Majdanek concentration camp

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Majdanek (called in the SS correspondence and also known as KL Lublin [3] ) is a location located about four kilometers east of Lublin in Poland that at its birth, in September 1941 [4] , the Nazis immediately used as a “field of prisoners of war” [5] . Although the field did not fall within the program of the extermination centers desired with the Reinhard operation (such as those of: Treblinka II, Bełżec and Sobibór) and “many scholars have traditionally counted the Majdanek field as a sixth center of extermination, a recent research clarifies Better the functions […] of Lublin / Majdanek ” [2] . He served “above all to concentrate the Jews that the Germans had temporarily spared from forced work […], from time to time he worked as a killing site to eliminate victims that could not be exterminated […] in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II ” [6] , so much so that the people who found death according to the search for the Polish scholar Tomasz Kranz were at least 78,000 of which 60,000 Jews [7] The field lasted until 22 July 1944 [8] When for the rapid advance of the Red Army it was hastily dismantled by the Nazis and immediately afterwards freed by the Soviets. The sudden escape of the SS and the failure to organize the commander Anton Thernes [9] who did not have time to the destruction of infrastructure and other tests that could have demonstrated their war crimes, they made the first of Majdanek [ten] field discovered and freed from the allies [11] , as well as the best preserved concentration and extermination camp of the Shoah [ten] Thanks also to the “very early decision (autumn 1944) to keep the Majdanek area to documentation and warning of Nazi violence” [twelfth] .

View of the Majdanek concentration camp

Lublino 1941 [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, most of the 3.5 million Jewish pole were raked and put in newly constitution ghettos by Nazi Germany [13] , Lublin, one of the main Polish cities, hosted one [14] . The prisoners in the ghetto of lublin were mostly Jewish, even if in March 1941 a certain number of Roma [15] He was part of his population.

Ghetto di Lublin 1941, German soldiers among the population of the ghetto [16]

Lublin was to be one of the first Ghetti wanted by the Nazis in occupied Poland, to be liquidated in the Shoah extermination program [17] .

The Ghetto of Lublin, the only one in the district of Lublin, first identified with the Jewish neighborhood ( Jews residential area ) was opened on March 24, 1941. The ghettoization of the Jews was decided in conjunction with the arrival of the Wehrmacht troops who secretly prepared the attack on the Soviet stations in Eastern Poland [18] .

At the time of its foundation, there was a population of 34,000 pole Jews in the Ghetto of Lublin [19] and an unknown number of Roma. At the end of the war almost all the pole Jews of the ghetto had died. Most of them, about 30,000, about one year after the opening of the ghetto, between March 17 and April 11, 1942, were deported to the extermination field of Bełżec [20] . The remaining number of Jews (4,000) was first moved to Majdan Tatarski’s small ghetto (established in the suburb of Lublin), to then be transferred a few kilometers by Lublin, al KL Lublin that is, in the concentration and extermination field of Majdanek [19] .

Majdanek concentration camp [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Unlike many other Nazi concentration and extermination fields, Majdanek was not a place hidden in some remote forest or obscured to view by natural barriers or surrounded by a “safety area”. He was founded in October 1941, on the order of Heinrich Himmler, following his visit to Lublin in July of the same year. Initially conceived as a field of prisoners of war, with a management entrusted to the SS to the commands of Karl Otto Koch, in February 1943, it was transformed into an imposing concentration camp [21] . Extended on an area of ​​667 acres (270 hectares) with 18 guard towers and 108 shacks for prisoners, the field was equipped for all its extension, with a double fence of electrified barbed wire [22] .

Its name derives from that of a district of Lublin called Majdan Tatarski and was given in 1941 by residents in the surroundings, who were aware of his existence. The original name in German of the field was Lublin concentration camp (Lublin concentration camp). It was equipped with five “reform” crematori ovens (TII model) installed by the company Heinrich kori GmbH of Berlin.

