In July 1941, Himmler visited the city of Lublin. On the 21st , he ordered the construction of a concentration camp big enough to harbour 25,000--50,000 inmates who would be put to work in nearby factories and workshops directed by the SS and the police.  Himmler's personal confidant, SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, immediately settled down to work and started organizing the building of a new camp on the south-eastern edge of Lublin, about 5 kilometers from the center of the city.

The camp was built on a large plane situated between the city of Lublin to the north and the hamlets of Abramowic and Dziesiata to the south. Undoubtedly, this choice was motivated by practical reasons. As the railway station of the city of Lublin was only a couple of kilometers away, the arriving prisoners could be lead to the camp on foot. Moreover, the barracks were built in the immediate neighborhood of a former airfield where the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, a mighty industrial complex, planned to set up the workshops and factories in which the future inmates of the camp would work for the benefit of the Reich.

Even the most superficial observer could hardly fail to notice the existence of this camp. Jozef Marszalek, the official historian of Majdanek, unmistakably states:

Of course, for an "extermination camp" this was the most impossible choice on earth as mass murders in Majdanek could not have been held secret for more than a couple of days. When asked why there is not a single German document proving that even one single Jew was gassed at Majdanek -- or, indeed, in any concentration camp --, the orthodox historians who defend the gas chamber story argue that the Germans, who wanted to conceal their atrocities, gave their gassing orders orally or used a coded language in their documents. The same historians claim that the Germans set up a death factory in the immediate vicinity of a large city and two hamlets from where everybody could observe what was going on in the camp!

According to the first known plan, drawn on 7 October 1941, the camp was to be subdivided into ten units called "fields". (No similar arrangement existed in any other German concentration camp.) By the end of November, the first row of barracks was completed on field I. Whereas simple manual tasks were always performed by the prisoners themselves, skilled workers were often provided by private firms which were predominantly Polish. Documents found in the archives of the city of Lublin prove that no fewer than 22 such firms worked on behalf of the "Zentralbauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei Lublin", the organization entrusted with the building of the camp. One Michal Ochnik, director of a Polish firm, organized the construction of the delousing chambers which, according to the orthodox historians, were also used as homicidal gas chambers for the extermination of Jews. The Polish civilian workers, who were working side by side with the prisoners, left the camp in the evening and returned to their families. It goes without saying that they would immediately have been informed of human gassings or other mass murders, and within days, the news would have spread all over Poland.

From the very beginning, the civilian authorities in Lublin frowned upon the arising of so big a camp in the immediate neighborhood of the city. They argued that Majdanek would require enormous amounts of coal, gas and electricity, thus jeopardizing the supply of the civilian population. In March 1942, the vice--mayor of Lublin, Steinbach, vetoed the connection of the camp to the sewerage system of the city. This decision had dire consequences for the prisoners as the hygienic conditions prevailing in the camp baffled description and lead to an enormously high death rate. In May 1942, a group of sanitary experts from the Berlin Institute of Hygienics castigated the disastrous sanitary situation and demanded the immediate linking of Majdanek to the urban sewerage system.

Another two months later, the Zentralbauleitung acceded to this demand, and in January 1943, the work was completed. By the autumn of 1943, all barracks had running water.

The majority of the inmates were Jewish and non-Jewish Polish citizens. From spring 1942, large numbers of short--term prisoners were sent to the camp. They were called "zakladnicy", hostages. These "hostages" were civilians arrested in retaliation to armed attacks committed by the resistance against German soldiers. Usually, they were released after a couple of weeks. They were rarely forced to work.

Towards the end of its existence, Majdanek once more changed its character. It became a kind of "hospital camp" to which sick prisoners from numerous other camps were transferred. When the Red army entered the outskirts of Lublin on July 22, 1944, the camp only contained 1500 prisoners; the rest had been evacuated by the withdrawing Germans.

