Майданек: Нацистік концлагерь та жойқын лагерінің тарихы

Nazi concentration camp

Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. The camp was nicknamed Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacent to the Lublin ghetto of Majdan Tatarski. Nazi documents initially described the site as a POW camp of the Waffen SS, based on how it was funded and operated. It was renamed by the Reich Security Main Office as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9, 1943, but the local Polish name remained more popular. After the camp's liberation in July 1944, the site was formally protected by the Soviet Union. By autumn, with the war still raging, it had been preserved as a museum. The crematorium ovens and gas chambers were largely intact, serving as some of the best examples of the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany. The site was given national designation in 1965.

Konzentrationslager Lublin was established in October 1941 on the orders of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, forwarded to Odilo Globocnik soon after Himmler's visit to Lublin on 17–20 July 1941 in the course of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 POWs. After large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war were captured during the Battle of Kiev, the projected camp capacity was subsequently increased to 50,000. Construction for that many began on October 1, 1941 (as it did also in Auschwitz Birkenau, which had received the same order). In early November, the plans were extended to allow for 125,000 inmates and in December to 150,000. Majdanek was made into a secondary sorting and storage depot at the onset of Operation Reinhard, for property and valuables taken from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. There are two identical buildings at Majdanek where Zyklon B was used. Executions were carried out in barrack 41 with crystalline hydrogen cyanide released by the Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in barrack 42. Due to the pressing need for foreign manpower in the war industry, Jewish laborers from Poland were originally spared. For a time they were either kept in the ghettos, such as the one in Warsaw (which became a concentration camp after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), or sent to labor camps such as Majdanek, where they worked primarily at the Steyr Daimler Puch weapons/munitions factory. By mid October 1942, the camp held 9,519 registered prisoners, of whom 7,468 (or 78.45%) were Jews, and another 1,884 (19.79%) were non Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, of which 9,105 (56.18%) were Jews and 3,893 (24.02%) were non Jewish Poles. Minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals. According to the data from the official Majdanek State Museum, 300,000 people were inmates of the camp at one time or another. The prisoner population at any given time was much lower. From October 1942 onward Majdanek also had female overseers. These SS guards, trained at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, included Elsa Ehrich, Hermine Boettcher Brueckner, Hermine Braunsteiner, Hildegard Lächert, Rosy Suess (Süss), Elisabeth Knoblich Ernst, Charlotte Karla Mayer Woellert, and Gertrud Heise (1942–1944), who were later convicted as war criminals. Majdanek did not initially have subcamps. These were incorporated in early autumn 1943 when the remaining forced labor camps around Lublin, including Budzyn, Trawniki, Poniatowa, Krasnik, Pulawy, as well as the "Airstrip" ("Airfield"), and "Lipowa 7") concentration camps became sub camps of Majdanek. From 1 September 1941 to 28 May 1942, Alfons Bentele headed the Administration in the camp. Alois Kurz, SS Untersturmführer, was a German staff member at Majdanek, Auschwitz Birkenau, and at Mittelbau Dora. He was not charged. On 18 June 1943, Fritz Ritterbusch moved to KL Lublin to become aide de camp to the Commandant. Due to the camp's proximity to Lublin, prisoners were able to communicate with the outside world through letters smuggled out by civilian workers who entered the camp. From February 1943 onward, the Germans allowed the Polish Red Cross and Central Welfare Council to bring in food items to the camp.

Until June 1942, the bodies of those murdered at Majdanek were buried in mass graves (these were later exhumed and burned by the prisoners assigned to Sonderkommando 1005). From June 1942, the SS disposed of the bodies by burning them, either on pyres made from the chassis of old lorries or in a crematorium. The so called First Crematorium had two ovens which were brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. it is no longer in existence today. The next morning, 25 Jews who had succeeded in hiding were found and shot. Meanwhile, 611 other prisoners, 311 women and 300 men, were commanded to sort through the clothes of the dead and cover the burial trenches. The men were later assigned to Sonderkommando 1005, where they had to exhume the same bodies for cremation. These men were then executed. The 311 women were subsequently sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered by gas. By the end of Aktion Erntefest ("Harvest Festival"), Majdanek had only 71 Jews left out of the total number of 6,562 prisoners still alive.</blockquote> In addition, Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs, while awaiting trial in Poland, that one method of murder used at Majdanek (KZ Lublin) was Zyklon B.

