Unlike some of the other Nazi concentration
camps, there was no familiar "Arbeit Macht Frei"
gate at the original entrance to the Majdanek camp. At the present tourist entrance, there is now a low gate with
a wooden frame and barbed wire; it could be the gate into a cow pasture.
Immediately to your right, as you enter through the wooden gate, you
see the familiar curved concrete posts and barbed wire which typically
surrounded the Nazi concentration camps. In front of this fence is a
small parking area for tour buses and a visitor's center, which is like
a tiny museum. The visitor's center is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. from
May to September, but stays open only to 3 p.m. October to April. The
exhibits in the barracks are open until 5 p.m. year round.
Entrance to the camp is free, although there is a charge
for parking in the narrow parking strip next to the visitor's center.
I did not see any guards at the camp and visitors are free to roam around
the grounds without a guide, although a two-hour guided tour is available
at the Museum in several different languages. There were virtually no
other visitors when I was there; although Majdanek has the only Nazi
homicidal gas chambers preserved in their original condition, the camp
has never achieved the same status as a tourist attraction as Auschwitz.
During the Nazi occupation, there was no railroad spur
to bring the prisoners directly into the Majdanek camp; the victims
disembarked from cattle cars at the crowded main railroad station in
Lublin amid German troops, also riding in cattle cars, on their way
to the Eastern front. Even some regular train passengers in Europe rode
on freight trains during World War II, according to the author of Schindler's
List. The prisoners destined for Majdanek were transported the rest
of the way to the camp in trucks.
At the Majdanek camp, there is a large field of grass
near the street, in the middle of which stands a lone white stucco house,
the former dwelling of the Camp Commandant. There were five different
camp commanders during the 35 months that Majdanek was in operation:
Karl Otto Koch, Max August Koegel, Hermann Florstedt, Martin Weiss and
Arthur Liebehenschel. Pictured below is Karl Otto Koch, the first Commandant
of the Majdanek camp. He was soon relieved of his command, charged with
stealing from the camp warehouses where plunder taken from the Jews
was kept. He was tried by a German court and executed before the end
of the war.
Karl Otto Koch, first Commandant
Commandant Hermann Florstedt was also executed by the
Nazis after he was convicted by a Nazi court on charges of stealing
from the camp warehouses. There were 800 cases of cruelty and corruption
in the concentration camps which were tried by Dr. Konrad Morgan, the
legal investigator of the Reich Criminal Police, and 200 SS men who
were in charge of the camps were convicted, including Amon Goeth, the
commandant at Plaszow, the camp which became famous as a result of the
film, "Schindler's List."
Two of the commandants of the Majdanek camp were tried
by the Allies after the war; Max Koegel was sentenced to death by a
British court in 1946 and Martin Weiss received a death sentence in
an American court in 1946, according to a Museum booklet. Arthur Liebehenschel,
the last commandant of the camp, was sent to Majdanek in 1944 after
serving as the commandant of Auschwitz for several months. When Majdanek
was evacuated in July 1944, he was sent to Triest. He was convicted
by the Supreme People's Court in Krakow and executed after the war.
The picture below shows the original main entrance
into the concentration camp at Majdanek. On either side of the gate
are two sentry boxes, painted with black and white chevron stripes.
One of these sentry boxes is on display in the exhibit barracks. Although
there doesn't seem to be much security at this gate, the interior of
the camp was divided into fields or compounds, each surrounded by a
double row of barbed wire fencing.
Old picture showing main gate into Majdanek camp
The tour of the camp starts with a movie, shown in
a large theater at the visitor's center. A 15-minute documentary made
by the Soviet Union in 1960, it show scenes taken just after the camp's
liberation on July 23, 1944. Majdanek was the first Nazi concentration
camp to be liberated by the Allies. It was also the first time that
anyone from the Allied countries had actually seen a gas chamber, although
there had been plenty of news in the world-wide media about their existence,
since as far back as the fall of 1942. It was not that the Russians
unexpectedly stumbled across the gas chambers and made the shocking
discovery of the Nazi killing machine; it was more like the Russians
arriving at the camp and saying, "Take us to the gas chambers."
In the movie, there are scenes of grieving Polish relatives
viewing the bodies of political prisoners who were brought to the camp
from the Gestapo prison at the Castle in Lublin and shot by the fleeing
Nazis just before liberation day. The movie puts heavy emphasis on the
suffering of the Polish resistors, and doesn't mention the genocide
of the Jews.
According to the tour guide, the Russians had already
decided that after the war, Poland would be a Communist country, in
keeping with the political ideology of the liberators. Consequently,
Lublin was immediately set up as the capital of the new Polish government,
which was to follow the Communist dictates of the Soviet Union. Anti-Communist
Polish citizens were dispatched to Siberia from Lublin after the war.
The decision to make the Majdanek camp into a museum
was made in August 1944, a month after liberation. According to a Museum
booklet, the Majdanek Museum was set up in November 1944 and became
the first such museum at a former concentration camp, long before any
of the other camps were liberated. During the Communist regime which
lasted until 1989, all Polish citizens were required to go on government
sponsored group tours to the concentration camps as part of their indoctrination
in hatred of the opponents of Communism. According to the tour guide,
Polish schools taught a censored version of history during the Communist
rule, leaving out such details as the Russian invasion of Poland in
1920, but emphasizing the crimes of the Nazi Fascists.
