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143-459: Mittelbau-Dora (also Dora-Mittelbau and Nordhausen-Dora ) was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia , Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp , supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany (including evacuated survivors of eastern extermination camps), for extending the nearby tunnels in

286-495: A "dual strategy of publicity and secrecy", the regime directed terror both at the direct victim as well as the entire society in order to eliminate its opponents and deter resistance. Beginning in March 1933, detailed reports on camp conditions were published in the press. Nazi propaganda demonized the prisoners as race traitors, sexual degenerates, and criminals and presented the camps as sites of re-education. After 1933, reports in

429-515: A barn that was set on fire. Those who were not burned alive were shot by SS, Wehrmacht and men of the Volkssturm . Overall, although no reliable statistics on the number of deaths on these transports exist, estimates put the number of prisoners killed at up to 8,000. As most of the camps of the Mittelbau system were completely evacuated, there were not many prisoners left to be liberated by

572-455: A brutal and inhumane manner, working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations. Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Dora-Mittelbau died. Today, the site hosts a memorial and museum. In early summer 1943, mass production of the A4 (later better known as V-2, V standing for Vergeltung or retribution) ballistic rocket started at

715-514: A consequence of these death marches . Many prisoners died after liberation due to their poor physical condition. The liberation of the camps – documented by the Western Allies in 1945 – has played a prominent part in perception of the camp system as a whole. Since their liberation, the Nazi concentration camp system has come to symbolize violence and terror in the modern world. After

858-624: A cumulative figure that counts all the subcamps that existed at one point; historian Karin Orth estimates the number of subcamps to have been 186 at the end of 1943, 341 or more in June 1944, and at least 662 in January 1945. The camps were concentrated in prewar Germany and to a lesser extent territory annexed to Germany. No camps were built on the territory of Germany's allies that enjoyed even nominal independence. Each camp housed either men, women, or

1001-803: A district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years imprisonment for his involvement in gassing to death prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the concentration camp Majdanek in Poland. Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least 3,610 kilograms (7,960 lb) of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow . In addition, Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs, while awaiting trial in Poland, that one method of murder used at Majdanek (KZ Lublin)

1144-399: A fixed daily cost. This decision paved the way for the establishment of many subcamps located near workplaces. More workers were obtained through transfers from prisons and forced labor programs, causing the prisoner population to double twice by mid-1944. Subcamps where prisoners did construction work had significantly higher death rates than those that worked in munitions manufacture. By

1287-462: A high mortality rate during the first half of the war. In contrast, Reich Germans enjoyed favorable treatment compared to other nationalities. A minority of prisoners obtained substantially better treatment than the rest because they were prisoner functionaries (mostly Germans) or skilled laborers. Prisoner functionaries served at the whim of the SS and could be dismissed for insufficient strictness. As

1430-478: A million died during their imprisonment. Historian Adam Tooze counts the number of survivors at no more than 475,000, calculating that at least 1.1 million of the registered prisoners must have died. According to his estimate, at least 800,000 of the murdered prisoners were not Jewish. In addition to the registered prisoners who died, a million Jews were gassed upon arriving in Auschwitz; including these victims,

1573-409: A million others [were] killed" and "You can tell America that at least three million [Polish] Jews [were] killed of whom at least a third were killed in Majdanek", and though widely reported in this way, the estimate was never taken seriously by scholars. In 1961, Raul Hilberg estimated that 50,000 Jewish victims were murdered in the camp. In 1992, Czesław Rajca gave his own estimate of 235,000; it

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1716-489: A mixed population. Women's camps were mostly for armaments production and located primarily in northern Germany, Thuringia , or the Sudetenland , while men's camps had a wider geographical distribution. Sex segregation decreased over the course of the war and mixed camps predominated outside of Germany's prewar borders. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom, according to Wagner, nearly

1859-654: A pace that was kept up until February 1945. On 31 December 1943, construction of the above-ground camp, less than a kilometre from the tunnel B entrance was sufficiently completed for the workers to move in. The underground detainee accommodations ( Schlafstollen or "sleeping tunnels") were dismantled in May 1944. Besides the main camp Dora, housing an average of 15,000 prisoners, the main subcamps were Lager Ellrich (established 2 May 1944, averaging around 8,000 prisoners), Lager Harzungen (1 April 1944, 4,000 prisoners), Lager Rottleberode (13 March 1944, 1,000 prisoners) and

2002-447: A result, sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky emphasizes that "They took over the role of the SS in order to prevent SS encroachment" and other prisoners remembered them for their brutality. Hard labor was a fundamental component of the concentration camp system and an aspect in the daily life of prisoners. However, the forced labor deployment was largely determined by external political and economic factors that drove demand for labor. During

2145-625: A result, the Nazi leadership accelerated plans to move military construction to areas less threatened by Allied bombers. On 22 August 1943, Adolf Hitler ordered SS leader Heinrich Himmler to use concentration camp workers in future A4/V-2 production. One of the sites selected was at the mountain known as Kohnstein, near Nordhausen in Thuringia. Since 1936, the Wirtschaftliche Forschungsgesellschaft (WIFO) (English: Economic Research Company ) had been building

2288-895: A rule applied by the West German justice system allowing only those directly involved in the process to be charged with murder. After the capture of the camp by the Soviet Army, the NKVD retained the ready-made facility as a prison for soldiers of the Armia Krajowa (AK, the Home Army resistance) loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne ( National Armed Forces ) opposed to both German and Soviet occupation. The NKVD like

2431-563: A special Polish-Soviet commission, to investigate and document the crimes against humanity committed at Majdanek. This effort constitutes one of the first attempts to document the Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe. In the fall of 1944 the Majdanek State Museum was founded on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1947 the actual camp became the monument of martyrology by the decree of Polish Parliament . In

2574-679: A special exhibition displaying a selection of those letters. From February 1943 onward, the Germans allowed the Polish Red Cross and Central Welfare Council to bring in food items to the camp. Prisoners could receive food packages addressed to them by name via the Polish Red Cross. The Majdanek Museum archives document 10,300 such itemized deliveries. Until June 1942, the bodies of those murdered at Majdanek were buried in mass graves (these were later exhumed and burned by

2717-547: A subterranean fuel depot for the Wehrmacht there. By late summer 1943, this was almost finished. To oversee the creation and operation of the new construction facility, Albert Speer , Himmler and Karl Saur agreed on the foundation of Mittelwerk GmbH  [ de ] (the name referring to the works' location in Mitteldeutschland ). Its board consisted of Hans Kammler , who was head of Amtsgruppe C at

