The liberation of Majdanek

On 24 July 1944 Soviet troops took Lublin, and on its south-eastern outskirts they occupied the Majdanek concentration camp. It was the first large German camp to fall into Allied hands before the Germans had managed to cover their tracks: the barracks, gas chambers, crematorium, storerooms of the victims’ belongings and part of the records were still there. In the weeks that followed, photographs and reports from Majdanek went round the world and for the first time showed in tangible form what the system the Allies had spoken of in their declaration of December 1942 actually meant.

The date of the entry into the camp itself is not consistent across the sources. The chronology of the State Museum at Majdanek and some other accounts give 24 July, the same day the fighting for the city ended. Many studies, including American ones, speak of the night of 22–23 July or of 23 July, when the first Soviet units reached the camp, abandoned by the SS, while the fighting for Lublin was still going on. It is therefore more accurate to speak of the turn of 23 and 24 July than of a single day. The phrase in chronologies describing Majdanek as the “first of many” liberated camps also needs some qualification: the Red Army had already passed through sites of crimes, and the Germans had dismantled and disguised the sites of the Operation Reinhard death camps – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – in 1943–1944. Majdanek was the first large concentration camp to be captured in an almost intact state.

The camp outside Lublin

Majdanek was established in the autumn of 1941. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler decided to build it during his July visit to Lublin and entrusted the task to the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik. The camp – officially at first a Waffen-SS prisoner-of-war camp and from February 1943 Lublin Concentration Camp – came under the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. Its inmates included Soviet prisoners of war; Jews from Slovakia, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Germany, the ghettos of the Lublin region and, after the suppression of the uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto; Polish political prisoners; peasants from Belarus; and people expelled from the Zamość region. From the autumn of 1942 it had gas chambers in which people were killed with Zyklon B and carbon monoxide, and the camp also served as a store for the property of Jews murdered in the Operation Reinhard death camps.

The bloodiest day in its history was 3 November 1943. In Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest) SS men and police shot some 18,000 Jews – prisoners of Majdanek and of the Lublin labour camps – in ditches behind Field V. It was the largest single execution in the history of the German concentration camps. After it Majdanek ceased to be a site of the mass murder of Jews, but it continued to operate as a concentration camp for Poles and prisoners of other nationalities, and from the spring of 1944 also as a place to which sick and emaciated prisoners were brought from other camps. From May 1944 the commandant was SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel, transferred from Auschwitz.

The evacuation

The Germans recognised that the front was approaching in the spring of 1944, when the Red Army reached the line of Kovel and the Bug. According to the museum, they began evacuating the camp on 1 April 1944. In the following weeks thousands of prisoners were taken by rail to Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Natzweiler and other camps deeper in the Reich. The final stage of the evacuation began on 17 July, and on the afternoon of 22 July the SS garrison led the remaining prisoners out of the camp in a column on foot – between about 800 and about a thousand people, according to various findings – and drove them west. After several days’ march in the heat, during which those who could no longer walk were shot, the prisoners were loaded into goods wagons at Ćmielów. The train reached Auschwitz on 28 July. According to some studies, roughly half of those marched out survived.

The Germans were in a hurry, but they did not manage to erase the traces of their crimes. Unlike Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, which had been dismantled, ploughed over and disguised, Majdanek remained almost entirely intact. According to accounts and the findings of later researchers, the crematorium was set on fire at the last moment and some documents were burnt, but the barracks, gas chambers, watchtowers, fences and storerooms were left standing. Historians still ask why this happened: some point to the chaos of the retreat and surprise at the speed of the Soviet advance, others to negligence on the part of the head of the camp administration, Anton Thernes, who was responsible for liquidating the camp.

The fighting for Lublin

Lublin lay in the path of the left wing of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front. After the destruction of Army Group Centre in Belarus, which began on 22 June, the troops of this wing went into the attack from Kovel on 18 July. The Lublin–Brest offensive, the last stage of Operation Bagration, struck the weakened junction of the German Army Groups Centre and North Ukraine. Soviet troops crossed the Bug and took Chełm on 22 July, and the spearheads of General Semyon Bogdanov’s 2nd Tank Army reached the outskirts of Lublin that same day.

