle of the most beautiful scenery you could ever imagine was this hellhole." Her account is one of 48 interviews than can be heard in a new visitor centre open to the public from Monday that tells the dark story of Austria's main "KZ" and its subcamps between 1938 and 1945.

VIENNA (Reuters) - The Swedish manager of an Austrian hotel was trapped in a faulty lift for four days before a bread delivery man heard his cries for help on Friday, police said. The 58-year-old was in good physical condition after his ordeal in the spa town of Bad Gastein near Salzburg, police in the mountainous Austrian province said. "He told police he had done a hunting course with survival training in the Swedish military, which stood him in good stead in this case," a police statement said.

A 4.5-magnitude quake shook southern Austria on Saturday, the country's ZAMG meteorological and geodynamic institute said, but it was not immediately clear whether it had caused any damage. The quake struck at 14:35 pm (1335 GMT) and "was strongly felt" in the Karavanke mountain range bordering Slovenia, near Eisenkappel in Austria's southern state of Carinthia, the centre said.