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General information

The German concentration camp in Lublin, called Majdanek, was initiated by Heinrich Himmler’s decision. Visiting Lublin in July 1941, Himmler entrusted Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police commander in the Lublin district, with building a camp “for 25-50,000 inmates who would be used to work in SS and police workshops and at construction sites”. The camp was going to be the source of a free workforce for the Third Reich's expansion in the East.

Initial plans concerning the size of the camp were modified a couple of times, with the area of the camp and the planned number of prisoners being enlarged each time. The so-called “general construction plan” to build Majdanek was authorized on 23 March 1942. According to its assumptions, the camp would have the capacity of keeping 150,000 prisoners. Thereby Majdanek was to become the largest camp in the German-occupied Europe. However, economic difficulties and the Wehrmacht's failures on the eastern front prevented the SS from fulfilling this plan completely.

The Majdanek camp was subordinate to the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager), and from March 1942 to the Economics and Administrative Department of the SS (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt). The camp was administered by a commandant supported by a garrison of up to 1,200 people. The camp commandant' position was held respectively by: Karl Otto Koch, Max Koegel, Hermann Florstedt, Martin Weiß, and Arthur Liebehenschel.

The camp, built from autumn 1941, was initially called Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen SS Lublin – a camp for prisoners of war, and in February 1943 was renamed Konzentrationslager Lublin – a concentration camp. The official functions of a POW camp and concentration camp did not exhaust the tasks allocated to Majdanek by the German authorities. Konzentrationslager Lublin was also a link in the realisation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Qestion". In addition it was used as a penal and transit camp for the Polish rural population.