Majdanek concentration camp
Majdanek 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 gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi 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 October 1, 1941, to July 22, 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 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 genocidal policy of Nazi Germany. The site was given national designation in 1965. Today, the Majdanek State Museum is a 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.
History
Construction
Konzentrationslager Lublin was established in October 1941 on the orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, forwarded to Odilo Globocnik soon after Himmler's visit to Lublin on July 17–20, 1941 in the course of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 POWs.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. 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.
Operation
In July 1942, Himmler visited Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the three secret extermination camps built specifically for Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry. These camps had begun operations in March, May, and July 1942, respectively. Subsequently, Himmler issued an order that the deportations of Jews to the camps from the five districts of occupied Poland, which constituted the Nazi Generalgouvernement, be completed by the end of 1942.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, 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.
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 the one in Warsaw, 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 were Jews, and another 1,884 were non-Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, of which 9,105 were Jews and 3,893 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, Elisabeth Knoblich-Ernst, Charlotte Karla Mayer-Woellert, and Gertrud Heise, who were later convicted as war criminals.
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" concentration camps became sub-camps of Majdanek.
From September 1, 1941, to May 28, 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 June 18, 1943, Fritz Ritterbusch moved to KL Lublin to become aide-de-camp to the Commandant.
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.
Cremation facilities
Until June 1942, the bodies of those murdered at Majdanek were buried in mass graves.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; 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 July 22, 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.
''Aktion Erntefest''
Operation Reinhard continued until early November 1943, when the last Jewish prisoners of the Majdanek system of subcamps from the District Lublin in the General Government were massacred by the firing squads of Trawniki men during Operation "Harvest Festival". With respect to the main camp at Majdanek, the most notorious executions occurred on November 3, 1943, when 18,400 Jews were murdered in a single day. The next morning, 25 Jews who had succeeded in hiding were found and shot. Meanwhile, 611 other prisoners, 311 women and 300 men, were commanded to sort through the clothes of the dead and cover the burial trenches. The men were later assigned to Sonderkommando 1005, where they had to exhume the same bodies for cremation. These men were then executed. The 311 women were subsequently sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered by gas. By the end of Aktion Erntefest, Majdanek had only 71 Jews left out of the total number of 6,562 prisoners still alive.File:Majdanek - enterace.jpg|thumb|right|Inconspicuous structure for murder. Showers, and similarly built gas chambers.
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 was Zyklon B.