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Life and death in the field [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

In October 1942, Numerous SS auxiliary auxiliary fields were transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Germany. These women, such as Hermine Braunsteiner, became known for their sadistic and brutal attitudes against prisoners: when the Soviets freed the field they found numerous evidence in the clue of the atrocities committed by this female body, whose bloody ferocity even surprised the SS .

At the height of his activity he contained around 25,000 prisoners. At the beginning of 1942 they were plans to expand Majdanek up to a capacity of 250,000 people. Between April 1942 and July 1944, exterminations took place with the use of gas chambers and crematoria to make the bodies disappear. Madjanek was one of the extermination camps, like Auschwitz, to use the Zyklon B (Cyanideous acid, originally produced for disinfection from parasites) in its gas chambers. However, carbon monoxide was also used.

According to the data of the Majdanek Museum about 150,000 prisoners passed through the field, of which over 40% Jews and about 35% Poles. Among the other major nationality of the prisoners were: Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, French, Italian and Dutch.
In December 2005, at the end of a long search, using all possible sources, the Polish scholar Tomasz Kranz, with the approval of the leadership of the Majdanek Museum, sets the number of deaths in 78,000, of which 75% Jews.
Majdanek provided prisoners as a labor to the Steyr-Daimler-Puch arms factory.

Block 41 [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

The unaware sentenced to death destined to die with gas were brought to block 41, a field structure with one of the gas chambers, probably the best known. Located just after the entrance of the field, the block immediately became a death factory. Those who had to be gas was brought to a first room of this block and his hair was shaved, then we passed in a room of really showers where the condemned were washed for a few minutes and reassured, not being able to disappear that thanks to that shower they would finally have passed a door that led directly to the gas chamber and their elimination.

Erntefest operation (harvest party) [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

“The image of the German invincibility had been destroyed by the battle of Stalingrado in January 1943. The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had arisen in April 1943, the same had happened in the Treblinka extermination field in August 1943. But It seems that it was the revolt of the Sobibor extermination camp on October 14, 1943, to worry Heinrich Himmler on the reach of the riots; So, after Sobibor’s revolt, Himmler ordered the killing of the Jews who remained in the General Governorate ”

( Jennifer Rosenberg – historic [23] )

Majdanek also binds its name to one of the most bloody Nazi actions to eliminate Jews through “mass rifulation”, the Erntefest operation. The Aktion Erntefest (in German) translates the Italian “Causing Festival” [24] (or Festa del Colleto), the code name that the liberation from all the general governor for the employed areas of Poland was proposed (including the rest in the district of the Ghetto di Lublin) from any Jew existing in the area. The operation, carried out with a view to the Reinhard operation, was performed on November 3, 1943 [23] [25] at the Majdanek concentration camp and in his subfilies by the men of the Ordnungspolizei, under the command of the SS Christian Wirth (the notorious Christian the terrible ) and the SS Jakob Sportrenberg, eliminating 43,000 Jews through shooting without distinction of sex and age.

Exceeded only by the 50,000 killed in 1941 by the Romanian military in the massacre d’Odessa, Majdanek’s Ernterfest was the single largest massacre of Jews made by the Nazis in the Second World War, overcoming by number of killed by such a massacre, that of 33,771 [26] victims of Babij Jar.

Liquidation, evacuation of the field and marches of death [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

The field was liquidated in July 1944, but of the extermination systems, the wooden shed of the crematorium was the only thing that the SS managed to set fire, before the red army arrived, leaving the ovens intact, the huge chimneys and the gas chambers. The shed was later reconstructed and today the Majdanek lager museum is among the best preserved concentration camps of the Holocaust to visit. Although 1,000 prisoners had evacuated in a march of death, the red army also found thousands of people in the field, mainly prisoners of war, and obvious traces of the massacre: «The fleeing SS had set fire to the buildings by burning only the wooden parts . The liberators see the crematorium, the gas chambers, the packs of Zyklon B, discover the common pits of when in November ’43 the Nazis had killed eighteen thousand Jews in one day, an action called “harvest party”: the rooms Gas are not enough, so they dig a hundred meters to zig zag and shoot them ” [27] .