In late July 1944, with Soviet forces rapidly approaching Lublin, the Germans hastily evacuated the camp and partially destroyed the crematoria before Soviet Red Army troops arrived on July 24, 1944. Majdanek is the best preserved camp of the Holocaust due to incompetence by its deputy commander, Anton Thernes. It was the first major concentration camp liberated by Allied forces, and the horrors found there were widely publicised. Although 1,000 inmates had previously been forcibly marched to Auschwitz (of whom only half arrived alive), the Red Army still found thousands of inmates, mainly POWs, still in the camp, and ample evidence of the mass murder that had occurred there.

After the camp takeover, in August 1944 the Soviets protected the camp area and convened a special Polish Soviet commission, to investigate and document the crimes against humanity committed at Majdanek. This effort constitutes one of the first attempts to document the Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe. In the fall of 1944 the
Majdanek State Museum was founded on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1947 the actual camp became the monument of martyrology by the decree of Polish Parliament. In the same year, some 1,300 m3 of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones was collected and turned into a large mound. Majdanek became a national museum in 1965. Some Nazi personnel of the camp were prosecuted immediately after the war, and some in the decades afterward. In November and December 1944, four SS Men and two kapos were placed on trial; one committed suicide and the rest were hanged on December 3, 1944. The last major, widely publicized prosecution of 16 SS members from Majdanek (Majdanek Prozess in German) took place from 1975 to 1981 in West Germany. Of 1,037 SS members who worked at Majdanek and are known by name, 170 were prosecuted, due to a rule applied by the West German justice system allowing only those directly involved in the process to be charged with murder.

After the capture of the camp by the Soviet Army, the NKVD retained the ready made facility as a prison for soldiers of the Armia Krajowa (AK, the Home Army resistance) loyal to the Polish Government in Exile and the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (National Armed Forces) opposed to both German and Soviet occupation. The NKVD like the SS before them used the same facilities to imprison and torture Polish patriots. On August 19, 1944, in a report to the Polish government in exile, the Lublin District of the Home Army (AK) wrote: "Mass arrests of the AK soldiers are being carried out by the NKVD all over the region. These arrests are tolerated by the Polish Committee of National Liberation, and AK soldiers are incarcerated in the Majdanek Camp. Losses of our nation and the Home Army are equal to the losses which we suffered during the German occupation. We are paying with our blood." Among the prisoners at the Majdanek NKVD Camp were Volhynian members of the AK, and soldiers of the AK units which had been moving toward Warsaw to join in the Warsaw Uprising. On August 23, 1944, some 250 inmates from Majdanek were transported to the rail station Lublin Tatary. There, all victims were placed in cattle cars and taken to camps in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union.

In July 1969, on the 25th anniversary of its liberation, a large monument designed by Wiktor Tołkin (a. k. a. Victor Tolkin) was constructed at the site. It consists of two parts: a large gate monument at the camp's entrance and a large mausoleum holding ashes of the victims at its opposite end. In October 2005, in cooperation with the Majdanek museum, four Majdanek survivors returned to the site and enabled archaeologists to find some 50 objects which had been buried by inmates, including watches, earrings, and wedding rings. this was the largest reported recovery of valuables in a death camp to date. Interviews between government historians and Jewish survivors were not frequent before 2005. The camp today occupies about half of its original , and—but for the former buildings—is mostly bare. A fire in August 2010 destroyed one of the wooden buildings that was being used as a museum to house seven thousand pairs of prisoners' shoes. The city of Lublin has tripled in size since the end of World War II, and even the main camp is today within the boundaries of the city of Lublin. It is clearly visible to many inhabitants of the city's high rises, a fact that many visitors remark upon. The gardens of houses and flats border on and overlook the camp. In 2016, Majdanek State Museum and its branches, Sobibór and Bełżec, had about 210,000 visitors. This was an increase of 10,000 visitors from the previous year. Visitors include Jews, Poles, and others that wish to learn more about the harsh crimes against humanity.