THE STATE MUSEUM at MAJDANEK

The State Museum of Majdanek was established in November 1944 & is the oldest museum created on the grounds of the former Nazi concentration camp on the south-east outskirts of Lublin, Poland. Konzentrationslager Lublin, more commonly known as Majdanek functioned from October 1941 to July 1944.This camp was originally contructed to provide a workforce to be used while building the SS District in Lublin with the Germanization of the region.However, in practice the camp combined a range of functions; It was a death camp for Jews,prisoner camp for various nationalities, transit camp & prisoner of war camp for Soviet forces. The camp covered an area of 270 hectares with three sections within. The SS segment, the administration section & prisoner area made up of five fields with wooden barracks for the inmates. Management of the camp was under SS control with around 200 men & 20 female supervisors with around 1,000 guards.A female camp was established in October 1942 with children arriving by March 1943. In the autumn of 1943,the remaining forced labor camps around Lublin (Budzyn, Trawniki, Poniatowa, Krasnik, Pulawy, and the "Airstrip" and Lipowa camps) became sub-camps of Majdanek.Vast majority of inmates were Jewish & Polish with all nationalities arriving at the beginning of 1944. On November 3, 1943 code name 'Emtefast' took place with the execution of 18 thousand Jews in execution ditches. Around 60 thousand Jews, 20 thousand other nationalities were murdered at Majdanek. In late July 1944, with Soviet forces rapidly approached Lublin,German forces hastily evacuated the camp but the staff had only succeeded in partially destroying the crematoria before Soviet Red Army troops arrived on July 24, 1944. The soviet advance was so fast that Majdanek was the best-preserved camp of the Holocaust. It was the first major concentration camp liberated by Allied forces, and the horrors found there were widely publicised. All images within this gallery are copyright protected Alex Ayres/Michael Hill 2012. Under the Berne Convention Act of 1988, all images within this gallery are copyright protected. Not for commercial use without prior permission. parksie@ntlworld.com