Majdanek was the first, of all concentration camps and extermination [28] , to be freed (even before that Auschwitz) ” [27] . The historian of the Shoah Marcello Pezzetti specified: “The field is freed six months before the arrival of the Russians in Auschwitz, almost a year before Mauthausen … hundreds of thousands of Jews, politicians, gypsies … we will tell the story of all. Do you think that when Majdanek’s evacuation begins, the Nazis are still killing the Hungarian Jews and only them are 438 thousand. The highest number of daily killings in Birkenau is in June and July ’44, the Lódz ghetto is not yet liquidated. And just that day, on July 23, 1944, all the Italian Jews of Rhodes arrest 1,800 people, they put a month to reach Birkenau … Here: you could do something, in those months. Nobody touches the railways. After Majdanek, how do you not bomb Auschwitz? ” [27] .

The arrival of the red army [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

With the red army that occupied Poland since 1944, the field was reopened as a transit field, to imprison the soldiers of thek (the Polish national army). ENKGB teams (succeeded at the NKVD since 1944), of the Smersh, of the newly formed UB (security service set up under Soviet control and supervision) of the MO (popular militia), and of the internal security body (reinforced internal army) disarmed and Thousands of members of the Krajawa hormia were arrested who had begun the clandestine struggle of resistance to communism throughout Poland.

A clarification (2016) on the function of Majdanek’s field by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Even the encyclopedia of the Holocaust (multilingual edition online, by the historians of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of Washington) includes Majdanek’s field among the six main extermination fields created by the Nazis in occupied Poland, [29] Together with Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau:

“Between 1941 and 1945 the Nazis built six extermination camps in the part of Poland employed by them: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was part of the wider complex of Auschwitz) and Maidanek. Chelmno and Auschwitz They were made in areas that Germany had annexed in 1939; the other fields (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek) were instead created in what was called General Governorate, always in Poland. Both Auschwitz and Majdanek were used at the same time as work fields , concentration camps and extermination centers. ” [30]

The most recent historical research of the Washington Institute have made it possible to clarify that, unlike other extermination camps and despite the very high number of victims, Majdanek always continued to be understood by the Nazis primarily as a concentration and transfer field and that came Activated as an extermination field only if the transports brought you a number of victims overabundant with respect to the elimination capacity of the three main extermination fields of the Reinhard operation (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka):

«Although several scholars have traditionally considered Majdanek as the sixth extermination camp, recent searches have made better light on the functions and operations implemented in Lublin/Majdanek. As part of the Reinhard operation, Majdanek served mainly to concentrate those Jews that the Germans spared temporarily and then sent them to forced labor. Majdanek was only occasionally used as an extermination field, in order to eliminate those who could not be killed in the extermination camps of the Reinhard operation: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II. Majdanek also contained a warehouse to preserve the properties and objects of value belonging to the victims of the other extermination fields ». [thirty first]

The number of victims of Majdanek, in the time sometimes overestimated, is now placed according to current research at 78,000 victims, of which about 60,000 Jews. [7] [32]

At least 227 were the Italians deported to Majdanek. Several Italian researchers, including Italo Tibaldi have reconstructed “travel” of those deportees to Majdanek [33] .

Victims [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

  • Bruno Altmann (1878-1943), essayist, German writer.
  • Ernst Bachrich (1892-1942), composer, pianist.
  • Eight Freundlich (1878-1943), painter and sculptor (he was part of the first generation of artists to devote himself to abstract art).
  • Aryeh Tzvi Frumer (1884-1943), Rabbi.
  • Roman Kantor (1912-1943), Olympic fencing champion.
  • Omeljan Kovč (1884-1944), Ukrainian presbyter of the Greek-Catholic Church.
  • Moshe Rynecki (1881-1943), artist
  • Kazimierz Skorupka (1901-1944), member of the Polish resistance
  • Ilia Szrajbman (1907-1943), Olympic swimming champion.
  • Leon Weissberg (1895-1943), Polish Jewish painter
  • YVA (1900-1944), Fotografa.
  • Emil Zinner (1900-1942), chess champion.
  • Henio Zytomirski (1933-1942), 9-year-old boy who found death in field gas chambers. Icon of the Polish Holocaust.

