Lublin (Majdanek) Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains primarily:

Deportation lists, prisoner lists, death lists, crematorium registry, death announcements, death certificates, death registries, listing of personal effects, lists of names of the prisoner funds administration, medical treatment register, excerpt from the death registry of the registry office in Rome from 1954, transport lists (CC Natzweiler, CC Buchenwald, CC Flossenbürg), prisoner registration questionnaire, fragments of various documents (personal effects cards, identity papers, reports, letters, court orders, subpoenas, leaflets, orders for pieces of clothing for prisoners), lists of liberated persons and survivors, reports from survivors, various correspondence concerning labor camps and concentration camps in Poland, correspondence and sketches about the construction of crematory ovens and a delousing facility, commandant orders, Soviet progaganda about Lublin-Majdanek, telegrams, identity papers from inmates, memorial book

History of Concentration Camp Lublin (Majdanek) 1941-1944:

Concentration Camp Majdanek, located in a suburb of Lublin bearing the same name, was constructed by order of Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler in the autumn of 1941 and given the name “prisoner-of-war-camp of the Armed SS Lublin”. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 the camp was intended as a production site for the SS. During the 30 some months of its existence, “Concentration Camp Lublin”, as it was officially called as of February 1943, had various functions and was subject to various chains of command within the National Socialist camp system. The SS used it as a prisoner-of-war-camp, as a slave-labor-camp and, at times, as both an extermination camp and transit camp. Between 1941 and 1944 some 270 “work units” existed in Majdanek; these units were primarily tasked with the work of expanding the camp. From autumn 1942 the camp served as an extermination site, after Odilo Globocnik, SS- and Police Leader in the Lublin district, arranged for Majdanek to be involved in die “Operation Reinhardt”, the plan to murder all the Jews in the general government. Besides the other extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, as of autumn 1942 Majdanek was also a camp where Jews were murdered in gas chambers with Cyclone B and/or carbon monoxide. The Majdanek grounds also served as an execution site for Jewish and Polish prisoners. On 3 November 1943 as part of “Operation Harvest Festival” the SS shot some 18,000 Jews. From late 1943 until the liberation by the Red Army in July 1944 only small numbers of Jews were still being deported to Majdanek. The prisoners were there only temporarily, before being sent on to different camps on Reich territory. Before the Red Army invaded, the camp administrators tried to remove the traces of mass murder. For this reason the prisoners had to open up the mass graves and burn the decaying corpses. Shortly before the camp was disbanded several buildings were also set on fire. Despite this, when the Red Army marched in on 23 July 1944, much of the camp compound was still well intact. Some 235,000 persons fell victim to the catastrophic living conditions and the extermination measures Concentration Camp Majdanek.

Source: Wysok, Wieslaw: Majdanek (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed.by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 147-148 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/60/Staatliches-Museum-in-Majdanek [Latest access: 2012-08-13].