The Germans tried to hold the city as a strongpoint. The fighting went on on 23 and 24 July. Bogdanov was wounded on 23 July, and command of the army passed to his chief of staff, General Aleksei Radzievsky. Units of General Vasily Chuikov’s 8th Guards Army also entered the city; according to his memoirs and Soviet studies, they were among the first in the camp. Units of the Home Army also took part in the fighting, attacking the retreating Germans in and around the city as part of Operation Tempest, as they had done a few days earlier in Wilno and were doing in those same days in Lwów. By 24 July Lublin was in Soviet hands. It was the first large city west of the Bug – that is, beyond the line Moscow regarded as the future Polish–Soviet border.

What was found in the camp

According to the museum’s findings, the Soviet soldiers found fewer than a thousand people in the camp who had not been taken out with the last column: above all the sick and disabled from the hospital for Soviet prisoners of war, and a small group of prisoners of other nationalities. The figures given in the literature vary, because some prisoners had managed to leave on their own while others were in no condition to move. They were taken into the care of the Lublin branch of the Polish Red Cross.

The soldiers and the first journalists to arrive saw a camp whose purpose was beyond doubt. In the bathhouse by the entrance and in the neighbouring building there were airtight chambers with spyholes in the doors and blue Zyklon B stains on the walls, with empty cans of the agent standing nearby. The crematorium with its five furnaces was partly burnt, but the furnaces had survived, and human bones lay nearby. In the camp fields and the SS market garden pits of ashes were found which – as reporters related – had been mixed with soil and compost and spread as fertiliser on the vegetable beds. In the storerooms by the road lay mountains of the dead people’s belongings: clothes, spectacles, suitcases, children’s toys and shoes. The number of pairs of shoes given in Soviet reports ran into hundreds of thousands. Part of the camp’s records also survived, from which Konstantin Simonov later read out the names of victims from all over Europe.

The world learns

From the outset the Soviet authorities exploited the discovery for propaganda, but this time the propaganda rested on facts that anyone who came could see with their own eyes. The camp was filmed by Soviet newsreel cameramen, including the crew of Roman Karmen, and by the Polish Army’s Czołówka film unit. Their footage was used for Aleksander Ford’s film Majdanek – Cemetery of Europe (PL), shown in the autumn of 1944. The Soviet artist Zinovy Tolkachev, who came to Lublin with the army, made a series of drawings in the camp, later exhibited as one of the first testimonies to the crimes. Konstantin Simonov, war correspondent of Krasnaya Zvezda, published a series of reports in August, later issued as the pamphlet Extermination Camp and quickly translated into many languages, including English.

In the West the news was at first received with distrust. At the end of August the Soviet authorities took a group of foreign correspondents from Moscow to Majdanek. Among them were William H. Lawrence of the New York Times, who by his own account reached the camp on 27 August, and Alexander Werth, correspondent of the BBC and the Sunday Times. On 30 August 1944 the New York Times printed Lawrence’s report on its front page, citing the Soviet figure of 1.5 million murdered. Werth later recalled that the BBC did not broadcast his report, finding it too improbable and suspecting a Soviet propaganda trick – a distrust reinforced by the memory of false stories of German atrocities from the previous war and by the Soviet effort to blame Katyn on the Germans.

On the spot, evidence was gathered by the Polish–Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes Committed in the Majdanek Extermination Camp, set up in August by the PKWN in agreement with the Soviet authorities. The commission questioned witnesses, exhumed graves and examined the camp’s installations. Its communiqué, published in the autumn of 1944, gave a figure of 1.5 million murdered, calculated from the estimated capacity of the crematoria rather than from documents. On this basis the first of the Majdanek trials was held before the Special Criminal Court in Lublin in November and December 1944. Six defendants – four SS men, including Anton Thernes, and two prisoner functionaries – were sentenced to death. Five of them were hanged in public next to the camp on 3 December 1944; one had earlier committed suicide. It was one of the first trials of members of the staff of a German concentration camp.