2860-472: A total of 17,500 slave labourers, almost 2,900 died at Dora. Another 3,000 who were very ill or dying were sent to Lublin-Majdanek and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Few of them survived. At the end of 1943, the Dora work squads had "the highest death rate in the entire concentration camp system". By late 1943, production had started. On 10 December, Albert Speer and his staff visited the tunnels, observing

3003-714: Is difficult to determine; historian Jane Caplan estimated it at 50,000, with arrests perhaps exceeding 100,000. Eighty per cent of prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany and ten per cent members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . Many prisoners were released in late 1933, and after a Christmas amnesty , there were only a few dozen camps left. About 70 camps were established in 1933, in any convenient structure that could hold prisoners, including vacant factories, prisons, country estates, schools, workhouses , and castles. There

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3146-624: Is no longer in existence today. In autumn of 1943, the first crematorium at Majdanek was replaced by the New Crematorium . It was a T-shaped wooden building with five ovens, fueled with coke and built by the Heinrich Kori GmbH of Berlin. The building was set on fire by the Germans on 22 July 1944 as they abandoned the camp on the day that the Red Army entered the outskirts of Lublin. The crematorium building which stands on

3289-627: The Einsatzgruppen death squads and massacred Polish Jews as well as Soviet prisoners of war. Older general SS personnel, and those wounded or disabled, replaced those assigned to combat duties. As the war progressed, a more diverse group was recruited to guard the expanding camp system, including female guards (who were not part of the SS). During the second half of the war, army and air force personnel were recruited, making up as many as 52 per cent of guards by January 1945. The manpower shortage

3432-864: The Heeresanstalt Peenemünde on the Baltic island of Usedom as well as at the Raxwerke in Wiener Neustadt , Austria and at the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance . On 18 August 1943, a bombing raid by the Royal Air Force on Peenemünde (" Operation Hydra ") seriously damaged the facilities and ended construction of V-2s there. Other air raids had damaged the other two sites in June and August. As

3575-717: The 1934 purge of the SA , the concentration camps were run exclusively by the SS via the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and later the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office . Initially, most prisoners were members of the Communist Party of Germany , but as time went on different groups were arrested, including "habitual criminals", " asocials ", and Jews . After the beginning of World War II , people from German-occupied Europe were imprisoned in

3718-652: The Arbeitseinsatz-Dienststelle which coordinated the use of forced labour. Hans Schurz  [ de ] became head of the Politische Abteilung (the local Gestapo office). On 3 and 4 April 1945, Nordhausen was attacked in two waves by several hundred Lancasters and Mosquitos of Nos 1 and 8 Groups of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Around 75% of the town was destroyed, the medieval old town

3861-725: The Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire , Ottoman Armenians were held in camps during their deportation into the Syrian Desert . In postwar Germany , "unwanted foreigners" – mainly Eastern European Jews – were confined at Cottbus-Sielow and Stargard . On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany after striking a backroom deal with the previous chancellor, Franz von Papen . The Nazis had no plan for concentration camps prior to their seizure of power. The concentration camp system arose in

4004-537: The Disciplinary and Penal Code , a manual which specified draconian punishments for disobedient prisoners. He also created a system of prisoner functionaries , which later developed into the camp elders, block elders, and kapo of later camps. In May 1934, Lichtenburg was taken over by the SS from the Prussian bureaucracy, marking the beginning of a transition set in motion by Heinrich Himmler , then chief of

4147-569: The Gestapo ( secret police ). Following the purge of the SA on 30 June 1934, in which Eicke took a leading role, the remaining SA-run camps were taken over by the SS. In December 1934, Eicke was appointed the first inspector of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (IKL); only camps managed by the IKL were designated "concentration camps". In early 1934, the number of prisoners was still falling and it

4290-565: The Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb . In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS . On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners. The inmates at Dora-Mittelbau were treated in

4433-663: The Majdanek State Museum is a Holocaust memorial museum and education centre devoted entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of concentration, slave-labor, and extermination camps and sub-camps of KL Lublin. It houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony. Konzentrationslager Lublin was established in October 1941 on the orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler , forwarded to Odilo Globocnik soon after Himmler's visit to Lublin on 17–20 July 1941 in

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4576-566: The SS Main Command Office and the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) took on the responsibility of detaining and releasing concentration camp prisoners. In 1942, the IKL was subordinated to the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA) to improve the camps' integration into the war economy. Despite changes in the structure, the IKL remained directly responsible to Himmler. The camps under

4719-550: The SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) and two of Speer's armaments managers, Karl Maria Hettlage  [ de ] and Gerhard Degenkolb  [ de ] , the former seconded from Commerzbank . To actually run the plant, Albin Sawatzki  [ de ] , who had earlier been in charge of producing the " Tiger I " tank at Henschel , was appointed. Operational security for

4862-560: The Steyr-Daimler-Puch weapons/munitions factory. By mid-October 1942, the camp held 9,519 registered prisoners, of whom 7,468 (or 78.45%) were Jews, and another 1,884 (19.79%) were non-Jewish Poles. By August 1943, there were 16,206 prisoners in the main camp, of which 9,105 (56.18%) were Jews and 3,893 (24.02%) were non-Jewish Poles. Minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals. According to

5005-415: The Wehrmacht were targeted and detained in concentration camps. In Western Europe, arrests focused on resistance fighters and saboteurs, but in Eastern Europe arrests included mass roundups aimed at the implementation of Nazi population policy and the forced recruitment of workers. This led to a predominance of Eastern Europeans, especially Poles, who made up the majority of the population of some camps. By

5148-644: The death marches . Museums commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime have been established at many of the former camps and the Nazi concentration camp system has become a universal symbol of violence and terror. Concentration camps are conventionally held to have been invented by the British during the Second Boer War , but historian Dan Stone argues that there were precedents in other countries and that camps were "the logical extension of phenomena that had long characterized colonial rule". Although

5291-419: The "criminal" prisoners at concentration camps needed to be isolated from society because they had committed offenses of a sexual or violent nature. In fact, most of the criminal prisoners were working-class men who had resorted to petty theft to support their families. Nazi raids of perceived asocials, including the arrest of 10,000 people in June 1938, targeted homeless people and the mentally ill, as well as

5434-472: The 34 months of its existence. Of the more than two million Jews murdered in the course of Operation Reinhard , some 60,000 (56,000 known by name) were most certainly killed at Majdanek, amongst its almost 80,000 counted victims. The Soviets initially grossly overestimated the number of murders, claiming at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 that there were no fewer than 400,000 Jewish victims, and

