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The camp site lay in the suburb Majdan Tatarski of the Polish town Lublin after which the camp was named later on. According to latest estimates, approximately 78,000 people were murdered there, among them about 60,000 Jews. Majdanek was both a concentration and – at least temporarily – an extermination camp.

The camp erected as of autumn 1941 was conceived to be an integral part of the German colonization and Germanization policy (“New living space in the East” / “General Plan East”) to be translated into practice especially after Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union (“Operation Barbarossa”). In a notice of 20^th July 1941, Heinrich Himmler had installed Odilo Globocnik as supervisor of the construction work on the camp to-be. It became clear that the camp would surpass the other already operating concentration camps considerably in size – according to estimates launched in December 1941; it was expected to hold 150,000 prisoners.   

The Nazis planned to use the camp as “reservoir” of forced labourers for the SS within the entire Lublin district and for the Eastern front. Himmler had made an arrangement with the offices in charge on a takeover of 325,000 prisoners of war by the SS, among them 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war. This intention was abandoned soon, the camp’s official name, however, was consistent with the original purpose as the Nazis continued to call it “Prisoner of War Camp of the weapon SS in Lublin”.  

The primary motive behind that arrangement was to preclude conflict with the administration of the so-called General Government. Hans Frank in his function as Governor General would not have consented to the construction of a concentration camp under the direction of the SS and police leader. The task of organisationally managing the camp in Lublin was performed by the inspection of the concentration camps, the superior SS and police leader in Krakow and Odilo Globocnik. Between September 1941 and July 1944, the camp saw five camp commandants come and go, among them Karl Koch and Arthur Liebehenschel.  

The name “prisoner of war camp” was largely used in pretext, a claim provable for instance by the fact that, up to 1944, only about 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war had been detained in the camp. To this number added around 3,500 “Soviet-Russian war invalids” who were accommodated in a military reserve hospital serving as showpiece for propaganda purpose – some of them being White Russians who had declared their willingness to cooperate with the Germans.  

The camp included a “camp for protective custody” as well as the SS and industrial or economy areas. In February 1943, Himmler gave orders to rename the camp “Concentration Camp of the Weapon SS” (Concentration Camp Lublin); in consequence, a women’s camp was established and opened along with seven outlying sub-camps in Blizyn, Radom and Warsaw among other towns.  

Forced labour was essential for the initial and extension stages of the camp. Aside to that function, many prisoners worked for the “Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke” and other SS companies in which the goods and chattels of murdered Jews were processed for example for further use on the Front.

Between October 1941 and February 1942, mainly Soviet prisoners of war and some hundreds of Jews and Poles from the surroundings arrived at the camp. Translating the decisions taken at the “Wannsee Conference” into practice, the Nazis captured, between the end of March and December 1942, next to Poles, primarily Jews from Slovakia, the German Reich, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Lublin district deporting them to the Majdanek camp that was to serve as transit camp on the prisoners’ route to one of the extermination camps.  

On 24^th April 1942, close to 2,500 Jews from the small ghetto in Majdan Tatarski were deported to the camp established after the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto. Furthermore, the SS interned in Majdanek people affected by the so-called “resettling and peace-bringing actions” – by August 1943 their number had climbed up to more than 8,000 persons who were deported to Germany as forced labourers. As of the end of 1943, Soviet nationals and Poles arrived there in bigger numbers, to which added deportees from Italy, Yugoslavia and other states.  

At Krępiecki forest, in ca. 10 kilometres’ distance from Majdanek, the SS murdered most of the Jews arriving at Majdanek between June and September 1942 (until the gas chambers were built). Late in September 1943, 23 members of the special commando were murdered – quasi a prelude to implementing the so-called “harvest festival”. The mass murder of the Jews living in the General Government and in Bialystok that had been prepared as of late in 1941 was named “Operation Reinhardt” and brought to a close by the “harvest festival” on 3^rd/4^th November 1943.  

Following the revolt unleashed by Jewish prisoners in the extermination camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, the “operation” was primarily put into practice in the camps of Poniatowa, Trawniki and Majdanek. The 3^rd November 1943 saw the wilful murder of between 17,000 and 18,000 Jews in Majdanek alone. Acting in unison with police units, the weapon SS killed a total of about 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district.  

As the Red Army was advancing, the approximately 9,000 prisoners who, in March, were still kept in Majdanek, by and by were deported to other concentration camps, such as to Natzweiler (and from there to Bergen-Belsen), Gross-Rosen, Płaszów, Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. In July 1944, the remainder of the camp was abandoned and about 800 inmates were sent on a death march to Auschwitz. Documents were destroyed and the crematorium was set on fire. The gas chambers and most of the prisoners’ barracks, however, were undamaged.   

