Majdanek

Camp Majdanek , situated in Poland , started in October 1941 as a POW camp .
The camp was runned by SS men , soon it became a concentrationcamp aswell .

The camp was divided into sectors , you had the POW camp , the extermination camp and the children camp . The camp only housed 2 wooden gaschambers , soon it was replaced by brick gaschambers .
The killing started in april 1942 and ended in July 1944 .
By that time the camp took 360.000 lives with it ... .

The camp was erected by Jewish workers , it had 144 wooden barracks , 2,7 square kilometers big and surrounded by electrified fences and watchtowers .
The first ones to arrive were Polish political prisoners together with 5000 Russian POW's .
Those Russians were all exterminated in a year to make room for more Jews .

The slave Jews were forced into labour and were used to make weapons for the Germans .
These Jews came from Belgium , Holland , Slovakia , France and Greece .
Firms like Daimler , Steyr and Puch used the inmates as free workers , slave workers ... .
The camp was infamous because of SS brutality that happened there , the camp commander Karl Koch was cruel and hard . His wife was as the prisoners called her , a bitch , she rode around , picked out prisoners and whipped them with her leather whip .
Karl Koch allowed everything in his camp , he formerly was head of the camp in Buchenwald .

Karl Koch was arrested in august 1943 and found guilty on embezzlement and forgery , he was exectuted in april 1945 .

The camp was liquidated in July 1944 but when the Soviets arrived , they found thousands of inmates still in the camp while others were on their deathmarch to Germany ... .
The nazi's obviously didn't take much effort in trying to cover the camp and the killings up as the Russians found the massgraves with no difficulties ... .