5577-516: The Allies. Only some small subcamps, mostly containing Italian POWs, were not evacuated. The SS also left several hundred sick prisoners at Dora and in the Boelcke-Kaserne . They were freed when US troops (consisting of the 3rd Armored Division , the 104th Infantry Division , and the 9th Infantry Division ) reached Nordhausen on 11 April 1945. There were also around 1,300 dead prisoners at

5720-830: The American space program. The Soviets also hired some of the engineers. Like the rocket engineers, many construction engineers at Mittelwerk were able to continue with their careers. Very few were charged in connection with their role in the Nazi slave labour program. After liberation, the US forces and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) turned Dora and Harzungen camps into accommodations for displaced persons (DPs). In mid-May 1945, there were around 14,000 people living at Dora, several hundred liberated concentration camp inmates and many POWs as well as foreign civilian forced labourers. Repatriation

5863-687: The Buchenwald system. With the creation of the Jägerstab (Fighter Staff), led by Speer, as an institution to oversee a boost to fighter plane production and the move of military production underground, facilities for the production of fighter planes for the Junkers company were to be created around Nordhausen – along with the necessary infrastructure. In addition, after the creation of the Geilenbergstab (named after Edmund Geilenberg ), over

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6006-860: The Great Depression lowered the unemployment rate, so " work-shy " elements would be arrested to keep others working harder. At the same time, Himmler was also focusing on exploiting prisoners' labor within the camp system. Hitler's architect, Albert Speer , had grand plans for creating monumental Nazi architecture . The SS company German Earth and Stone Works (DEST) was set up with funds from Speer's agency for exploiting prisoner labour to extract building materials. Flossenbürg and Mauthausen had been built adjacent to quarries, and DEST also set up brickworks at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Political prisoners were also arrested in larger numbers, including Jehovah's Witnesses and German émigrés who returned home. Czech and Austrian anti-Nazis were arrested after

6149-577: The IKL were guarded by members of the SS-Totenkopfverbande ("death's head"). The guards were housed in barracks adjacent to the camp and their duties were to guard the perimeter of the camp as well as work details. They were officially forbidden from entering the camps, although this rule was not followed. Towards the end of the 1930s, the SS-Totenkopfverbande expanded its operations and set up military units, which followed

6292-546: The June 1945 Fedden Mission investigation of conditions at Dora, the trial "The United States of America versus Arthur Kurt Andrae et al." trial commenced on 7 August 1947 at the Dachau internment camp against 19 defendants. Otto Förschner was not a defendant in the Dora Trial, since he had already been executed after being convicted in the Dachau camp trial . The court convicted 15 Dora SS guards and Kapos (one of them

6435-716: The Majdanek Camp. Losses of our nation and the Home Army are equal to the losses which we suffered during the German occupation. We are paying with our blood." Among the prisoners at the Majdanek NKVD Camp were Volhynian members of the AK , and soldiers of the AK units which had been moving toward Warsaw to join in the Warsaw Uprising . On August 23, 1944, some 250 inmates from Majdanek were transported to

6578-644: The Majdanek Museum, which was cited by the museum for years. The current figure is considered "incredibly low" by Rajca, nevertheless, it has been accepted by the Museum Board of Directors "with a certain caution", pending further research into the number of prisoners who were not entered into the Holocaust train records by German camp administration. For now, the museum states that based on new research, some 150,000 prisoners arrived at Majdanek during

6721-473: The Mittelbau camps between August 1943 and March 1945. The precise number of people killed is impossible to determine. The SS files counted around 12,000 dead. In addition, an unknown number of unregistered prisoners died or were murdered in the camps. Around 5,000 sick and dying were sent in early 1944 and in March 1945 to Lublin and Bergen-Belsen. Of those killed, around 350 were hanged (including 200 for sabotage). The rate of executions notably accelerated after

6864-770: The Nazi camps than any other site of detention and terror in history". Stone argues that the Nazi concentration camp system inspired similar atrocities by other regimes, including the Argentine military junta during the Dirty War , the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Brazilian military dictatorship and Pitești Prison in the Romanian People's Republic . Majdanek concentration camp Majdanek (or Lublin )

7007-448: The Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum , calculated following the discovery of the Höfle Telegram in 2000. That number is close to the one currently indicated on the museum's website. The total number of victims has been a controversial since the research of Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz in 1948, who approximated a figure of 360,000 victims. It was followed by an estimate of around 235,000 victims by Czesław Rajca (1992) of

7150-406: The SS before them used the same facilities to imprison and torture Polish patriots. On August 19, 1944, in a report to the Polish government-in-exile, the Lublin District of the Home Army (AK) wrote: "Mass arrests of the AK soldiers are being carried out by the NKVD all over the region. These arrests are tolerated by the Polish Committee of National Liberation , and AK soldiers are incarcerated in

7293-459: The SS construction units III and IV (totaling around 3,000 prisoners, distributed among several small camps along a newly constructed railway line between Nordhausen and Herzberg am Harz . More subcamps were added once Mittelbau was officially independent. By spring 1945, the number of inmates totaled over 40,000 in around 40 camps. From spring/summer 1944, the camp became the centre of a subcamp system of its own. Originally, these still were part of

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7436-513: The SS to exert absolute power. Prisoners, who previously wore civilian clothes, were forced to wear uniforms with Nazi concentration camp badges . The number of prisoners began to rise again, from 4,761 on 1 November 1936 to 7,750 by the end of 1937. By the end of June 1938, the prisoner population had expanded threefold in the previous six months, to 24,000 prisoners. The increase was fueled by arrests of those considered habitual criminals or asocials . According to SS chief Heinrich Himmler ,

7579-462: The SS used Zyklon B to kill Soviet prisoners in improvised gas chambers . In 1942, the emphasis of the camps shifted to the war effort; by 1943, two-thirds of prisoners were employed by war industries. The death rate skyrocketed with an estimated half of the 180,000 prisoners admitted between July and November 1942 dying by the end of that interval. Orders to reduce deaths in order to spare inmate productivity had little effect in practice. During

7722-435: The Soviet Union, Poland or France) died from hunger, thirst, cold and overwork. During the first months, most of the work done was heavy construction and transport. Only in January 1944, when production of the A4/V-2 began, were the first prisoners moved to the new above-ground camp on the south side of the mountain. Many had to sleep in the tunnels until May 1944. In these initial months, from October 1943 to March 1944, out of

7865-440: The Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in barrack 42. Due to the pressing need for foreign manpower in the war industry, Jewish laborers from Poland were originally spared. For a time they were either kept in the ghettos, such as the one in Warsaw (which became a concentration camp after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ), or sent to labor camps such as Majdanek, where they worked primarily at