The number of the victims

Some years ago, the official figure was reduced again. In 1992, Polish historian Czeslaw Rajca candidly admitted that the number of the victims had been been inflated for purely political purposes. The real figure, he assured, was about 235,000. Rajca wrote:

"Owing to the lack of documents about the dimension of the crimes perpetrated at Majdanek, the only rational way to ascertain the death figure consists in subtracting from the total number of prisoners those who were transferred to other places, released or managed to escape."

According to the official Polish literature, 45,000 prisoners were transferred to other camps, 20,000 were released, 1500 succeeded in escaping and another 1500 were liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. The figure of the transferred prisoners is largely documented as they were registered in the camps they were sent to. Although the Polish literature does not disclose on what documents the figure of 20,000 inmates released by the Germans is based, I accept it because I cannot see any possible motive to exaggerate it for political reasons. On the contrary, it is a cogent argument against the extermination theory: every released prisoner would either have personally witnessed mass murders or at least heard about them from his fellow-inmates. In other words, the Polish historians tell us that the same Germans who were so eager to hush up the mass gassings that they never issued a single written gassing order were stupid enough to release 20,000 witnesses of their atrocities so that they could tell the whole world what they had seen or heard!

In spite of the fragmentary character of the documentation which survived the war, it is possible to determine the death figure quite accurately on the basis of altogether eight documents: 1) The Totenbuch for the months from May to September 1942. 2) The "Totenmeldung für die Effektenkammer" for some days in autumn 1942. 3) The list of prisoners deceased in November and December 1942. 4) The "Stärkemeldung" (force of the camp) for some days in 1942. 5) A register of prisoners deceased in October 1943. 6) The Totenbuch for March and April 1943. 7) The Nuremberg document NO--5194. 8) The Nuremberg document PS--1469.

Diseases, especially spotted typhus, but also tuberculosis and dysentery, were the main cause of the extremely high mortality rate at Majdanek. These diseases were above all provoked by the atrocious sanitary conditions; as I have pointed out before, the barracks did not have running water before autumn 1943. This made any efficient struggle against the typhus--bearing lice and other vermin impossible. The harsh and often inhuman working conditions -- especially during the first phase, the one of the construction of the camp -- also claimed countless lives.

According to Pohl's letter to Himmler, which was later presented in Nuremberg as document PS--1469, no less than 7.67% of the male and 4.41% of the female prisoners died in August 1943. At that time, Majdanek was by far deadlier than Auschwitz where the mortality rate amounted to 3% for the men and to 3.61% for the women. In the same month, not a single prisoner died in the camp of Hertogenbosch in Holland which harboured 2500 inmates, and in Dachau 40 prisoners out of 17,500 perished, the mortality rate thus being 0.25%. Majdanek was not a typical German concentration camp. It was the worst of them all.

Among the members of the Polish-Soviet commission, which established the official version of the gassings (after the war), there were professors of chemistry and engineering. It goes without saying that these qualified scientists and technicians knew exactly how Zyklon-B was used and were not silly enough to repeat the naive fairy tale non--scientist Simonov had been imprudent enough to tell his readers. Consequently, the commission hastily ordered openings to be made in the ceilings of the rooms christened homicidal gas chambers. Unfortunately, they forgot to order this in the case of gas chamber number three, a room measuring 35,2 m2 which undoubtedly served as a delousing chambers, as the blue colouration of the walls attests. The Polish historians claim that the Germans threw the Zyklon-B pellets on the heads of the inmates before closing the steel door. Jean--Claude Pressac comments:

"It is frankly unrealistic to imagine an SS-man with a gas mask and a can of Zyklon-B in his hand throwing the pellets into a space of 30 cm between the heads of the victims and the ceiling -- the pellets might have fallen on the floor in front of the gas chamber -- and subsequently trying to slam the door without the doomed inmates making a desperate attempt to break out."

The fourth and last gas chamber, which is situated immediately beside the bath, measures 107.7 m2. Its walls have an intense blue coloration. There are two round openings in the ceiling.

