The camp at Majdanek

Under an order issued on 27 September 1941 by the head of SS construction, Hans Kammler, two camps for Soviet prisoners of war, each for 50,000 men, were to be set up “immediately” on 1 October, in Lublin and at Oświęcim (Auschwitz). The Lublin camp, officially called the Prisoner-of-War Camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin (Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS Lublin), went down in history under the name given to it by the city’s inhabitants: Majdanek, after the nearby district of Majdan Tatarski (PL). It was the first camp subordinate to the SS Concentration Camps Inspectorate on the territory of the General Government. By July 1944, according to the findings of the State Museum at Majdanek, some 130,000–150,000 people had passed through it, and nearly 80,000 of them had lost their lives, most of them Jews.

It is often said that the Majdanek concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Lublin), which later became an extermination camp, was “opened” on 1 October 1941. This needs several corrections. 1 October was the date set in Kammler’s order, not the day the camp opened. According to the museum’s chronology, construction work began on 7 October 1941, and the first sizeable group of prisoners, Soviet POWs, was brought in at the end of October. Majdanek received the name Lublin Concentration Camp (Konzentrationslager Lublin, KL Lublin) only in February 1943. Finally, the term “extermination camp” is a matter of debate among historians: the museum calls Majdanek a concentration and extermination camp because gas chambers operated there from the autumn of 1942, but the museum’s director, Tomasz Kranz (PL), points out that direct extermination was a secondary function there, and that the camp remained above all a “multifunctional makeshift” in which people died mainly of exhaustion, hunger and disease, and in executions.

From SS base to prisoner-of-war camp

The camp’s history began on 20 July 1941, when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, during a visit to Lublin, instructed the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District, SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, to build a concentration camp for 25,000–50,000 prisoners. They were to work in SS and police workshops and on SS and police building sites: Lublin was to become the rear base for a network of fortified SS bases in the conquered Soviet territories and a centre of German settlement in the east. From the outset, however, the camp did not belong to Globocnik. Formally it was subordinate to the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks; its plans and construction were handled by the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Police in Lublin; and organisational matters were taken in hand, on behalf of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, by the commandant of Buchenwald, SS-Standartenführer Karl Otto Koch.

Through August and most of September the order remained on paper. Its fate was decided by the situation on the Eastern Front. Since the German attack on the Soviet Union the Wehrmacht had been taking prisoners in numbers unknown in any previous war: hundreds of thousands in the pockets at Białystok and Minsk, at Smolensk and at Uman, and in September, according to German communiqués, 665,000 near Kiev. Himmler negotiated with the Wehrmacht high command the transfer of some of these prisoners to the SS as labour. According to the German historian Jan Erik Schulte, it was this agreement that changed the character of the planned camps: instead of concentration-camp prisoners, tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were now to be sent to them.

On 22 September Kammler issued an order to build the first part of the Lublin camp for 5,000 prisoners. Five days later he replaced it with a new order covering both Lublin and Auschwitz, with the date of 1 October and a planned capacity of 50,000 prisoners of war in each camp. From the same order grew the camp at Brzezinka (Birkenau), which Himmler, on his visit to Oświęcim in March 1941, had already announced, according to the post-war notes of Rudolf Höss. Majdanek and Birkenau were thus born as twin SS prisoner-of-war camps, built at the same time, to the same guidelines from Berlin and by the hands of the same people: Soviet prisoners of war.

Construction in the autumn of 1941

The site chosen for the camp lay on the south-eastern outskirts of Lublin, beside the road leading to Zamość and Lwów (Lviv), on fields where the city met the villages of Dziesiąta, Kalinówka and Abramowice. The first site plan is dated 7 October 1941. The camp was to consist of an SS sector, an economic complex with workshops and storehouses, and a prisoners’ section divided into square “fields”, surrounded by a double fence of electrified barbed wire and watchtowers. At first none of this existed. The commandant’s office and the guards were housed in buildings in the city, the commandant’s office in Ogrodowa Street, and barracks for the garrison and quarters for SS officers by the camp were built only in 1942–1943.