8008-440: The annexation of their countries in 1938 and 1939. Jews were also increasingly targeted, with 2,000 Viennese Jews arrested after the Nazi annexation. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, 26,000 Jewish men were deported to concentration camps following mass arrests , overwhelming the capacity of the system. These prisoners were subject to unprecedented abuse leading to hundreds of deaths – more people died at Dachau in

8151-441: The approximately 15,000 prisoners from Mittelbau, about half were from the Soviet Union and Poland. Although not in good health, these men were much healthier than most of the prisoners in the Belsen main camp. When the British Army liberated Belsen on 15 April, many of the inmates turned on their former overseers at Mittelbau. About 170 of these " Kapos " were killed that day. Some of the SS personnel who had come from Auschwitz with

8294-406: The area, US specialists began to inspect the rocket works and seized materials, parts and documents. They were later joined by British experts. Eventually the Soviets took over. Apart from Rickhey, Rudolph, and von Braun, several dozen former Mittelwerk engineers and scientists quickly hired on with the US government. They first constructed rocket weapons or jet planes and then mostly went on to join

8437-460: The assembly lines. As a result, new prisoners were brought in from other concentration camps. From March 1944, the others were moved to newly created subcamps in the area around Nordhausen where they continued to be used for digging new tunnels or working at construction sites above ground. By late January, 56 rockets had been produced. By May, monthly output was 400 units. There were still defects, resulting in launch-pad and mid-air explosions. Output

8580-512: The barracks. War correspondents took pictures and made films of the dead and dying prisoners at Dora. Like the documentation of Nazi atrocities at Bergen-Belsen, these were published around the globe and became some of the best-known testimonies of Nazi crimes. Most of those inmates who survived the transports were freed in mid-April at Bergen-Belsen or at other camps. Some, however, remained prisoners until early May and were freed in Mecklenburg or Austria. In total, even conservative estimates put

8723-403: The building under the title Die Blutspur führt nach Bonn ("the blood trail leads to Bonn "), implying a historical continuity between the Nazi concentration camp and the government of West Germany . By contrast with Buchenwald , Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück , the communist government of the GDR never raised Dora to the status of Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte (national memorial). In

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8866-441: The camp averaged about 5,000. The camp was dissolved in July 1946. After that, the town of Nordhausen had the huts at Dora dismantled and re-erected at other locations in the district as emergency housing for the homeless. Only the camp's crematorium, the fire station and the camp prison remained. Nature reclaimed the area of the camp. The Soviets briefly continued to use parts of the tunnel network for manufacturing rockets. In 1947,

9009-410: The camp system, and aspects such as forced labor. As late as the 1990s, German local and economic history omitted mention of the camps or presented them as exclusively the responsibility of the SS. Two scholarly encyclopedias of the concentration camps have been published: Der Ort des Terrors and Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos . According to Caplan and Wachsmann, "more books have been published on

9152-400: The camps because Germans saw the prisoners rather than the guards as criminals. She writes that demand for SS construction brigades "points to general acceptance of the concentration camps". In Cologne some construction brigade prisoners were shot in broad daylight. There were 27 main camps and, according to historian Nikolaus Wachsmann 's estimate, more than 1,100 satellite camps. This is

9295-445: The camps has often been depicted as a Darwinian struggle for survival, although some mutual aid existed. Individual efforts to survive, sometimes at others' expense, could hamper the aggregate survival rate. The influx of non-German prisoners from 1939 changed the previous hierarchy based on triangle to one based on nationality. Jews, Slavic prisoners, and Spanish Republicans were targeted for especially harsh treatment which led to

9438-469: The camps to be murdered in euthanasia centers . By April 1942, when the operation finished, at least 6,000 and as many as 20,000 people had been killed – the first act of systematic killing in the camp system. Beginning in August 1941, selected Soviet prisoners of war were killed within the concentration camps, usually within a few days of their arrival. By mid-1942, when the operation finished, at least 34,000 Soviet prisoners had been murdered. At Auschwitz,

9581-407: The camps where they worked, often engaging prisoners for domestic labor. Perpetration by this leadership was based on their tight social bonds, a perceived common sense that the aims of the system were good, as well as the opportunity for material gain. Before World War II, most prisoners in the concentration camps were Germans. After the expansion of Nazi Germany, people from countries occupied by

9724-576: The camps. These subcamps, often established in town centers in such locations as schools, restaurants, barracks, factory buildings, or military camps, were joint ventures between industry and the SS. An increasing number of German civilians interacted with the camps: entrepreneurs and landowners provided land or services, doctors decided which prisoners were healthy enough to continue working, foremen oversaw labor deployments, and administrators helped with logistics. SS construction brigades were in demand by municipalities to clear bomb debris and rebuild. For

9867-425: The concentration camp system after being deported to Auschwitz. Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the camp system. Conditions worsened after the outbreak of war due to reduction in food, worsening housing, and increase in work. Deaths from disease and malnutrition increased, outpacing other causes of death. However, the food provided was usually sufficient to sustain life. Life in

10010-457: The concentration camps. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. Following Allied military victories, the camps were gradually liberated in 1944 and 1945, although hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in

10153-435: The course of Operation Barbarossa , the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 POWs. After large numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war were captured during the Battle of Kiev , the projected camp capacity was subsequently increased to 50,000. Construction for that many began on October 1, 1941 (as it did also in Auschwitz-Birkenau , which had received

10296-707: The data from the official Majdanek State Museum, 300,000 people were inmates of the camp at one time or another. The prisoner population at any given time was much lower. From October 1942 onward Majdanek also had female overseers. These SS guards, trained at the Ravensbrück concentration camp , included Elsa Ehrich , Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner , Hermine Braunsteiner , Hildegard Lächert , Rosy Suess (Süss), Elisabeth Knoblich-Ernst, Charlotte Karla Mayer-Woellert, and Gertrud Heise (1942–1944), who were later convicted as war criminals. Majdanek did not initially have subcamps. These were incorporated in early autumn 1943 when

10439-516: The death rate rose: Between January and early April 1945, around 6,000 inmates died, around 3,000 of them at the Boelcke -Kaserne (a former Luftwaffe barracks) at Nordhausen, which had been used by the SS after January 1945 as the main Sterbelager (camp for the dying) for the Mittelbau system. Also from January to April 1945, at least 1,700 V-2 and over 6,000 V-1 rockets were built. Along with

10582-487: The dissolution of the so-called Zigeuner-Familienlager (Gypsy family camp) at Auschwitz-Birkenau , the SS transported many Roma and Sinti to Mittelbau between April and August 1944. The prisoners were subject to extreme cruelty. As a result, they often suffered injuries, including permanent disability and disfigurement, and death. Severe beatings were routine, as was deliberate starvation, torture and summary executions . In total, around 60,000 prisoners passed through