The origin of the gas chamber story

Popular superstition has it that the Nazi concentration camps were strictly isolated places and that everything going on in these camps was a state secret. This is generally not true, and in the case of Majdanek, it is simply utter rubbish. The perpetual transfer of prisoners to other camps, the remarkably high number of inmates released (20'000 according to official Polish sources!), the immediate vicinity of a big city and the permanent presence of civil workers -- all this made it radically impossible to conceal what was happening within the camp.

After Poland was overrun by German and Soviet armies in September 1939, the Warsaw government fled to London. In the German-occupied territories, a kind of shadow government which called itself "Delegatura" was soon set up. It provided the London-based exile government with an incessant flow of information about the events in Poland and closely cooperated with the various resistance movements, especially the pro--estern Armija Krajowa ("Country Army"). Since the concentration camps set up by the Germans were of special interest to both the government in exile and the resistance fighters, many of the reports sent to London dealt with these camps.

In 1973, Polish historians Krystyna Marczewska and Wladyslaw Wazniewski published a long article containing the reports about Majdanek the Delegatura transmitted to London between November 30, 1941, and July 7, 1944.

The first mention of a gas chamber occurred in a short report dating from December 15, 1942 and consisted of one single phrase:

Now, you would assume that the appearance of such an outlandish and fiendish murder weapon would create an outpouring of indignation, but strangely enough the Delegatura contented itself with this one laconic sentence. For the next five months, the gas chamber was never alluded to again in the no less than 25 reports the Delegatura wrote about Majdanek between December 15, 1942, and May 7, 1943. Especially noteworthy was an extremely long, detailed and highly accurate description of the Lublin camp which originated at the end of January or the beginning of February 1943. The authors dedicated a short chapter to the fate of the Jewish prisoners who, as they correctly pointed out, were treated much worse than the Poles. Not a single reference to a homicidal gas chamber or mass killings occurred in this report.

Now, the gassings are said to have started in September or October 1942. For the reasons already stated, it would have been totally unthinkable to conceal such a crime for more than a few days.

Of course, all of you are familiar with Arthur Butz's legendary utterance: "I see no elephant in my basement. If there were an elephant in my basement, I would certainly see it. Therefore, there is no elephant in my basement."

It would have been impossible to conceal mass gassings at Majdanek. The Delegatura, which was exceedingly well informed about the camp, didn't talk mass gassings at Majdanek during the first seven months of their alleged existence (except for the laconic and inconclusive reference to a gas chamber in the report dated December 15, 1920). Therefore, no mass gassings occurred at Majdanek!

On May 7, 1943, the gassing propaganda started as a psychological weapon against the Germans, and the gas chambers were regularly mentioned in the subsequent Delegatura reports. Neither the location of the gas chambers nor the killing process were ever described in any detail.

The first detailed description of Majdanek as an extermination center was published by one Abraham Silberschein, a Geneva-based Jew, in the first half of 1944. According to him, no less than two million people had been slaughtered in the Lublin camp by then. Characteristically, barrack 41 where four gas chambers were located according to the later version of the story was never referred to by Silberschein.

After the liberation of the camp, the Polish-Soviet commission accused the Germans of having murdered 1,7 million people at Majdanek, gassing having been one of the most commonly used killing methods. To substantiate this terrible accusation, the commission quoted exactly four German prisoners (who were later executed after a Stalinist--type show trial) and nine former inmates of the camp! These witnesses testified to 19 gassing actions with somewhat over 4000 victims. With one exception (Theo Schölen), they always spoke of the gas chamber in the singular. None of them ever located the position of the gas chamber, none of them mentioned carbon monoxide nor Zyklon-B as the murder weapon. Obviously, the witnesses did not know exactly what they were supposed to tell. The commission had undoubtedly interviewed more than nine former prisoners, but evidently the statements of the other ones were even more inconclusive so the commission did not even bother to quote them.

"I know that people were systematically being killed in the gas chambers [plural]. Prisoners under my command told me that they had themselves witnessed the choking of over 150 children in the gas chamber [singular]."