Survivors [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Il prima process by majdanek a lublin nel 1944

Before the Nuremberg trial that began at the end of 1945, the Soviets instructed “in autumn 1944” (November 22 – December 2, 1944) in the Polish city of Lublin, what in fact can be considered “the first trial for war crimes” . The process was kept not only against SS with tasks of managers in Majdanek but also to field guards who had carried out important support tasks [35] [36] . The special court made up of Soviets and Poles called six members previously arrested and who had not been able to escape before the arrival of the red army to the field, the SS-Oberstormführer Anton Thernes, the SS-HaupsturMführer Wilhelm Gerstenmeier, the SS- Oberscharführer Hermann Vogel, Kapo Edmund Pohlmann, Ss-Rottenführer Theodor Schöllen and Kapo Heinrich Stalp [37] . Everyone were considered guilty on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and condemned to death by hanging. The sentence was performed the day after the closure of the trial and precisely on December 3, 1944 against five defendants, except for the Kapo Edmund Pohlmann suicide the night before. [37]

It is considered as the second process for the crimes committed in Majdanek, the one celebrated in different cities of Poland between 1946 and 1948 and precisely in the cities of Lublin, Radom and świdnica in 1947; Krakow, Wadowice, and Toruń in 1948; And therefore Warsaw always in 1948. A total of 95 defendants and tried 63 SS (including 60 field guards) were brought to the bar, with penalties concerning 10 sentences of death sentences by hanging, 2 lifetime imprisonments, and for the remaining defendants, prison penalties from 15 to 2 years. The vast majority of these was accused of War crimes and crimes against humanity . One of the defendants condemned to death was the criminal Elsa Ehrich, a women’s women’s guard without scruples that had already served in the concentration camp of Kraków-Płaszów and then to Majdanek [38]

The third trial for Majdanek was celebrated in Germany and precisely in Düsseldorf between November 26, 1975 and 30 June 1981 [39] [40] [41] In front of a German court who called to testify over 200 people and saw 16 defendants on the bar whose majority were SS. Among the defendants were six women, including Hermine Braunsteiner the diabolical caval scaling (nickname reached them from the internees for killing several women, especially elderly, trampling on them with particular violence); The doctor of the field Heinrich Schmidt, several surveillance guards and some managers of the field [41] . At the end of the trial, the Braunsteiner was sentenced to life imprisonment, 12 years of imprisonment for the overseer of the Hildegard Lachert camp; 10 years for the commander of the SS Hermann Heinrich Hackmann field and then penis between eight and three years of imprisonment for 5 other defendants; For two defendants, no sentence was requested due to their poor health; While 5 were acquitted, finally no judgment for the sixteenth defendant, the SS Alice Orlowski, who died during the process sessions. The conclusions and judgments of the process were severely criticized not only by Jewish communities from all over the world but also by the associations of deportees in the Nazi concentration camps. In Italy, the ANED (National Association of former politician deportees in the Nazi fields) elevated his lively protest for the shameful way in which a process had ended that had not made justice and his magazine Red triangle « Against Majdanek’s torturers – shameful process and sentence »And still” the shameful condemnation ” [40] .