10725-400: The early 1970s, the local authorities turned the completely overgrown muster ground into an Ehrenplatz der Nationen with a rostrum, flag poles and an eternal fire. In 1988, an attempt was made to access one of the tunnels inside Kohnstein, but it was abandoned due to a lack of funds that same year. After reunification, the memorial was redesigned. A small portion of the original tunnel system

10868-624: The end of the war, main camps were functioning more and more as transfer stations from which prisoners were redirected to subcamps. At their peak in 1945, concentration camp prisoners made up 3 per cent of workers in Germany. Historian Marc Buggeln estimates that no more than 1 per cent of the labor for Germany's arms production came from concentration camp prisoners. Arrests of Germans in 1933 were often accompanied by public humiliation or beatings. If released, prisoners might return home with visible marks of abuse or psychological breakdown. Using

11011-749: The end of the war, only 5 to 10 per cent of the camp population was "Reich Germans" from Germany or Austria. More than 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war and smaller groups from other nationalities were transferred to the concentration camps in direct violation of the Geneva Convention . Most Jews who were persecuted and killed during the Holocaust were never prisoners in concentration camps. Significant numbers of Jews were imprisoned beginning in November 1938 because of Kristallnacht , after which they were always overrepresented as prisoners. During

11154-525: The enemy. These men were subject to debriefing by the Soviet secret service and some of them were imprisoned once more and sent to the Gulag . Once the last forced labourers had left, Dora camp was used from December 1945 by German authorities as a holding camp for Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia . They were then distributed among various municipalities in northern Thuringia. The number of expelled housed in

11297-460: The entrances and some internal parts were blown up in accordance with the Allied agreement to destroy military facilities in Germany. Similar to what happened at Dora, most of the subcamps were soon dismantled and the wood used for heating or new construction. Local authorities decided in 1952 to demolish the Dora camp prison – in the face of protests by former detainees. By the early 1950s, most of

11440-599: The evacuation trains went on to Bergen-Belsen when Mittelbau was itself evacuated. A few of them, notably Franz Hössler , were prosecuted by the British military authorities at the Belsen trial in Lüneburg in September 1945. However, charges at this trial related only to crimes committed either at Auschwitz or at Bergen-Belsen, not at Mittelbau. Hössler was among those found guilty and executed on 13 December 1945. Following

11583-519: The first years of the camps, unemployment was high and prisoners were forced to perform economically valueless but strenuous tasks, such as farming on moorland (such as at Esterwegen ). Other prisoners had to work on constructing and expanding the camps. In the years before World War II, quarrying and bricklaying for the SS company DEST played a central role in prisoner labor. Despite prisoners' increasing economic importance, conditions declined; prisoners were seen as expendable so each influx of prisoners

11726-573: The following months due to the desire to suppress tens of thousands of Nazi opponents in Germany. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was the pretext for mass arrests. The Reichstag Fire Decree eliminated the right to personal freedom enshrined in the Weimar Constitution and provided a legal basis for detention without trial . The first camp was Nohra , established on 3 March 1933 in a school. The number of prisoners in 1933–1934

11869-544: The former buildings—is mostly bare. A fire in August 2010 destroyed one of the wooden buildings that was being used as a museum to house seven thousand pairs of prisoners' shoes. The city of Lublin has tripled in size since the end of World War II , and even the main camp is today within the boundaries of the city of Lublin. It is clearly visible to many inhabitants of the city's high-rises, a fact that many visitors remark upon. The gardens of houses and flats border on and overlook

12012-480: The four months after Kristallnacht than in the previous five years. Most of the Jewish prisoners were soon released, often after promising to emigrate. At the end of August 1939, prisoners of Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps were murdered as part of false flag attacks staged by Germany to justify the invasion of Poland . During the war, the camps became increasingly brutal and lethal due to

12155-491: The height of the Holocaust from 1941 to 1943, the Jewish population of the concentration camps was low. Extermination camps for the mass murder of Jews— Kulmhof , Belzec , Sobibor , and Treblinka —were set up outside the concentration camp system. The existing IKL camps Auschwitz and Majdanek gained additional function as extermination camps. After mid-1943, some forced-labor camps for Jews and some Nazi ghettos were converted into concentration camps. Other Jews entered

12298-443: The horrors found there were widely publicised. Although 1,000 inmates had previously been forcibly marched to Auschwitz (of whom only half arrived alive), the Red Army still found thousands of inmates, mainly POWs, still in the camp, and ample evidence of the mass murder that had occurred there. The official estimate of 78,000 victims, of those 59,000 Jews, was determined in 2005 by Tomasz Kranz  [ pl ] , director of

12441-494: The inmates from Auschwitz arrived several hundred SS guards who joined the staff at Mittelbau, including Richard Baer , who succeeded Otto Förschner as overall Mittelbau commandant on 1 February 1945. Baer replaced most senior personnel with people from Auschwitz. Franz Hössler became commandant of the Häftlinglager Dora . Eduard Wirths became the new Standortarzt . Max Sell  [ de ] became head of

12584-607: The inmates were forced to board box cars. Several trains, each with thousands of prisoners, left the area through 6 April for Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück . Others were forced to walk through the Harz hills towards the northeast. Those unable to keep up with these death marches were summarily shot by the guards. The worst atrocity occurred at Gardelegen, known as the Gardelegen massacre . More than 1,000 prisoners from Mittelbau and Neuengamme subcamps were murdered in

12727-474: The largest subcamp, Lager Ellrich-Juliushütte , that had been cut in half by the inner-German border. Nazi concentration camp From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps ( German : Konzentrationslager ), including subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe . The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany . Following

12870-530: The local Polish name remained more popular. After the camp's liberation in July 1944, the site was formally protected by the Soviet Union . By autumn, with the war still raging, it had been preserved as a museum. The crematorium ovens and gas chambers were largely intact, serving as some of the best examples of the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany . The site was given national designation in 1965. Today,

13013-432: The main camp at Majdanek, the most notorious executions occurred on November 3, 1943, when 18,400 Jews were murdered in a single day. The next morning, 25 Jews who had succeeded in hiding were found and shot. Meanwhile, 611 other prisoners, 311 women and 300 men, were commanded to sort through the clothes of the dead and cover the burial trenches. The men were later assigned to Sonderkommando 1005 , where they had to exhume

