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Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had three , two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi Party concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder an estimated 78,000 people during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.
The camp was nicknamed Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacent to the Lublin ghetto of Majdan Tatarski. Nazi documents initially described the site as a POW camp of the Waffen-SS, based on how it was funded and operated. It was renamed by the Reich Security Main Office as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9, 1943, but the local Polish name remained more popular.
After the camp's liberation in July 1944, the site was formally protected by the Soviet Union. By autumn, with the war still raging, it had been preserved as a museum. The crematorium ovens and gas chambers were largely intact, serving as some of the best examples of the Final Solution of Nazi Germany. The site was given national designation in 1965. Today, the Majdanek State Museum is a The Holocaust memorial museum and education centre devoted entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of concentration, slave-labor, and extermination camps and sub-camps of KL Lublin. It houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony.
After large numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war were captured during the Battle of Kiev, the projected camp capacity was subsequently increased to 50,000. Construction for that many began on October 1, 1941 (as it did also in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had received the same order). In early November, the plans were extended to allow for 125,000 inmates and in December to 150,000. It was further increased in March 1942 to allow for 250,000 Soviet prisoners of war.
Construction began with 150 Jewish forced laborers from one of Globocnik's Lublin camps, to which the prisoners returned each night. Later the workforce included 2,000 Red Army POWs, who had to survive extreme conditions, including sleeping out in the open. By mid-November, only 500 of them were still alive, of whom at least 30% were incapable of further labor. In mid-December, barracks for 20,000 were ready when a typhus epidemic broke out, and by January 1942 all the slave laborers – POWs as well as Polish Jews – were dead. All work ceased until March 1942, when new prisoners arrived. Although the camp did eventually have the capacity to hold approximately 50,000 prisoners, it did not grow significantly beyond that size.
Majdanek was made into a secondary sorting and storage depot at the onset of Operation Reinhard, for property and valuables taken from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Due to large Jewish populations in southeastern Poland, including the ghettos at Kraków, Lwów, Zamość and Warsaw Ghetto, which were not yet "processed", Majdanek was refurbished as a killing center around March 1942. The gassing was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the buildings. Another frequent murder method was shootings by the squads of Trawnikis. According to the Majdanek Museum, the gas chambers began operation in September 1942. There are two identical buildings at Majdanek where Zyklon B was used. Executions were carried out in barrack 41 with crystalline hydrogen cyanide released by the Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in barrack 42. Compare
Due to the pressing need for foreign manpower in the war industry, Jewish laborers from Poland were originally spared. For a time they were either kept in the ghettos, such as Warsaw Ghetto (which became a concentration camp after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), or sent to labor camps such as Majdanek, where they worked primarily at the Steyr-Daimler-Puch weapons/munitions factory.
By mid-October 1942, the camp held 9,519 registered prisoners, of whom 7,468 (or 78.45%) were Jews, and another 1,884 (19.79%) were non-Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, of which 9,105 (56.18%) were Jews and 3,893 (24.02%) were non-Jewish Poles.. Minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals. According to the data from the official Majdanek State Museum, 300,000 people were inmates of the camp at one time or another. The prisoner population at any given time was much lower.
From October 1942 onward Majdanek also had female overseers. These SS guards, trained at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, included Elsa Ehrich, Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner, Hermine Braunsteiner, Hildegard Lächert, Rosy Suess (Süss), Elisabeth Knoblich-Ernst, Charlotte Karla Mayer-Woellert, and Gertrud Heise (1942–1944), who were later convicted as war criminals. Source: See: index or articles ("Personenregister"). Oldenburger OnlineZeitschriftenBibliothek.
Majdanek did not initially have subcamps. These were incorporated in early autumn 1943 when the remaining forced labor camps around Lublin, including Budzyn, Trawniki, Poniatowa, Krasnik, Pulawy, as well as the "Airstrip" ("Airfield"), and "Lipowa 7") concentration camps became sub-camps of Majdanek.
From 1 September 1941 to 28 May 1942, Alfons Bentele headed the Administration in the camp. Alois Kurz, SS Untersturmführer, was a German staff member at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and at Mittelbau-Dora. He was not charged. On 18 June 1943, Fritz Ritterbusch moved to KL Lublin to become aide-de-camp to the Commandant.Biogram Fritza Ritterbuscha na www.MAJDANEK.com.pl
Due to the camp's proximity to Lublin, prisoners were able to communicate with the outside world through letters smuggled out by civilian workers who entered the camp. Many of these surviving letters have been donated by their recipients to the camp museum. In 2008 the museum held a special exhibition displaying a selection of those letters..
From February 1943 onward, the Germans allowed the Polish Red Cross and Central Welfare Council to bring in food items to the camp. Prisoners could receive food packages addressed to them by name via the Polish Red Cross. The Majdanek Museum archives document 10,300 such itemized deliveries..
From June 1942, the SS disposed of the bodies by burning them, either on pyres made from the chassis of old lorries or in a crematorium. The so-called First Crematorium had two ovens which were brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This facility stood in "Interfield I", the area between the first and the second fenced camp section;See File:Alians PL Lublin StateMuseumKL Majdanek,2007 05 20,P5200312.jpg it is no longer in existence today.