The monument to the victims of Majdanek. In the imposing construction, the ashes of many internees are preserved who found death in the field. The Polish writing that stands in the upper part of the monument reads: By us for you on the future warning
  1. ^ Cartina 7, Raffigurate I SEI “Centri Di Sterminio”: Chelmno, Bełże, Sobibór, Treblinka II, Auschwitz (Oswieecim), E Lublin (Majdane) – The destruction of the Jews of Europe , by Raul Hilberg, Volume II, p.986, Einaudi, Turin 1995 and 1999, ISBN 88-06-15191-6
  2. ^ a b Killing Centers: An Overview . are Ushmm.org . URL consulted on January 6, 2017 .
  3. ^ KL Lublin (1941-1944) . are Majdanek.com.pl . URL consulted on April 29, 2013 (archived by URL Original June 26, 2013) .
  4. ^ Start of the field on the Yad Vashem site
  5. ^ Still as the “field of prisoners of war” was considered Majdanek until August 1942 according to the official SS correspondence), the German historian Reimund Schnabel reveals him in his book The dishonor of man on p. 82 by publishing a letter signed by the SS Brigade Commander and Major General of the Waffen-SS, Glucks on 4/8/1942 which having as the object: “prisoners who fall into the Keitel decree” is directed as follows: “At the fields of concentration: from., sa., bu., mau., fl., neu., au., gr.-r., natz., nie., stud., arb., rav., e of the field prisoners of War of Lublin [the italics is ours]. For knowledge and execution I send the attachment extracted from the “Nacht und nebel” decree (night and fog) for the use of concentration camps, relating to the prisoners that fall within the Keitel decree. In the event of any transfer of these prisoners, it should be noted that they fall into the “Keitel decree” or “Nacht und nebel” ».
  6. ^ Killing Centers : An Overview . are Ushmm.org . URL consulted on January 6, 2017 .
  7. ^ a b Majdanek ( PDF ), are yadvashem.org . URL consulted on January 6, 2017 .
  8. ^ Liberation of the field on the Yad Vashem site
  9. ^ Su anton thernes nel sito dell’ushmm
  10. ^ a b Discovery of Concentration Camps and the Holocaust . are WW2DB . URL consulted on January 27, 2022 .
  11. ^ Majdanek was absolutely the first field freed of the entire Nazi concentration system. The Red Army arrived at the field on the night of 22 July 1944 for which the next day, 1l 23, was already free (the 24th according to some other sources), or about six months before the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 – The liberation of the field in an article in the Corriere della Sera
  12. ^ MAJDANEK NEL SITO DELL’ANED Filed On October 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive.
  13. ^ Treblinka Death Camp www.HolocaustResearchProject.org . are Archive.is , April 14, 2013. URL consulted on January 27, 2022 (archived by URL Original April 14, 2013) .
  14. ^ ( IN ) Jack Fischel, The Holocaust , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, ISBN 978-0-313-29879-0. URL consulted on January 27, 2022 .
  15. ^ ( IN ) Doris L. Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust , Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, ISBN 978-0-8476-9631-4. URL consulted on January 27, 2022 .
  16. ^ The ghetto of Lublin that stood in the same Polish city is not to be confused with the KL Lublin, which was another name of KL Majdanek that stood four kilometers from the ghetto
  17. ^ ( IN ) Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana , Univ of North Carolina Press, 1º March 2002, ISBN 978-0-8078-5 URL consulted on January 27, 2022 .
  18. ^ Barbara Schwindt, The concentration and extermination camp Majdanek: functional change in the context of the “final solution” , Di Barbara Schwindt, p. 56, Königshausen & Neumann, 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3123-7
  19. ^ a b The Holocaust di Jack Fischel, p. 58, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998
  20. ^ Ordinary Men , by Christopher Robert Browning, PDF (see arrival in Poland [ interrupted connection ]