13156-629: The main camps. The number of prisoners tripled from 21,000 in August 1939 to about 70,000 to 80,000 in early 1942. This expansion was driven by the demand for forced labor and later the invasion of the Soviet Union ; new camps were sent up near quarries (Natzweiler and Gross-Rosen) or brickworks (Neuengamme). In April 1941, the high command of the SS ordered the murder of ill and exhausted prisoners who could no longer work (especially those deemed racially inferior). Victims were selected by camp personnel or traveling doctors, and were removed from

13299-522: The most incriminating evidence of war crimes. The camp was nicknamed Majdanek ("little Majdan") in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacent to the Lublin ghetto of Majdan Tatarski. Nazi documents initially described the site as a POW camp of the Waffen-SS , based on how it was funded and operated. It was renamed by the Reich Security Main Office as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9, 1943, but

13442-413: The new main camps, many satellite camps were set up to more effectively leverage prisoner labor for the war effort. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the camps were organized according to the following structure: commandant / adjutant , political department , protective custody camp , administration  [ de ] , camp doctor , and guard command. In November 1940, the IKL came under the control of

13585-404: The number of people who did not survive being sent to Mittelbau-Dora at over 20,000. Thus, around one in three of those confined here did not survive. Transports from Mittelbau arrived at Bergen-Belsen between 8 and 11 April 1945. Several thousand men were housed in the so-called Kasernenlager around 2 kilometres (1.2 miles) north of the main camp, which was already overflowing with prisoners. Of

13728-464: The number of victims more or less corresponded to the crematoria capacity. Later researchers tried to take much more evidence into account, using records of deportations, contemporaneous population censuses, and recovered Nazi records. Hilberg's 1961 estimate, using these records, aligns closely with Kranz's report. After the camp takeover, in August 1944 the Soviets protected the camp area and convened

13871-402: The number of workers had risen to over 3,000, by late October to 6,800 and by Christmas 1943 to more than 10,500. Since there were initially no huts, the prisoners were housed inside the tunnels – in specially designated Schlafstollen with four levels of beds stacked over each other. There were no sanitary facilities except for barrels that served as latrines. Inmates (the majority of them from

14014-646: The official Soviet count was of 1.5 million victims of different nationalities, Independent Canadian journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, based in Moscow and on the payroll of the Canadian Jewish Congress , visited Majdanek on August 28, 1944. The following day he sent a telegram to Saul Hayes , the executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress. It states: "I do wish [to] stress that Majdanek where one million Jews and half

14157-558: The open. By mid-November, only 500 of them were still alive, of whom at least 30% were incapable of further labor. In mid-December, barracks for 20,000 were ready when a typhus epidemic broke out, and by January 1942 all the slave laborers – POWs as well as Polish Jews – were dead. All work ceased until March 1942, when new prisoners arrived. Although the camp did eventually have the capacity to hold approximately 50,000 prisoners, it did not grow significantly beyond that size. In July 1942, Himmler visited Belzec , Sobibor , and Treblinka ,

14300-518: The personnel from Auschwitz arrived: in February and March 1945, the SS on some days hanged 30, on one occasion even 50 prisoners. On 1 January 1944, the Mittelwerk delivered its first three rockets, all of which suffered from serious production defects. The SS considered those prisoners who had expanded the tunnels in autumn and winter of 1943/44 as unusable in actual production work, because they were either too weakened or not qualified for work on

14443-568: The plans of the Nazi leadership: most victims died in the second half of the war. Five new camps were opened between the start of the war and the end of 1941: Neuengamme (early 1940), outside of Hamburg ; Auschwitz (June 1940), which initially operated as a concentration camp for Polish resistance activists; Gross-Rosen (May 1941) in Silesia ; and Natzweiler (May 1941) in territory annexed from France . The first satellite camps were also established, administratively subordinated to one of

14586-428: The press were scarce but larger numbers of people were arrested and people who interacted with the camps, such as those who registered deaths, could make conclusions about the camp conditions and discuss with acquaintances. The visibility of the camps heightened during the war due to increasing prisoner numbers, the establishment of many subcamps in proximity to German civilians, and the use of labor deployments outside

14729-483: The prisoners assigned to Sonderkommando 1005 ). From June 1942, the SS disposed of the bodies by burning them, either on pyres made from the chassis of old lorries or in a crematorium. The so-called First Crematorium had two ovens which were brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . This facility stood in "Interfield I", the area between the first and the second fenced camp section; it

14872-799: The prisoners, chances of survival rarely improved despite the contact with the outside world, although those few Germans who tried to help did not encounter punishment. Germans were often shocked to see the reality of the concentration camps up close, but reluctant to aid the prisoners because of fear that they would be imprisoned as well. Others found the poor state of the prisoners to confirm Nazi propaganda about them. Historian Robert Gellately argues that "the Germans generally turned out to be proud and pleased that Hitler and his henchmen were putting away certain kinds of people who did not fit in, or who were regarded as 'outsiders', 'asocials', 'useless eaters', or 'criminals ' ". According to historian Karola Fings , fear of arrest did not undermine public support for

15015-408: The project was overseen by SS-Oberstürmbannfuhrer Helmut Bischoff , a former Gestapo official and a member of Kammler's staff. The initial contract for Mittelwerk was for 12,000 rockets, valued at 750 million Reichsmark for a standard price per unit, once production reached 5,000 units, of 50,000 Reichsmark per rocket. Especially for Kammler, this became a prestige project. Only ten days after

15158-517: The raid on Peenemünde, on 28 August 1943, the first 107 concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald arrived with their SS guards at the Kohnstein. The official name of the new subcamp of Buchenwald was Arbeitslager Dora . Another 1,223 Buchenwald prisoners followed on 2 September and workers from Peenemünde came in mid-October. Over the next months, many more prisoners were brought to the area in almost daily transports from Buchenwald. By late September,

15301-522: The rail station Lublin Tatary . There, all victims were placed in cattle cars and taken to camps in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union. In July 1969, on the 25th anniversary of its liberation, a large monument designed by Wiktor Tołkin (a.k.a. Victor Tolkin) was constructed at the site. It consists of two parts: a large gate monument at the camp's entrance and a large mausoleum holding ashes of

15444-495: The remaining forced labor camps around Lublin, including Budzyn, Trawniki , Poniatowa , Krasnik, Pulawy, as well as the "Airstrip" (" Airfield "), and "Lipowa 7" ) concentration camps became sub-camps of Majdanek. From 1 September 1941 to 28 May 1942, Alfons Bentele headed the Administration in the camp. Alois Kurz, SS Untersturmführer , was a German staff member at Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and at Mittelbau-Dora. He