According to the museum and German studies, the camp was built by some two thousand Soviet prisoners of war, brought at the end of October from Wehrmacht camps. They worked in the rain, then in the frost, at first with no roof over their heads, in the rags of their uniforms and with almost no food, under the supervision of SS men who treated them as condemned men. By mid-November only about five hundred of them were still alive, and at least a third of the survivors were unfit for work. At the end of 1941 the first prisoners from concentration camps in the Reich, among them Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, were brought to Lublin to act as interpreters, doctors, clerks and kapos. On 12 December 1941, according to the museum’s chronology, the first 150 Jewish prisoners were placed in the camp – forced labourers from the labour camp in Lipowa Street – followed by several hundred peasants from the Lublin region, imprisoned as hostages for failing to deliver compulsory quotas. Some studies state that Jews from Lipowa Street had been working on the site since October, walking there from the city every day.

By mid-December barracks for about 20,000 people were ready. At that point an epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp. By the turn of 1941 and 1942 none of the Soviet prisoners of war who had built Majdanek, nor any of the Jewish labour detail, was still alive. In January and February 1942 construction came to a halt for lack of labour. Meanwhile the plans grew on paper: at the beginning of November Kammler raised the camp’s planned capacity to 125,000, in December to 150,000, and in March 1942 there was even talk of 250,000 prisoners of war. The master plan approved on 23 March 1942 envisaged a camp for 150,000 prisoners and POWs, the largest in occupied Europe. Because of economic difficulties, the overloading of the single-track railway line to Lublin and setbacks at the front, only part of it was built: on 270 hectares five prisoners’ fields were created with 108 barracks, which could hold about 25,000 people. A sixth field was completed too late to be used.

The fate of Majdanek’s builders was no exception. The autumn and winter of 1941 were a time of mass death among Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity. Held in camps in the open air, starved in accordance with the decisions to use the food of the occupied territories for the Wehrmacht and the Reich, and decimated by typhus and dysentery, they died in the worst weeks, by estimates, at a rate of several thousand a day. According to historians’ estimates, by the spring of 1942 some two million of the more than three million prisoners taken in 1941 had died, and over the whole war between 2.5 and more than 3 million of the roughly 5.7 million Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands. Political commissars, communists and Jews selected from among the prisoners were shot, including in the POW camps of the Lublin region, and at Auschwitz at the beginning of September 1941 the SS for the first time killed several hundred of them with Zyklon B.

An SS camp beyond Frank’s authority

Majdanek was an institution of the SS and its central offices in Berlin. Neither the Governor-General, Hans Frank, nor the authorities of the Lublin District had any influence over it, although it was built on territory they governed and was to draw on local materials and people. This separateness was in keeping with the ambitions of Himmler, who was building his own empire in the General Government, and it became one of the sources of the conflict between the SS and Frank’s administration that lasted until 1943.

The first commandant, Karl Otto Koch, organised the camp from the autumn of 1941, formally took charge of it, according to the museum, in January 1942 (some studies give September 1941) and ran it until August 1942. Earlier, at Buchenwald, he had become notorious for cruelty and corruption, and in Lublin he was suspended after 86 Soviet prisoners of war escaped during the night of 14–15 July 1942. In April 1945, sentenced by an SS court for embezzlement and abuses, he was shot at Buchenwald. After him the camp was run in turn by Max Koegel, Hermann Florstedt, Martin Weiss and Arthur Liebehenschel. At the end of 1943 the garrison numbered about 1,250, mostly ethnic Germans from Romania and Yugoslavia, supported by Lithuanian policemen and guards from the SS training camp at Trawniki.

Majdanek in 1942–1944

From the spring of 1942 Majdanek changed its function several times. On 29 March 1942 the first transport of a thousand Jews arrived from Slovakia. After them came Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from Germany and from the ghettos of the Lublin region, as well as Poles, hostages and people seized in street round-ups. Majdanek became part of the rear base of Operation Reinhard, which Globocnik directed from Lublin: the property of Jews murdered at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka was taken to storehouses at the former airfield and in the camp. In the summer of 1942 construction of gas chambers began. According to the museum, the first consignment of Zyklon B was delivered at the end of August and the chambers were put into operation in September or October 1942. In them Jews judged unfit for work at selections, and exhausted prisoners, were killed with Zyklon B and carbon monoxide.