  21. ^ The Majdanek camp was by extension the largest concentration camp ever built. This means that it was even larger than each single Auschwitz field (also by Birkenau, but not of its entire area consisting of three fields) – Majdanek in the Aktion Reinhard Camps card tab
  22. ^ Majdanek nella scheda di yad vashem
  23. ^ a b Harvest festival campaign . are history1900s.about.com . URL consulted on February 5, 2017 (archived by URL Original December 27, 2016) .
  24. ^ The Nazis started from Majdanek to erase the traces of the fields . are Corriere.it . URL consulted on February 5, 2017 .
  25. ^ The operation was to be carried out in a single day to avoid any possible reaction and resistance
  26. ^ Chronology of Marcello Pezzetti (Cdec Foundation) – collaboration of Sara Berger (Bochum University) See 29-30 September 1941 ( PDF ), are memoria.comune.rimini.it . URL consulted on February 5, 2017 (archived by URL Original May 9, 2016) .
  27. ^ a b c The Nazis started from Majdanek to erase the traces of the fields . are Corriere.it . URL consulted on January 16, 2017 .
  28. ^ «The liberation of Auschwitz was followed by those of Groß-Rosen (by the Soviets, 13 February), Stutthof (Soviets, 9 May, but the evacuation had started in January), Mittelbau-Dora and Buchenwald (Americans, 11 April), Bergen-Belsen (English, April 15), Flossenbürg (Americans, April 23), Sachsenhausen (Soviets, April 22-23), Dachau (Americans, April 29), Ravensbrück (Soviets, April 30), Neuengamme (British, 2 May ) and Mauthausen (Americans, May 5) »in The Nazis started from Majdanek to erase the traces of the fields . are Corriere.it . URL consulted on January 16, 2017 .
  29. ^ ( IN ) Killing Centers: An Overview . are Encyclopedia.ushmm.org . URL consulted on January 27, 2022 .
  30. ^ Room of extermination in occupied Poland . are Ushmm.org , Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
  31. ^ The extermination camps: synthesis . are Ushmm.org . URL consulted on January 17, 2017 .
  32. ^ Majdanek Concentration Camp (a.k.a. KL Lublin) . are holocaustresearchproject.org . URL consulted on January 17, 2017 .
  33. ^ Majdanek . are deportati.it . URL consulted on January 29, 2017 (archived by URL Original February 28, 2017) .
  34. ^ Treasures Emerge From Field of the Dead at Maidanek . are nytimes.com . URL consulted on January 29, 2017 .
  35. ^ Majdanek . are deportati.it . URL consulted on January 29, 2016 (archived by URL Original March 4, 2016) .
  36. ^ Majdanek, the forgotten concentration camp in Poland . are Epochtimes.it . URL consulted on January 29, 2016 (archived by URL Original on February 3, 2017) .
  37. ^ a b Majdanek Trial – (November 22 – December 2, 1944) . are jewishvirtuallibrary.org . URL consulted on February 3, 2017 .
  38. ^ KL Lublin 1941 – 1944 . are Majdanek.com.pl . URL consulted on February 3, 2017 (archived by URL Original on 14 October 2013) .
  39. ^ Totalitarianism, lager and modernity: identity and history of the concentrational universe, pag. 71 . are Books.google.it . URL consulted on January 29, 2017 .
  40. ^ a b Against the Aguzzini di Majdanek shameful process and sentence . are deportati.it . URL consulted on January 29, 2017 (archived by URL Original on February 2, 2017) .
  41. ^ a b Third Majdanek TRIAL – (November 26, 1975 – June 30, 1981) . are jewishvirtuallibrary.org . URL consulted on February 3, 2017 .
  • Antonella Filippi and Lino Ferracin, Deportati Italiani nel Lager di Majdanek , Silvio Zamorani Editore, Turin 2013, ISBN 978-88-7158-197-2
  • Italo Tibaldi, Days of memory. Calendar of Italian political and racial deportation in the Nazi elimination and extermination camps (1943-1944-1945) , Anned-Femperation edition of the Deportation Memory, Sansepolcro 2005
  • ( IN ) Anna Wisniewska, Majdanek: The concentration camp of Lublin , Lublin, State Museum at Majdanek, 1997, ISBN 978-83-9075-320-1.
  • ( IN ) Elissa Milanese, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 , East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 2015.
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