15587-798: The same bodies for cremation. These men were then executed. The 311 women were subsequently sent to Auschwitz , where they were murdered by gas. By the end of Aktion Erntefest ("Harvest Festival"), Majdanek had only 71 Jews left out of the total number of 6,562 prisoners still alive. Executions of the remaining prisoners continued at Majdanek in the following months. Between December 1943 and March 1944, Majdanek received approximately 18,000 so-called "invalids", many of whom were subsequently murdered with Zyklon B . Executions by firing squad continued as well, with 600 shot on January 21, 1944; 180 shot on January 23, 1944; and 200 shot on March 24, 1944. Adjutant Karl Höcker's postwar trial documented his culpability in mass murders committed at this camp: On 3 May 1989

15730-510: The same order). In early November, the plans were extended to allow for 125,000 inmates and in December to 150,000. It was further increased in March 1942 to allow for 250,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Construction began with 150 Jewish forced laborers from one of Globocnik's Lublin camps, to which the prisoners returned each night. Later the workforce included 2,000 Red Army POWs, who had to survive extreme conditions, including sleeping out in

15873-805: The same year, some 1,300 m of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones was collected and turned into a large mound. Majdanek became a national museum in 1965. Some Nazi personnel of the camp were prosecuted immediately after the war, and some in the decades afterward. In November and December 1944, four SS Men and two kapos were placed on trial; one committed suicide and the rest were hanged on December 3, 1944. The last major, widely publicized prosecution of 16 SS members from Majdanek ( Majdanek-Prozess in German) took place from 1975 to 1981 in West Germany. Of 1,037 SS members who worked at Majdanek and are known by name, 170 were prosecuted, due to

16016-852: The second half of the war, Auschwitz swelled in size – fueled by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews – and became the center of the camp system. It was the deadliest concentration camp and Jews sent there faced a virtual death sentence even if they were not immediately killed, as most were. In August 1943, 74,000 of the 224,000 registered prisoners in all SS concentration camps were in Auschwitz. In 1943 and early 1944, additional concentration camps – Riga in Latvia, Kovno in Lithuania, Vaivara in Estonia, and Kraków-Plaszów in Poland – were converted from ghettos or labor camps; these camps were populated almost entirely by Jewish prisoners. Along with

16159-555: The site today is a reconstruction from the time when the former camp became a memorial. Its ovens are the original ones built in 1943. Operation Reinhard continued until early November 1943, when the last Jewish prisoners of the Majdanek system of subcamps from the District Lublin in the General Government were massacred by the firing squads of Trawniki men during Operation "Harvest Festival" . With respect to

16302-470: The sites of Nazi camps, such as Theresienstadt and Mauthausen . Many prisoners held by Germany died as a result of intentional withholding of food and dangerous working conditions in violation of the 1907 Hague Convention . In countries such as France , Belgium , Italy , Austria-Hungary , and Germany, civilians deemed to be of "enemy origin" were denaturalized . Hundreds of thousands were interned and subject to forced labor in harsh conditions. During

16445-481: The summer of 1944 more underground construction was requested for the German petroleum industry. Demand for workers for these projects was satisfied with concentration camp prisoners, but also with foreign forced labourers, POWs and drafted Germans. The SS administration separated Mittelbau-Dora from Buchenwald at the end of September 1944 and Dora became the center of it. In effect, the new camp became officially operational on 1 November 1944 with 32,471 prisoners. By

16588-817: The terrible conditions and finding them littered with corpses. Some members of Speer's staff were so shocked that they had to take an extra period of leave. A week later, Speer wrote to Kammler, congratulating him on his success "in transforming the underground installation ... from its raw condition two months ago into a factory, which has no equal in Europe and which is unsurpassed even when measured against American standards. I take this opportunity to express my appreciation for this really unique achievement and to ask you also in future to support Herr Degenkolb in this wonderful way." Inmates came from almost all countries of Europe; many of them had been arrested for political reasons. After May 1944, Jews were also brought to Mittelbau. With

16731-487: The three secret extermination camps built specifically for Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry . These camps had begun operations in March, May, and July 1942, respectively. Subsequently, Himmler issued an order that the deportations of Jews to the camps from the five districts of occupied Poland , which constituted the Nazi Generalgouvernement , be completed by the end of 1942. Majdanek

16874-401: The time Dora became operational in November 1944, the decline of Mittelbau-Dora was already beginning. With the subcamps overcrowded and the weather turning colder, conditions in all camps deteriorated and the death rate rose significantly. After peaking in March 1944 at 750, this had declined to 100 to 150 per month by the summer. From November it picked up and in December 1944 the official tally

17017-552: The total death toll is estimated at 1.8 to more than two million. Most of the fatalities occurred during the second half of World War II, including at least a third of the 700,000 prisoners who were registered as of January 1945. Major evacuations of the camps occurred in mid-1944 from the Baltics and eastern Poland , January 1945 from western Poland and Silesia , and in March 1945 from concentration camps in Germany. Both Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners died in large numbers as

17160-457: The traces of the central Dora camp had disappeared. Whilst the prison was being demolished, some people from Nordhausen began to turn the area around the crematorium into a memorial and cemetery. In 1964, the local district SED created the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Dora and had a sculpture by the artist Jürgen von Woyski erected in front of the crematorium. In 1966, a permanent exhibition opened inside

17303-607: The unemployed. Although the Nazis had previously targeted social outsiders, the influx of new prisoners meant that political prisoners became a minority. To house the new prisoners, three new camps were established: Flossenbürg (May 1938) near the Czechoslovak border, Mauthausen (August 1938) in territory annexed from Austria , and Ravensbrück (May 1939) the first purpose-built camp for female prisoners. The mass arrests were partly motivated by economic factors. Recovery from

17446-599: The victims at its opposite end. In October 2005, in cooperation with the Majdanek museum, four Majdanek survivors returned to the site and enabled archaeologists to find some 50 objects which had been buried by inmates, including watches, earrings, and wedding rings. According to the documentary film Buried Prayers , this was the largest reported recovery of valuables in a death camp to date. Interviews between government historians and Jewish survivors were not frequent before 2005. The camp today occupies about half of its original 2.7 square kilometres (670 acres), and—but for

17589-574: The war, most Germans rejected the crimes associated with the concentration camps, while denying any knowledge or responsibility. Under the West German policy of Wiedergutmachung ( lit.   ' making good again ' ), some survivors of concentration camps received compensation for their imprisonment. A few perpetrators were put on trial after the war. Accounts of the concentration camps – both condemnatory and sympathetic – were publicized outside of Germany before World War II. Many survivors testified about their experiences or wrote memoirs after