On 1 October 1942, exactly a year after the date in Kammler’s order, a camp for women was opened on Field V. From January 1943 Polish political prisoners were brought from prisons in the General Government; from the spring of 1943 rural people from Belarus, including children; from the end of April some 20,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto after the suppression of the uprising; and in the summer of 1943 about 9,000 inhabitants of the Zamość region, then being cleared of its population, most of them mothers with children. In February 1943 the camp was renamed Lublin Concentration Camp.

On 3 November 1943, in Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest), SS men and policemen shot some 18,000 Jews, prisoners of Majdanek and of the labour camps in Lublin, in trenches behind Field V. It was the largest single execution in the history of the German concentration camps. All day long dance music and marches were played over loudspeakers to drown out the shots. On the same day and the next, Jews from the camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa were shot; in the operation as a whole some 42,000 people were killed, according to historians’ estimates, and the Jews of the Lublin District, earlier deported to the extermination camps, ceased to exist as a community.

The Germans began evacuating the camp on 1 April 1944. The SS led out the last column of about 800 prisoners on 22 July, and the camp, left almost intact, was taken by units of the 1st Belorussian Front. The museum’s chronology states that Soviet soldiers entered it on 24 July, during the fighting for Lublin; many studies give the date as 23 July. Majdanek was the first large concentration camp to be captured by the Allies. Photographs of the gas chambers, the crematorium and storehouses holding thousands of pairs of shoes went round the world in August 1944, long before the liberation of Auschwitz. A few weeks later the NKVD set up a prison on the camp grounds for soldiers of the Home Army and the Peasant Battalions.

The death toll

The number of Majdanek’s victims was disputed for decades. The Polish-Soviet commission that investigated the camp in 1944 gave a figure of 1.5 million killed, based on estimates of the crematoria’s capacity rather than on documents. In 1948 Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz estimated the number of victims at about 360,000, and in 1992 the museum historian Czesław Rajca put it at about 235,000. Research by Tomasz Kranz in 2005, based on surviving camp documents, transport lists and a telegram from Hermann Höfle discovered in 2000, established that some 78,000 people died in the camp, including about 59,000 Jews. The museum adopted these findings and now states that of some 130,000 deportees nearly 80,000 died, including about 60,000 Jews, followed by Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians. About half of them were killed in executions and gas chambers; the rest died of hunger, disease, exhaustion and beatings.

Of the more than a thousand members of the garrison known by name, about 170 were brought to justice. The first trial, before the Special Criminal Court in Lublin, took place as early as the autumn of 1944: four SS men and two prisoner functionaries were sentenced to death, and five of them were publicly hanged next to the camp on 3 December 1944. The longest trial, before a court in Düsseldorf, lasted from 1975 to 1981. In the autumn of 1944 the State Museum at Majdanek was established on the site of the former camp, the first museum in the world on the site of a German concentration camp.

Place in the war

When, at the beginning of October 1941, Soviet prisoners of war began digging the foundations of the first barracks, Majdanek was not conceived as a place of extermination. It was an instrument of the grand plans for colonising the east, which the SS intended to carry out with slave labour: first of prisoners of war, then of prisoners from all over occupied Europe. Yet even this first period showed what “work” in Himmler’s camps meant in practice. Of the people who built the first field, not one was alive four months later.

The autumn of 1941 was also the time when the decisions to murder the Jews of Europe were being taken. On 13 October Globocnik discussed the future of the Lublin District with Himmler; at the beginning of November construction of the first extermination camp in the General Government began near Bełżec; and from March 1942 Lublin was the centre of Operation Reinhard, in which some 1.5–1.8 million Jews were murdered, according to historians’ estimates. Majdanek, through which passed Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners from almost 30 countries, became a link in this machine and at the same time the first testimony to it that the whole world saw after the Red Army arrived.