Majdanek: The Camp in the Heart of Lublin

Most Nazi killing sites were hidden in forests or far from population centers. Majdanek was different. Built on the southeastern edge of the Polish city of Lublin, it stood close enough to residential streets that its barbed wire, watchtowers and smoking chimneys were visible to the people who lived nearby. Officially named Konzentrationslager Lublin, it became known by the name of the neighborhood where it was built.

Origins of the Camp

In the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler visited Lublin and ordered the construction of a large SS camp there. Construction began in October 1941 under the direction of SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik, who was also responsible for Operation Reinhard, the murder of the Jews of the General Government. Early plans envisioned a camp holding well over 100,000 prisoners, using forced labor to serve SS economic and settlement projects in the occupied east.

The first prisoners included Soviet prisoners of war, who were made to build the camp in conditions of starvation and exposure, and many of them died in the first winter. Over time, people were sent to Majdanek from across Europe. Poles, including political prisoners and civilians swept up in reprisals and roundups, formed a large part of the population, alongside Jews from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, France and elsewhere, as well as Belarusians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of many other nationalities.

Life and Death in the Camp

The camp was divided into numbered fields, each holding rows of wooden barracks, with a separate women's section and later a hospital area. Prisoners were forced to labor in the camp workshops and construction details, and were subjected to roll calls lasting hours, beatings, and chronic hunger. Disease, especially typhus and dysentery, spread rapidly in overcrowded and unsanitary barracks, and selections sent the weak to their deaths.

Majdanek also served as a site of mass murder. Gas chambers using Zyklon B and carbon monoxide were operated at the camp, and a crematorium was built to dispose of the bodies. Many thousands of people were also shot, died of exhaustion and illness, or were killed through brutal treatment. Majdanek was also a depot where property taken from murdered Jews in the Operation Reinhard camps was sorted and stored, a reminder of how closely the camp system was linked.

Operation Harvest Festival

The deadliest single day at Majdanek came on November 3, 1943. In an operation the SS cynically called Erntefest, or “Harvest Festival,” the Jewish prisoners who remained in the Lublin district were gathered and shot in trenches dug beforehand. About 18,400 Jews were murdered at Majdanek that day, and more than 40,000 across the Lublin district camps in the two days of the operation, one of the largest single-day massacres of Jews during the Holocaust. Loudspeakers played music to drown out the sound of gunfire. The killing was carried out as a response to the Sobibor and Treblinka uprisings and to the growing fear of further revolts.

The Majdanek State Museum estimates that about 150,000 people were deported to the camp and that approximately 78,000 died there, among them roughly 59,000 Jews. Historians long cited much higher numbers; the lower figure reflects decades of archival research by Polish scholars.

Liberation and the First Evidence

As the Red Army advanced in July 1944, the SS tried to evacuate prisoners and destroy evidence, but there was too little time. Soviet troops entered Majdanek in late July 1944, and found the camp almost fully intact: the barracks, the gas chambers, the crematorium, and warehouses holding enormous quantities of shoes taken from victims. It was the first major camp to be liberated, and the Soviet and Polish authorities invited journalists from around the world to see it. Their reports reached the public months before Allied forces reached the camps in western Germany, though many readers at the time found the accounts difficult to believe.

Later in 1944 a Polish court in Lublin tried a number of camp staff, in one of the first trials of Nazi crimes after the war. Further proceedings followed over the decades, including the Majdanek Trial in Düsseldorf, West Germany, which ran from 1975 to 1981 and prosecuted sixteen former members of the camp staff.

The Site Today

Majdanek was preserved almost exactly as it was found. A museum was established there in 1944, and the site became a state museum in the following decades. Visitors can walk through the surviving barracks, the gas chambers and the crematorium, and see the mausoleum that holds the ashes of victims. Because the camp lies within sight of the modern city, it is a place where the history of the Holocaust is not distant from everyday life, but part of the landscape of Lublin itself.