17732-418: The war. Some of these accounts have become internationally famous, such as Primo Levi 's 1947 book, If This is a Man . The concentration camps have been the subject of historical writings since Eugen Kogon 's 1946 study, Der SS-Staat  [ de ] ("The SS State"). Substantial research did not begin until the 1980s. Scholarship has focused on the fate of groups of prisoners, the organization of

17875-702: The word "concentration camp" has acquired the connotation of murder because of the Nazi concentration camps, the British camps in South Africa did not involve systematic murder. The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps. During the First World War , eight to nine million prisoners of war were held in prisoner-of-war camps , some of them at locations which were later

18018-440: Was 570, of whom 500 died at Lager Ellrich . At the end of 1944, the SS began to evacuate the inmates of Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen before the advancing Red Army . Many of them were transported to the Mittelbau. Through March 1945, up to 16,000 prisoners arrived, including women and children. Although many died in transit, this raised the number of Jews at Mittelbau. Those who survived were often extremely weak or sick. Once again,

18161-411: Was Zyklon B. In late July 1944, with Soviet forces rapidly approaching Lublin, the Germans hastily evacuated the camp and partially destroyed the crematoria before Soviet Red Army troops arrived on July 24, 1944. Majdanek is the best-preserved camp of the Holocaust due to incompetence by its deputy commander, Anton Thernes . It was the first major concentration camp liberated by Allied forces, and

18304-516: Was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II . It had seven gas chambers , two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination , it

18447-418: Was appointed Chief of German Police on 17 June 1936. Of the six SS camps operational as of mid-1936, only two (Dachau and Lichtenburg) still existed by 1938. In the place of the camps that closed down, Eicke opened new camps at Sachsenhausen (September 1936) and Buchenwald (July 1937). Unlike earlier camps, the newly opened camps were purpose-built, isolated from the population and the rule of law , enabling

18590-485: Was displayed at the camp museum. The 2005 research by the Head of Scientific Department at Majdanek Museum, historian Tomasz Kranz indicated that there were 79,000 victims, 59,000 of them Jews. The differences between the estimates stem from different methods used and the amounts of evidence available to the researchers. The Soviet figures relied on the crudest methodology, used for Auschwitz estimates also—it assumed that

18733-466: Was executed), four defendants were acquitted. The trial also addressed the question of liability of the engineers and scientists — former Generaldirektor of Mittelwerk Georg Rickhey was acquitted. Arthur Rudolph (recruited in 1945 under Operation Paperclip and later exiled from the US in 1984) was not even charged. A related trial was also held 1959–1961 in Essen . Immediately after taking control of

18876-436: Was fairly quick for those from Western Europe, but many from Eastern Europe had to wait months before they were able to return home. In early July, Thuringia passed from American to Soviet control. The Red Army now used Dora as a repatriation camp for former Polish and Soviet slave labourers. The Soviet authorities treated their citizens who had been forced to work for the Germans with suspicion, blaming them for collaborating with

19019-529: Was followed by increasing death rate. Private sector cooperation remained marginal to the overall concentration camp system for the first half of the war. After the failure to take Moscow in late 1941, the demand for armaments increased. The WVHA sought out partnerships with private industry and Speer's Armaments Ministry . In September 1942, Himmler and Speer agreed to use prisoners in armaments production and to repair damage from Allied bombing . Local authorities and private companies could hire prisoners at

19162-457: Was hit particularly hard. Out of 40,000 inhabitants, roughly 8,800 people died, 20,000 lost their homes. Among the dead were also an estimated 1,300-1,500 Mittelbau prisoners, who were confined at the Boelcke-Kaserne at the time. In early April 1945, as US troops were advancing towards the Harz , the SS decided to evacuate most of the Mittelbau camps. In great haste and with considerable brutality,

19305-479: Was made into a secondary sorting and storage depot at the onset of Operation Reinhard, for property and valuables taken from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Due to large Jewish populations in southeastern Poland, including the ghettos at Kraków , Lwów , Zamość and Warsaw , which were not yet "processed", Majdanek was refurbished as a killing center around March 1942. The gassing

19448-445: Was no national system; camps were operated by local police, SS, and SA , state interior ministries, or a combination of the above. The early camps in 1933–1934 were heterogeneous and fundamentally differed from the post-1935 camps in organization, conditions, and the groups imprisoned. On 26 June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke the second commandant of Dachau , which became the model followed by other camps. Eicke drafted

19591-460: Was not charged. On 18 June 1943, Fritz Ritterbusch moved to KL Lublin to become aide-de-camp to the Commandant. Due to the camp's proximity to Lublin, prisoners were able to communicate with the outside world through letters smuggled out by civilian workers who entered the camp. Many of these surviving letters have been donated by their recipients to the camp museum. In 2008 the museum held

19734-486: Was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the buildings. Another frequent murder method was shootings by the squads of Trawnikis . According to the Majdanek Museum , the gas chambers began operation in September 1942. There are two identical buildings at Majdanek where Zyklon B was used. Executions were carried out in barrack 41 with crystalline hydrogen cyanide released by

19877-453: Was reduced by relying on guard dogs and delegating some duties to prisoners. Corruption was widespread. Most of the camp SS leadership was middle-class and came from the war youth generation  [ de ] , who were hard-hit by the economic crisis and feared decline in status. Most had joined the Nazi movement by September 1931 and were offered full-time employment in 1933. SS leaders typically lived with their wives and children near

20020-641: Was reopened and has been accessible to visitors since 1995. Since 2000, the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora runs the memorial, financed by the Thuringian state and the federal government. The GDR era memorial installations were left intact as a documentation of the way the Communist regime treated the Nazi past. A new permanent exhibition opened in a new museum building in 2006. Some work has also been done at

20163-476: Was still far below the goal of 1,000 units per month. Wernher von Braun visited the Nordhausen plant on 25 January 1944 and again on 6 May 1944, when he met Walter Dornberger , Arthur Rudolph and Albin Sawatzki, discussing the need to enslave another 1,800 skilled French workers. On 8 September 1944, the first V-2 built at Mittelbau was successfully launched at London. That month, production hit 600 units,

20306-511: Was uncertain if the system would continue to exist. By mid-1935, there were only five camps, holding 4,000 prisoners, and 13 employees at the central IKL office. At the same time, 100,000 people were imprisoned in German jails, a quarter of those for political offenses. Believing Nazi Germany to be imperiled by internal enemies , Himmler called for a war against the "organized elements of sub-humanity", including communists, socialists, Jews, Freemasons , and criminals. Himmler won Hitler's backing and

20449-501: Was used to murder people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard , the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland . In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove

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