The victims

For decades the number of Majdanek’s victims was a matter of dispute. After the Soviet estimate of 1.5 million, Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz in 1948 accepted a figure of about 360,000, and the museum historian Czesław Rajca in 1992 about 235,000. Research by Tomasz Kranz (PL) published in 2005, based on surviving camp records, transport lists and a telegram from Hermann Höfle discovered in 2000, showed that some 78,000 people died in the camp, including some 59,000 Jews. The museum has adopted these findings and states that of some 130,000–150,000 prisoners almost 80,000 died, including about 60,000 Jews, followed by Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians and members of other nations. Some were killed in executions and in the gas chambers; the rest died of hunger, disease, exhaustion from labour and beatings.

Lublin, the PKWN and the NKVD

The capture of Lublin was not only of military significance. On 21 July the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) was set up in Moscow, headed by Edward Osóbka-Morawski – a centre of power dependent on Moscow and a rival to the Polish government in London. Its manifesto, dated 22 July at Chełm, was broadcast by radio from Moscow. According to historians’ findings, Joseph Stalin on 21 July ordered the command of the 1st Belorussian Front to take Lublin as quickly as possible, as it was to become the committee’s seat. The PKWN moved there at the end of July, and from 1 August Lublin was its official seat. The Polish government-in-exile and the Polish Underground State did not recognise the committee.

The camp that the world was coming to know as a symbol of German crimes was soon put to use by the new authorities. On the site of the former Majdanek the NKVD set up a filtration camp and a prison for soldiers of the Home Army and the National Armed Forces (NSZ) detained in the Lublin region after the fighting against the Germans was over. The commander of the Home Army’s Lublin District, Lieutenant Colonel Kazimierz Tumidajski (PL) (“Marcin”), was arrested by the NKVD in Lublin on 27 or 28 July and taken to Moscow at the beginning of August. On 19 August the district staff reported to London on mass arrests of Home Army soldiers, who were being held at Majdanek. On the night of 23 August some 250 officers and NCOs were taken in goods wagons from Lublin Tatary (PL) station to camps deep inside the USSR, including the area of Ryazan. This chapter in the history of the site, known today as the NKVD camp at Majdanek (PL), is also commemorated by the museum. In those same weeks Home Army soldiers from the Wilno region, Volhynia and the Lwów area met a similar fate.

Place in the war

The liberation of Majdanek was the first moment at which the Allies entered a large German concentration camp that had operated until its last days and found there not only witnesses but the entire apparatus of extermination. Information about the murder of the Jews had been reaching the West since 1942, but for a long time it remained a matter of reports that many did not believe. Lublin provided the first photographs, films and documents. The doubts with which the first reports were received were dispelled only in the following months, when the Red Army entered Auschwitz in January 1945 and in April 1945 American and British soldiers saw Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. The material of the Lublin commission was also cited by the Soviet prosecution before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The camp’s former commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel, was sentenced in Kraków in 1947 at the Auschwitz staff trial and executed in 1948, and the longest trial of members of the camp’s staff took place in Düsseldorf in 1975–1981.

In the autumn of 1944 the State Museum at Majdanek was established on the site of the camp – the first museum in the world on the site of a German concentration camp. In 1969, on the 25th anniversary of the liberation, the Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom designed by Wiktor Tołkin was unveiled there.

For the course of the war, the capture of Lublin meant that the front now stood on the threshold of the Vistula: from the Lublin region the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front reached the river near Dęblin and Puławy in the last days of July, while the 2nd Tank Army turned north towards the approaches to Praga, Warsaw’s right-bank district. For half a year Lublin became the capital of a new authority dependent on Moscow, which in the last days of 1944 transformed itself into the Provisional Government. The same land on which the world saw the first evidence of the German extermination became the scene of the first mass arrests of soldiers of the Polish Underground State by the NKVD – and this duality long shaped Polish memory of the summer of 1944.