Himmler in Lublin

On Sunday 20 July 1941, four weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, arrived in Lublin. His host was the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District of the General Government, SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, who for the past three days had also been Himmler’s plenipotentiary for the construction of SS and police bases in the conquered Soviet territories. That day Himmler gave him a series of instructions. The most important concerned the construction in Lublin of a concentration camp for 25,000–50,000 prisoners, who were to work in the workshops and on the building sites of the SS and police. From this order grew the camp known, after a suburb of Lublin, as Majdanek, and officially as KL Lublin. The chronology of the State Museum at Majdanek gives 20 July 1941 as the date of the order to build the camp.

Himmler’s instructions were recorded in two official memoranda dated 21 July, which the Reichsführer annotated with his own comments and initialled. The German historian Jan Erik Schulte, who analysed them, called them the “camp memorandum” and the “construction memorandum”. Both have survived in Globocnik’s personnel file, and the first was published by the Polish historian Czesław Madajczyk in the document collection Zamojszczyzna – Sonderlaboratorium SS.

It is often said that on 20 July Himmler visited Soviet prisoners of war “near Minsk and Lublin” and decided to build a camp near Lublin. The second part is correct; the first needs correcting. Himmler did not go to Minsk, taken by the Wehrmacht at the end of June in the Battle of Białystok–Minsk, until the middle of August 1941 (15 August, according to his official diary). He then inspected the camps for prisoners of war and detained civilians there and, for the first time, watched an execution of about a hundred people, most of them Jews, carried out by a detachment of Einsatzgruppe B. In Lublin on 20 July, by contrast, prisoners of war were not the issue. In its original conception the camp was to be a concentration camp for prisoners of an unspecified kind. Soviet prisoners of war entered the plans only in September 1941.

Lublin in July 1941

From the autumn of 1939 the Lublin District had been a testing ground for Nazi experiments. In the autumn of 1939 it was to become a “reservation” for Jews from the whole of the Reich, to which Adolf Eichmann sent the first transports under the Nisko Plan. From November 1939 the SS and police in the district were commanded by Globocnik, a former Gauleiter of Vienna and a protégé of Himmler. Under his rule a labour camp in Lipowa Street was set up in Lublin in December 1939, the first such camp for Jews in the General Government, and in 1940 a network of labour camps around Bełżec, in which thousands of Jews dug an anti-tank ditch along the border with the USSR. In March 1941 the Germans shut the Jews of Lublin into a ghetto. The Polish intelligentsia and clergy of the district were decimated by arrests and executions, among them those of the AB-Aktion in 1940.

From the summer of 1940 Globocnik had been pressing Himmler for permission to settle Germans in the Lublin region. He had learned that around Zamość there lived the descendants of German colonists settled there under Emperor Joseph II, and he launched a “search for German blood” among these Polonised descendants, who were to be “recovered” for Germandom. Himmler, who as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood was responsible for all settlement policy, was delighted with these plans, even if other dignitaries considered them fantastical.

The war against the USSR opened up entirely new prospects for them. On 24 June 1941 Himmler instructed his settlement expert, Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling, to extend the plans for colonising the east. On 15 July Meyer delivered the first version of the Generalplan Ost. The next day, at a conference at headquarters, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany would not give up the conquered lands and that the Baltic states and Crimea were to be annexed to the Reich. Martin Bormann’s record of this conference, later submitted as evidence at Nuremberg, is regarded as one of the key documents of the radicalisation of German occupation policy. On 17 July a decree by Hitler entrusted Himmler with the “police security” of the newly occupied eastern territories, and on the same day Himmler appointed Globocnik his plenipotentiary for the construction of SS and police bases in the “new eastern space”. A network of fortified SS and police settlements, with barracks and family housing, was to stretch from the Baltic states to Ukraine. According to Schulte, Himmler wanted to go to Lublin straight away but had to postpone the journey by a few days.

The instructions of 20 July

The memoranda of 21 July show what Himmler expected of Globocnik. The concentration camp for 25,000–50,000 prisoners was to supply labour for the workshops and building sites of the SS and police, and subcamps were to be set up beside each future base. It was not to be subordinate to Globocnik but to the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks, and its construction was to be handled by the SS building office under Oswald Pohl. Himmler also ordered another labour camp to be established in Lublin, subordinate, like the Lipowa Street camp, to the SS-owned company Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, and he instructed its workshops, in which almost all the workers were forced labourers, to train bricklayers, carpenters and other building tradesmen “for work in the east”. Schulte concluded that the purpose of the visit was to speed up the “Germanisation” of the region and to prepare the ground for SS settlement, and that the concentration camp was to be its reservoir of cheap forced labour.