On 24^th July 1944, Lublin was taken by the Red Army. As early as autumn 1944 a museum was erected and opened, in the fore of which were curator’s work and first exhibitions strongly dyed in the colours of the Communist ideology. Research was not started before the 1960s.  

Initial legal proceedings against SS members and warders were instituted already late in 1944. Between 1946 and 1948, 95 SS members, mainly guard men/women, stood on trial in Lublin; about two thirds of the accused were condemned. The wardress of the women’s camp, Elsa Ehrich, was sentenced to death and executed in 1948.  

The various court proceedings opened on the grounds of Nazi crimes included time and again trials against persons accused for the role they had played in Majdanek. In the years between 1975 and 1981, 16 persons were in the dock during the Düsseldorf Majdanek proceedings. Hermine Ryan-Braunsteiner, wardress in the women’s camp, received a life sentence, seven other accused were sentenced to prison between three and 12 years; the others were acquitted.

Selective bibliography

Dieter Ambach and Thomas Köhler, Lublin-Majdanek. Das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager im Spiegel von Zeugenaussagen. Düsseldorf 2004 (= Juristic contemporary history North Rhine-Westphalia volume 12)  

Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 7 Wewelsburg, Majdanek (described by Tomasz Kranz), Arbeitsdorf, Herzogenbusch (Vught), Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora. 2008

Majdanek, in: Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, Volume II, H-P, edited by Israel Gutman, Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich and Julius H. Schoeps, 2nd edition, Munich 1998, p.918ff.

Josef Marszalek, Majdanek. Konzentrationslager in Lublin, Warsaw 1984

Tadeusz Mencel, Majdanek 1941-1944, Lublin 1991

Dieter Ambach and Thomas Köhler, Lublin-Majdanek. Das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager im Spiegel von Zeugenaussagen. Düsseldorf 2004 (= Juristic Contemporary history North Rhine-Westphalia. Volume 12)

Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 7 Wewelsburg, Majdanek (described by Tomasz Kranz), Arbeitsdorf, Herzogenbusch (Vught), Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora. 2008

Tomasz Kranz/ Janina Kiełboń Archival Sources and the State of Research Concerning the History of the Camp at Majdanek in: Les archives de la Shoah, ouvrage collectif sous la direction de J. Fredj, Paris 1998, S. 521–540

Tomasz Kranz: Das KZ Lublin - zwischen Planung und Realisierung, in: Ulrich Herbert/ Karin Orth/ Christoph Dieckmann: Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Frankfurt am Main 1998

Tomasz Kranz (Hg.), Bildungsarbeit und historisches Lernen in der Gedenkstätte Majdanek, Lublin, 2000

Tomasz Kranz: Die Erfassung der Todesfälle und die Häftlingssterblichkeit im KZ Lublin. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft ZfG (Journal of Historiography) 55(2007), Issue 3, p.243ff

Josef Marszalek, Majdanek. Konzentrationslager in Lublin, Warsaw 1984

Tadeusz Mencel, Majdanek 1941-1944, Lublin 1991

Ingrid Müller-Münch, Die Frauen von Majdanek – Vom zerstörten Leben der Opfer und der Mörderinnen , Reinbek, Rowohlt publishing house 1982.

Zacheusz Pawlak, „Ich habe überlebt... - ein Häftling berichtet über Majdanek“, Hoffmann and Campe publishers, Hamburg, 1979

Günther Schwarberg, Der Juwelier Von Majdanek, Göttingen 1998

Barbara Schwindt, Das Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek. Funktionswandel im Kontext der „Endlösung“. Würzburg 2005

Konstantin Mikailovich Simonov, The death factory near Lublin. London: Daily Worker League, 1944.

Elizabeth White, Majdanek: Cornerstone of Himmler’s SS Empire in the East, Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1993. pp. 3-21.

 

Documents, photos, audio and video tapes on Lublin/Majdanek on websites (as of May 2009)

http://www1.yadvashem.org/Odot/prog/index_before_change_table.asp

(Gates of Knowledge on the website of Yad Vashem, keyword: Majdanek)

 http://www6.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/photo?lang=en&homepage=true

(More than 350 photos on Majdanek can be found in the digital photo archives of Yad Vashem.)

 http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/search/ph_catalog.php

(Photo archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/ USHMM)

 http://catalog.ushmm.org/

(Library and audio/video tape register of the USHMM, enter Majdanek / Lublin)

Website of the memorial centre Majdanek in Poland: http://www.majdanek.pl/?lng=1 (various publications may be ordered there)

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