Majdanek (KL Lublin)

Majdanek was set up on the outskirts of Lublin after Heinrich Himmler ordered a camp there in July 1941; construction began in October 1941 with Soviet prisoners of war as the first large group of inmates. First called the "Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS Lublin" and from February 1943 "Konzentrationslager Lublin", it was subordinate to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. It served as a slave-labour camp, a penal and transit camp for Polish rural people and civilians from Belarus, and a place where Jews were imprisoned and murdered.

From the end of March 1942 transports of Jews arrived, among them about 7,000 Slovak Jews and some 2,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia selected as workers. Gas chambers using Zyklon B and carbon monoxide were in operation from September or October 1942. In April and May 1943, after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, between 18,000 and 22,000 Jews from Warsaw were deported to the camp. On 3 November 1943, in the operation the SS called "Erntefest" ("Harvest Festival"), SS and police units shot about 18,000 Jews from Majdanek and from labour camps in Lublin in ditches beside the camp; USHMM describes it as the largest single-day, single-location massacre of the Holocaust. About 42,000 Jews were killed in the operation as a whole.

The State Museum at Majdanek, drawing on research by Tomasz Kranz, puts the number of dead at about 78,000–80,000, some 59,000–60,000 of them Jews, out of about 130,000 people deported to the camp. USHMM gives a wider estimate of 95,000–130,000 deaths in the Majdanek camp system, 80,000–110,000 of them in the main camp. The SS began evacuating prisoners in April 1944; Soviet forces reached the camp on 23–24 July 1944 and found fewer than 500 prisoners.

From Berlin

No train from Berlin had Majdanek as its sole destination; statistik-des-holocaust.de lists the Berlin transport of June 1942 under "Majdanek/Sobibor". That train (dated 13 June 1942 by the Bundesarchiv, 2 June by statistik-des-holocaust.de) stopped in Lublin, where 36 men were ordered off and taken to Majdanek; 28 of them are known by name. The other deportees, including women and children, were presumably taken on to Sobibor and murdered there.

Boris Schönhaus, born in 1898, was one of the men taken to Majdanek. From the camp he wrote to his family that he had arrived and asked whether they had heard anything of his wife Fanja, who had remained on the train and was presumably murdered on arrival at Sobibor. He was murdered at Majdanek on 16 August 1942.

No transport went directly from Berlin to this place.