Diapositive.pl Jewish Identity and Culture

The camp was founded in the second half of 1941 on orders from Heinrich Himmler. It was to be an enormous camp, covering 516 hectares and having a total of 250,000 prisoners. In the end, however, the camp only represented twenty percent of those original plans. It was nevertheless a large camp, with 144 barracks for prisoners, workshops, warehouses, quarters for the SS-men, the commandant's office, soldiers' barracks and gas chambers. Only some of these buildings survive today. Considering the threat of revisionism today, it is important that both the original gas chambers and crematoria still survive at Majdanek.

The camp's commandants were Karl Otto Koch, Max Koegel, Hermann Florstedt, Martin Weiss and Arthur Liebehenschel. The first prisoners to arrive were Soviet prisoners-of-war in late 1941. Although prisoner-of-war transports continued to be sent there, the Jewish population from the Lublin region also began arriving in late 1941 and early 1942. The third large group of prisoners-peculiar to Majdanek-were the peasant victims of rural pacifications and deportations that were designed to aid the German colonization of the Zamosc region.

Beginning in the spring of 1943, Belarusian peasants, especially women and children, were also sent to Majdanek for their "partisan activities". That same year, transports of political prisoners, for the most part Poles, were also sent there from the overflowing Gestapo prisons. The last were the death transports of political prisoners from the prison at the Lublin Castle.

The numbers are only estimates. In all, Majdanek had about 300,000 prisoners of over fifty different nationalities. Among these, 41% were Jews and 35% were Poles. Of all the camps, Majdanek had the highest percentage of children and young people. Children up to fifteen years of age comprised 6% of the camp's populations, and more than 1% were infants. Over 230,000 people died at Majdanek. Among the victims, 48% were Jews, 31% Poles, and 16% were citizens of the Soviet Union. Over half died as the result of the bad conditions, disease and exhaustion. The rest died as the result of executions and in the gas chambers. Forty-five thousand were sent to other camps, twenty-thousand were freed, five hundred escaped and 1,500 survived until the liberation.

Majdanek did not have its own railway ramp at the camp. The prisoners walked from the ramp at the Lublin-Chelm rail line. After entering the camp, the prisoners' belongings were confiscated. The prisoners' hair was cut off and they were bathed and disinfected with lysol. After registration, dressing in prison stripes, and being marked with their category (Jews, politicals, criminals, asocials, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals) were allowed to enter the camp.

The camp conditions were very bad and the mortality rate among the prisoners at Majdanek was high, even compared to other German camps. The numerous commandos worked constructing and running the camp. Slave labor was used at German companies outside the camp.

The genocide began with large-scale executions. The first victims were Soviet prisoners-of-war and peasants from the Lublin region. On November 3, 1943, the largest execution took place: accompanied by music, the Germans shot over 18,000 Jews. From mid-1942, the gas chambers began functioning, using carbon monoxide and Zyklon B.

It was primarily Jews who were killed in the gas chambers, immediately after they arrived. At first, the bodies were buried; beginning in mid-1942, however, they began to be burned in heaps and in the crematoria.