The Making

The Majdanek Concentration Camp is located about 3 miles from the Polish city of Lublin. The decision to make the camp came from Heinrich Himmler during his visit to Lublin in July 1941. The Nazis brought in 2,000 Soviet POWs to build the camp. With no barracks these prisoners were forced to sleep and work in the cold outdoors with no water and no toilets.

The Fields

The camp at Majdanek was laid out into six sections called fields. Each field has two rows of barracks on each side of an open area, which has gallows for hanging prisoners. Field 1 was next to the entrance and fields 2,3,and 4 went up a slight slope with field 5 and 6 at the top.

This is Field three at Majdanek, you can see barracks and watch towers in the background.

At first, the Russian POWs were in field 1 and the Jewish women and children were in field 5, but later field 1, right next to the gas chambers, was assigned to the Jews.

The Crematoria

When the camp first opened, the bodies of the dead prisoners were buried in mass graves, but in June 1942 on, they were burned in the first crematoria or on pyres made from the chassis of old trucks. The first crematoria had 2 ovens, which were brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany. The first crematoria is no longer at Majdanek.

The second crematoria was outfitted with 5 ovens which were fueled with coke. It was a wooden building but later it got burned down by the Germans.

In the crematoria there is a room were they take out all the valuables from a persons body after they have been gassed. When the camp was liberated there were still remains of the bodies in the ovens of the crematoria. The last crematoria was built in 1943 which is still standing today.

Barracks

At first, the prisoners had to sleep on straw filled thin pallets on the bare ground in buildings that had no wooden floors. These buildings were horse barns, which could be erected as quickly as possible. In just one barrack they stuffed 500 to 800 prisoners in a room when it only held about 250 people

This gas chamber is the biggest in Majdanek.  You can see the air tight door and a peep hole in the door.

This is a Majdanek gas chamber.  You can see the blue stains on the walls from the Zyklon B pellets.  There is also finger nail scratchings on the walls from prisoners trying to get out.                                 

After gassing the victims, Sondo Kommandos ( special prisoners that could partially be trusted) took the bodies up a slope to the crematoria were the bodies would then be cremated.

Erntefest The worst incident ever to happen at Majdanek was on November 3,1943. It was called ''Bloody Wednesday,'' but the Germans called it Erntefest, or the harvest festival. The reason this was the worst incident was because 18,000 Jews were murdered in a single day. The SS men shot the Jews in a group of one hundred. They were shot in pits while loudspeakers played dance music,'' Beer Barrel Polka,'' to drown out the screams and to reduce the noise from the shooting.

Conditions at Majdanek

While it sill was a Nazi camp, conditions at Majdanek were much worse than any other concentration camp. Majdanek had no sewer system in the camp. They had no toilets they had to just go on the ground. At night when the prisoners were forbidden to leave the barracks, they used wooden buckets. In Lublin the civil authorities would not let the camp be connected to the main sewer line, but in May 1942 Majdanek finally got a sewer system. And in 1943 the camp got running water, but the prisoners got only one shower or bath a month. This lack of sanitation caused many deaths from deceases like typhus, tuberculosis, and dysentery.

No Escape

Majdanek was very strict about not letting Jews escape. It has double barbed wire fence with a high voltage system all around the camp, including nine watch towers equipped with mobile search lights.

Transporting the Jews

During the Nazi occupation, there was no railroad to bring in prisoners directly in to the Majdanek camp. The prisoners were brought to Lublin in long cattle cars then they were loaded up in trucks and brought to Majdanek.

Liberation of Majdanek

The Germans could not shut down Majdanek in such an orderly fashion. With the Russian army advancing westward the Germans evacuated the camp in March 1944. About 15,000 prisoners were transported I trains to camps in Europe like Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbruck, Natzwiler, Mathausen, Lodz, and Plaszow. And about another 1,000 prisoners weremarched off by foot just the day before the liberation.And some prisoners that were to ill to walk were abandoned at Majdanek.

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This is a picture of Jews Liberation Day at Majdanek

  When the Russians overran the camp in July 23, 1944 they finally saw the horror of the death camps. They brought in representatives from the International Red Cross and the news media to view the gas chambers, crematoria, and the survivors, which were a little less than skeletons. But after all that the United States and Great Britain hesitated to believe what had happened. The Germans did not want a repeat of Majdanek. So through the last half of 1944, the Germans worked furiously to complete their deadly work in preparation for the evacuation of Auschwitz the last remaining death camp.

Death Toll

When the Majdanek death camp was liberated, the Soviet Union first said that 1.7 million people had been killed there by the Nazis but at the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals in 1946, the Soviets charged the Nazi leaders at Majdanek with killing only 1.5 million people at Majdanek. By 1960 the number of people murdered by the Nazis at Majdanek declined to 350,000. This was corrected by the guidebook, when it was learned that no more than 300,000 people had even been sent to Majdanek. The actual death toll was 250,000 people killed at Majdanek.

Commandants and Convictions

There were many commandants at Majdanek. The first was Karl Koch, then Max Koegel, and followed by Martin Weiss, and the last was Arthur Liebehenschel. In 1944 a special Soviet Nazi Crime Commission investigated the scenes at Majdanek.

This is Karl Koch the first commandant at Majdanek.

Only some of the 1,300 staff members were put to trial after the war. In November 1944 six SS men who worked at Majdanek were tried in Lublin, four of them were sentenced to death, the other two-committed suicide right before the trial

From 1946 to 1948 in Lublin 95 SS men who worked at Majdanek were put to trial. Seven of them were sentenced to death and the rest of them were sentenced to long-terms in prison. There were 800 cases of cruelty and corruption total in the death camps.

National Museum In 1944 a National Museum was built on the site of Majdanek. It holds the remains of the camp as well as a permanent exhibition, administers archive, and edits research works on the history of the camp.