There are also scenes in the movie which show some
of the 1,500 surviving prisoners, mostly men who are not cheering the
liberators, as shown in the picture below. Although they do not look
emaciated, most of the survivors shown in the movie were on crutches
or had missing feet and were walking on stumps. The movie had no explanation
for this strange circumstance, but I later learned from the museum guidebook
that in early 1943, there was a hospital set up in Field II at Majdanek
for wounded Russian soldiers who had been POWs but defected after their
capture and were then wounded in fighting on the side of the Nazis against
Besides these invalid soldiers, the only other survivors
were Polish peasants from the immediate area. According to the Museum
booklet, a large percentage of the inmates at Majdanek were "rural
people" or "peasants." Some of these Polish peasants
were people who were ejected from their homes as part of the German
plan to colonize Poland, which the Nazis referred to as "the German
east." Others were from Byelorussia, a province known to Americans
as White Russia, where women and children were taken prisoner in reprisal
for heavy partisan fighting in that area. The Polish peasants were not
shown in the movie because they took the opportunity to escape while
the Germans and the Russians were fighting a last-ditch battle for the
city of Lublin, which lasted for two days. The Polish Home Army, a partisan
group, joined the Russian soldiers in the battle to free Lublin from
Home Army soldiers including three escapees from
In anticipation of the arrival of Soviet troops, the
Nazis had evacuated 15,000 prisoners in March and April 1944, transporting
them westward by train to other camps in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück,
Natzwiler, Mauthausen, Lodz and Plaszow. The last 1,000 prisoners were
marched off on foot only the day before liberation.
The Russian soldiers who had defected were taken to
camps in the Soviet Union after their liberation, and one can imagine
their fate. Other Russian defectors who had joined the German army were
taken prisoner by the Americans during the war and sent to POW camps
in America. World War II was more of an ideological war between the
Communists and the Fascists than a war between nations, which accounts
for large numbers of Russian soldiers switching sides.
Liberated Russian POWs who fought on the side of
When the Majdanek camp was liberated, the Soviet Union
at first announced that 1.7 million people had been murdered there by
the Nazis, but at the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals in 1946,
the Soviets charged the Nazi leaders with murdering only 1.5 million
people at the Majdanek camp. By the time this movie was made by the
Soviet Union in 1960, the number of people murdered by the Nazis at
Majdanek had dropped to 350,000. This figure was again revised, according
to the guidebook, when it was learned that no more than 300,000 people
had ever been sent to the camp. The actual death toll, according to
the guidebook, was 235,000. This approximate figure was based on the
number of arrivals minus the number of prisoners who escaped, were transferred
or released. Approximately 45,000 were transferred to other camps, 20,000
were released and 500 escaped, according to Polish historians. There
were six sub-camps surrounding the Majdanek camp, to which some of the
prisoners were transferred.
Other estimates from books that I have read put the
total number of deaths at Majdanek anywhere from 42,200 to 1,380,000.
At the Düsseldorf trial of the Majdanek war criminals, the West
German government charged the Nazis with the murder of no less than
200,000 people at the camp. Jewish historian Martin Gilbert wrote "Between
300,000 and 350,000 people were murdered here in Majdanek over a period
of three years." Raul Hilberg puts the number of Jewish victims
at Majdanek at 50,000, but doesn't mention the non-Jews. According to
the Museum booklet, most of the files from the camp are stored in the
Soviet Union and have never been released.
Immediately after the liberation, the Illustrated London
News published photographs of the camp, saying that this was "irrefutable
proof of the organized murder of between 600,000 and 1,000,000 helpless
persons at the Majdanek Camp near Lublin." The same newspaper also
stated that "Prisoners too ill to walk into the camp were dragged
alive to the furnaces and thrust in alongside the dead."
The first ever war crimes trial took place in the Special
Penal Court in Lublin in November 1944 and six men who had been captured
during the liberation of the camp were convicted and sentenced to death.
Two of them were kapos, or prisoners who were in charge of other prisoners
in the camp: Heinrich Stalp and Edmund Pohlmann. One was a guard, Theodor
Schöllen, and the other three were administrative personnel: Anton
Thernes, Hermann Vogel, and Wilhelm Gerstenmeier.
The movie mentions the 800,000 pairs of shoes which
were found in the camp when it was liberated, but doesn't point out
that Majdanek was a center for processing clothing from the Operation
Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. There was also a shoe
repair shop at Majdanek where the prisoners worked on the boots of the
German soldiers as well as the shoes taken from the Jews. When the camp
was liberated these shoes were awaiting shipment by train to Germany
where they were to be distributed to civilians in the German cities
that had been bombed by the Allies. Some of the shoes from Majdanek
were sent to Washington, DC for the display at the United States Holocaust
Museum. The remainder are displayed at Majdanek in three buildings.
After the liberation of Lublin, Majdanek was taken
over by the Soviet Army with fields IV and V being used as quarters
for Soviet soldiers, while fields I and II were used by the 2nd Polish
Army, which was formed after the liberation. German POWs were put into
field VI before being sent to slave labor camps deep inside the Soviet
Union; a few of them returned after a period of captivity lasting as
long as 10 years.