The American Philatelist April 2020

Figure 2. Map of the
Majdanek concentration
camp. Courtesy of U.S.
Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
of the Weapons-SS Lublin, usually shortened to KL Lublin
(Figure 1). Since the end of the war, it has generally been
called the Majdanek concentration camp.
Due to the large number of Soviet prisoners of war
(POWs), the initial capacity of KL Lublin specified by Himmler
was 50,000 inmates, with a later expansion to include
an additional 200,000 inmates. Soviet and Polish POWs built
the original camp and became the first permanent prisoners.
Later, additional Polish POWs (mostly Jewish), political
prisoners, intelligentsia, and other “undesirables” were
incarcerated in the camp, similar to the permanent inmate
population at KL Auschwitz. The flimsy barracks built by the
Soviet prisoners were constructed of thin wooden planks
that provided no insulation and had windows set in the roof.
The camp was organized into numerous compounds, the
functions of which would vary as the war progressed (Figure
2). There was also a women’s concentration camp (Frauenkonzentrationslager)
established to house around 5,000 female
prisoners, and a section for prisoners working in the
SS-owned manufacturing factories. These were in addition
to half a dozen subcamps controlled through the main camp,
including the DAW (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke — German
Equipment Works) subcamp on Lindenstrasse (Lipowa) in
Lublin, which is the subject of “Food packages, etc., should
be addressed to Camp Lipowa 7,” published on page 318 of
this issue.
Prisoners from over 30 nationalities would eventually
be interned in KL Lublin, including those from Belgium,
Denmark, Finland, Great Britain, Greece, the Netherlands,
Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The Germans even
imprisoned Italian soldiers after the surrender of Italy to the
Allies. Over half of the camp’s population was represented
by Poles, with Soviet prisoners making up about 20% of the
total. As an extermination camp, KL Lublin was eventually
equipped with two gas chambers utilizing Zyklon B and a
total of seven crematoria, all fully operational by fall of 1943.
These were used primarily in the “processing” of Polish Jews
living in southeastern Poland. Ultimately, the camp became
notorious for its harsh conditions, and especially among the
Jewish prisoners, KL Lublin was considered a much worse
destination than KL Auschwitz. One survivor, Jewish prisoner
Rudy Vrba who was transferred from KL Lublin to Auschwitz,
recounts, “Nobody who stayed in Majdanek survived.”
APRIL 2020 / AMERICAN PHILATELIST 311