Majdanek State Museum

The Majdanek State Museum, established in the fall of 1944, is located on the grounds of the former Nazi Germany Majdanek death camp in Lublin. It was the first museum of its kind in the world, dedicated entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of concentration, slave-labor, and extermination camps and subcamps of KL Lublin. The museum houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony.

The Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, established in 1941, was one of the largest of its kind. Its construction began in October 1941. The first prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, arrived in October 1941, followed by the first Jews in the fall of the same year. By December 1941 and January 1942, the first group of Polish peasants from the Lublin region were detained in the camp. The camp, operational for 34 months, saw the murder of more than 79,000 people at the main camp alone, with between 95,000 and 130,000 people killed in the entire Majdanek system of subcamps.

As the Red Army advanced in 1944, the Nazis began liquidating the Majdanek camp. Approximately 12,000-15,000 inmates were evacuated to other camps from March to July 1944. Efforts were made to erase evidence of the camp’s atrocities, including dismantling barracks, cremating corpses, and partially destroying camp documents. On July 22, 1944, the final group of 800 prisoners was marched out of Majdanek, with those unable to keep up being killed. A small number of prisoners remained at Majdanek until the Red Army’s arrival.

The camp became a state monument of martyrology by the 1947 decree of the Polish Parliament. The museum is home to a monument dedicated to Holocaust victims, erected on the 25th anniversary of the Majdanek liberation. The monument, designed by Polish sculptor and architect Wiktor Tołkin, consists of three parts: the symbolic Pylon, the road, and the Mausoleum, containing a mound of ashes of the victims.

In recent years, the museum has continued to evolve and expand. In 2003, a new obelisk was erected to the memory of Jewish victims of Erntefest (or “Harvest Festival”, code name for the mass murder of November 3 and 4, 1943, with approximately 18,000 Jewish prisoners executed at Majdanek and other camps in Lublin).