In autumn of 1943, the first crematorium at Majdanek was replaced by the New Crematorium. It was a T-shaped wooden building with five ovens, fueled with coke and built by the Heinrich Kori GmbH of Berlin. The building was set on fire by the Germans on 22 July 1944 as they abandoned the camp on the day that the Red Army entered the outskirts of Lublin. The crematorium building which stands on the site today is a reconstruction from the time when the former camp became a memorial. Its ovens are the original ones built in 1943.
Executions of the remaining prisoners continued at Majdanek in the following months. Between December 1943 and March 1944, Majdanek received approximately 18,000 so-called "invalids", many of whom were subsequently murdered with Zyklon B. Executions by firing squad continued as well, with 600 shot on January 21, 1944; 180 shot on January 23, 1944; and 200 shot on March 24, 1944.
Adjutant Karl Höcker's postwar trial documented his culpability in mass murders committed at this camp:
On 3 May 1989 a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years imprisonment for his involvement in gassing to death prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the concentration camp Majdanek in Poland. Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow.In addition, Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs, while awaiting trial in Poland, that one method of murder used at Majdanek (KZ Lublin) was Zyklon B.
Although 1,000 inmates had previously been forcibly marched to Auschwitz (of whom only half arrived alive), the Red Army still found thousands of inmates, mainly POWs, still in the camp, and ample evidence of the mass murder that had occurred there.
In 1961, Raul Hilberg estimated that 50,000 Jewish victims were murdered in the camp. In 1992, Czesław Rajca gave his own estimate of 235,000; it was displayed at the camp museum. The 2005 research by the Head of Scientific Department at Majdanek Museum, historian Tomasz Kranz indicated that there were 79,000 victims, 59,000 of them Jews.
The differences between the estimates stem from different methods used and the amounts of evidence available to the researchers. The Soviet figures relied on the crudest methodology, used for Auschwitz estimates also—it assumed that the number of victims more or less corresponded to the crematoria capacity. Later researchers tried to take much more evidence into account, using records of deportations, contemporaneous population censuses, and recovered Nazi records. Hilberg's 1961 estimate, using these records, aligns closely with Kranz's report.
| +Majdanek commandants |
| Camp commandant from October 1941 to August 1942. Tried and executed by the SS on April 5, 1945, for robbing the Reich of Jewish gold and money and committing multiple unauthorized murders. |
| Camp commandant from August 1942 to November 1942. Committed suicide in Nuremberg trials in Germany the day after his arrest on June 27, 1946. |
| Camp commandant from November 1942 to October 1943. Tried and sentenced to death by the SS on April 15, 1945, for stealing from the Reich to become rich, the same as Koch. Whether he was executed is unknown. |
| Camp commandant from November 1, 1943 to May 5, 1944. Tried by the U.S. military during the Dachau trials in November 1945, hanged on May 29, 1946. |
| Camp commandant from May 5, 1944 to July 22, 1944. Tried by Poland at the Auschwitz trial in Kraków, sentenced to death and hanged on January 28, 1948. |
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Some Nazi personnel of the camp were prosecuted immediately after the war, and some in the decades afterward. In November and December 1944, four SS Men and two kapos were placed on trial; one committed suicide and the rest were hanged on December 3, 1944.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington. The last major, widely publicized prosecution of 16 SS members from Majdanek ( Majdanek-Prozess in German) took place from 1975 to 1981 in West Germany. Of 1,037 SS members who worked at Majdanek and are known by name, 170 were prosecuted, due to a rule applied by the West German justice system allowing only those directly involved in the process to be charged with murder.
On August 19, 1944, in a report to the Polish government-in-exile, the Lublin District of the Home Army (AK) wrote: "Mass arrests of the AK soldiers are being carried out by the NKVD all over the region. These arrests are tolerated by the Polish Committee of National Liberation, and AK soldiers are incarcerated in the Majdanek Camp. Losses of our nation and the Home Army are equal to the losses which we suffered during the German occupation. We are paying with our blood."Tadeusz Walenty Pełczyński, Armia Krajowa w dokumentach 1939-1945. Vol. IV: "Lipiec-Październik 1944"; Wrocław 1991, pp. 189, 200.
Among the prisoners at the Majdanek NKVD Camp were Volhynian members of the AK, and soldiers of the AK units which had been moving toward Warsaw to join in the Warsaw Uprising. On August 23, 1944, some 250 inmates from Majdanek were transported to the rail station Lublin Tatary. There, all victims were placed in cattle cars and taken to camps in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union.
In October 2005, in cooperation with the Majdanek museum, four Majdanek survivors returned to the site and enabled archaeologists to find some 50 objects which had been buried by inmates, including watches, earrings, and wedding rings.. According to the documentary film Buried Prayers, this was the largest reported recovery of valuables in a death camp to date. Interviews between government historians and Jewish survivors were not frequent before 2005..
The camp today occupies about half of its original , and—but for the former buildings—is mostly bare. A fire in August 2010 destroyed one of the wooden buildings that was being used as a museum to house seven thousand pairs of prisoners' shoes. The city of Lublin has tripled in size since the end of World War II, and even the main camp is today within the boundaries of the city of Lublin. It is clearly visible to many inhabitants of the city's high-rises, a fact that many visitors remark upon. The gardens of houses and flats border on and overlook the camp.
In 2016, Majdanek State Museum and its branches, Sobibór and Bełżec, had about 210,000 visitors. This was an increase of 10,000 visitors from the previous year. Visitors include Jews, Poles, and others that wish to learn more about the harsh crimes against humanity.State Museum at Majdanek, accessed March 13, 2018. http://www.majdanek.eu/en.
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