The American Philatelist April 2020

Prisoner Mail System
in KL Lublin/Majdanek
BY J. S. SAWYER
... in Majdanek itself we did not wear striped clothing. They gave us clothing of people who had been shot. We
always knew how many people had worn it before by the (number of) bullet holes...
— Judith Becker (a Jewish prisoner in KL Lublin), Yad Vashem Archives 0.3-9416
While the world is focused this year on the 75th anniversary
of the liberation of KL (Konzentrationslager)
Auschwitz, it is important to recall that
during the war there were several other concentration camps
built in Poland by the Germans. Among these were camps
erected primarily for extermination purposes only, e.g., Sobibor,
Treblinka, Bełżec, and Chełmno, none of which were
designed to have large, permanent inmate populations. KL
Figure 1. Soviet Army photo of prisoner barracks at KL Lublin as
they appeared shortly after liberation. U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Courtesy of Panstwowe Muzeum na Majdanku.
Auschwitz was a hybrid camp, engineered both as a vast murder
factory and, simultaneously, a provider of slave labor to
support various war-related projects. Another combination
concentration/extermination camp was built in the town of
Lublin in fall of 1941. At this time, the German armed forces
were fully committed to an ill-fated invasion of the Soviet
Union under the code name “Operation Barbarossa.” The
Russian soldiers captured in the early stages of this offensive
numbered over 3 million and became a logistical nightmare
for the Wehrmacht (German Army). Many of these Soviet
prisoners were subsequently shot, but many were marched
west into Poland and other controlled territories for internment
in the German camp system. SS (Schutzstaffel) Chief
Heinrich Himmler had actually drafted plans to build a prisoner
camp in the eastern city of Lublin before the invasion
of June 1941. This was in anticipation of the Germanization
of the captured eastern territories, a process that required
many workers and involved the displacement of the current
inhabitants, followed by resettlement of the vacant land with
German citizens. A site was chosen near the Lublin township
of Majdan Tatarski, from whence was derived the name
Majdanek, as the camp would be known after WWII, but the
original name of the new prisoner camp was Das Konzentrationslager
der Waffen-SS Lublin — The Concentration Camp
310 AMERICAN PHILATELIST / APRIL 2020