A second group of instructions concerned the Lublin region itself. According to Polish and German studies, Himmler decided to extend the “search for German blood” to the whole of the General Government and approved Globocnik’s settlement plans. A large SS and police quarter was to be built in Lublin, and the district, settled by German colonists, was in future to form a bridge linking German settlement in the Baltic states with the German communities of south-eastern Europe. Within the SS this whole complex of projects was called the “Heinrich Programme”. There was no place in these plans for the Polish and Jewish population: the Poles were to be expelled or pushed to the margins, while the Jews, as everywhere in the General Government, were regarded as people destined for removal.

The visit bypassed the civil authorities. Governor-General Hans Frank and the Governor of the Lublin District, Ernst Zörner (PL), had no say in the decisions taken between Himmler and Globocnik, even though they concerned the land, people and economy of “their” territory. This rivalry between the SS and Frank’s administration lasted until 1943 and was one of the reasons for Globocnik’s eventual removal from Lublin.

From labour camp to prisoner-of-war camp

Construction did not begin at once. In August and September 1941 Globocnik’s office was still setting up its departments and drawing up its plans, and the SS bases in Soviet territory were coming into being only with difficulty. The turning point came with the Wehrmacht’s victories in the east and the hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, including, according to German reports, more than 600,000 taken at Kiev. On 22 September the head of SS construction, Hans Kammler, issued an order to build the first section of the camp in Lublin for 5,000 prisoners, and a few days later, on 27 September, he amended it: from 1 October camps for 50,000 prisoners of war each were to be built in Lublin and at Oświęcim (Auschwitz). In this way the Lublin camp and Birkenau were born as twin SS prisoner-of-war camps.

According to the museum’s chronology, construction began on 7 October 1941 in fields on the south-eastern edge of the city, beside the road to Zamość. The camp was officially called the Prisoner-of-War Camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin (Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS Lublin). It was built by Soviet prisoners of war, about 2,000 men, in freezing weather, without shelter and with almost no food. According to German studies, by mid-November only about 500 of them were still alive, and at the turn of 1941 and 1942, when an epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp, they all died, as did the Jews from the Lipowa Street camp who had been sent to work there. On paper the plans kept growing: in November there was talk of 125,000 prisoners, and in March 1942 the approved master plan provided for 150,000 prisoners and prisoners of war. Only part of the camp was built; in the end it could hold about 25,000 people.

Place in the war

The order of 20 July 1941 said nothing about extermination. It was part of the megalomaniac plans for colonising the east, which the SS meant to carry out with the hands of prisoners and prisoners of war. Yet the men who received new tasks from Himmler at that time became, a few months later, the organisers of mass murder. In the late summer and autumn of 1941 the decisions to murder the Jews were being taken, and on 13 October 1941 Globocnik met Himmler and the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger. At the beginning of November work began near Bełżec on the first extermination camp in the General Government. From March 1942 Globocnik directed Operation Reinhardt, in which, according to historians’ estimates, some 1.5–1.8 million Jews were murdered in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka and in mass shootings. The Lublin “SS base”, where in the autumn of 1941 a training camp at Trawniki (PL) for selected Soviet prisoners of war was also established, provided this operation with its men and its staff.

The settlement plans, too, left the drawing board. In November 1941 more than 2,000 Poles were driven out of seven villages near Zamość to make room for German families, and from November 1942 the SS carried out the expulsions from the Zamość region, in which some 110,000 Poles, including about 30,000 children, were driven from their homes. Resistance by the population and the Polish underground, together with the opposition of Frank’s administration, led to the operation being halted in 1943.

Meanwhile the camp at Majdanek changed its function several times. From the spring of 1942 it received Jews from Slovakia, the Protectorate and the ghettos of the General Government, as well as Poles seized in round-ups, people expelled from the Zamość region and political prisoners. In February 1943 it was renamed Concentration Camp Lublin. From the autumn of 1942 it had gas chambers, and on 3 November 1943, in Operation Erntefest (“Harvest Festival”), SS men and policemen shot some 18,000 Jews in ditches behind the camp, in one of the largest single massacres in the history of the German concentration camps. On 23 July 1944 the Red Army entered the almost intact camp. It was the first large concentration camp to be liberated by the Allies, and photographs of its gas chambers and storerooms of shoes went round the world. The number of victims was long disputed: Soviet and post-war Polish estimates spoke of hundreds of thousands killed. According to the findings of Tomasz Kranz (PL) published in 2005 and accepted by the museum, some 130,000–150,000 people passed through the camp and almost 80,000 died there, including about 60,000 Jews.