He does not -- no footnote, no nothing.Does the author mention any source for this information?
Liberation of Majdanek 1944
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David Thompson
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michael mills
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Giles120 wrote:
This was after all a concentration camp, and had a high death rate from the inhumanly harsh conditions imposed on the inmates.
Survivor accounts from Auschwitz that I have read often refer to carts that went around the accommodation blocks every morning and collected the bodies of those that had died during the night, for transport to the crematorium or burial pits.
Thus, we can believe Theodor Schollen and other witnesses when they say they saw tractors carting the bodies of the dead to the crematroium at the far end of the camp complex. Whether the bodies were of victims of gassing is another matter.
I would presume that the corpse collection detain started at the field furthest away from the crematorium, ie nearest the prisoner reception centre located in Barrack 41, and then proceeded along the fields toward the crematorium, collecting bodies along the way.
Such a pattern might have lent credence to a rumour that the bodies had come from Barrack 41, where the prisoners probably knew there were gassing chambers, although they may not have realised their true purpose (or if they had heard about the delousing of clothing there, may have disbelieved what they heard as being a cover story).
The reason why the term "Bad- und Desinfektionsraum" was applied to a reception centre for incoming prisoners is that the word "Desinfektion" refers to the delousing of both people and their clothing. It is best translated as "disinfestation", the removal of insect pests from ones body and clothes.
And also presumably the bodies of those who had died in the camp from other causes, disease, exhaustion, malnutrition, exposure, etc.Tractors were used to transport the dead(both shot and gassed) to the crematorium.
This was after all a concentration camp, and had a high death rate from the inhumanly harsh conditions imposed on the inmates.
Survivor accounts from Auschwitz that I have read often refer to carts that went around the accommodation blocks every morning and collected the bodies of those that had died during the night, for transport to the crematorium or burial pits.
Thus, we can believe Theodor Schollen and other witnesses when they say they saw tractors carting the bodies of the dead to the crematroium at the far end of the camp complex. Whether the bodies were of victims of gassing is another matter.
I would presume that the corpse collection detain started at the field furthest away from the crematorium, ie nearest the prisoner reception centre located in Barrack 41, and then proceeded along the fields toward the crematorium, collecting bodies along the way.
Such a pattern might have lent credence to a rumour that the bodies had come from Barrack 41, where the prisoners probably knew there were gassing chambers, although they may not have realised their true purpose (or if they had heard about the delousing of clothing there, may have disbelieved what they heard as being a cover story).
The reason why the term "Bad- und Desinfektionsraum" was applied to a reception centre for incoming prisoners is that the word "Desinfektion" refers to the delousing of both people and their clothing. It is best translated as "disinfestation", the removal of insect pests from ones body and clothes.
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David Thompson
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Here is what Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Rueckerl (editors) had to say about the gas chambers at KL Majdanek, in their book Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University Press, New Haven (CT): 1993, pp. 174-77:
Maidanek
Those in charge of the Maidanek camp, near Lublin, used gas chambers for mass extermination operations, although not for as long or to the same extent as at Auschwitz. As soon as the chambers were installed, however, Jews had to undergo the "selection" process when they arrived, and those who seemed unfit for work were gassed.
Reports vary as to when the process was introduced at Maidanek. One report says that forty-eight Poles were murdered there with poison gas as early as September 1942.1 But after the war a court in Düsseldorf concluded: "It was probably in October 1942, at the very latest, that the gassing facilities were ready to operate; and it is from that date until the autumn of 1943 that they were used."2 In the beginning, two gas chambers were installed in a wooden barrack, then a brick building was put into service. The two temporary chambers were later used as drying rooms. 3
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Gassings in Other Concentration Camps 175
The facility was quite similar to the one that worked so well at Auschwitz. At the entrance was an inscription: "Bath and Disinfection." The plans of the technical installations had been checked and approved by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office in Berlin, which made available a credit of 70,000 marks to pay for the building. 4 The iron doors with their rubber packing could be securely bolted; they were furnished by the firm of Auert in Berlin. 5 In its judgment the Düsseldorf court mentions "at least three concrete rooms, provided with tight-fitting steel doors," and estimates the capacity of the big room as "up to three hundred" and of the small rooms as "up to 150 people each."
Both Zyklon B and carbon monoxide were used for killing. As regards the gassing process, the Düsseldorf court reached the same conclusions drawn by other investigations:
The carbon monoxide, which was in steel bottles, was introduced through a system of ducts leading from an anteroom located in front of one of the small gas chambers. From this anteroom the gas flow was regulated by means of a hand-operated valve, and the gassing process could be observed without danger through a little window in the wall. Gassing with Zyklon B, contained in cans, was carried out in the following manner: the contents of the cans were emptied directly into the chambers through funnels set into the ceiling, or else by the machines that produced the hot air necessary to release the gas, especially when the weather was cold. 6
A good deal of correspondence has been preserved between the Maidanek administration and the firm of Tesch and Stabenow, an "international pest-control company" in Hamburg. Letters show how insistently the head of the camp administration, SS-Hauptsturmführer Worster, kept asking for large quantities of Zyklon "as quickly as possible," so that "there should be no interruption in the work of disinfection,"7 as the camp's head doctor put it.8 Archives have made it possible to estimate that the total quantity of Zyklon B sent to the camp for "disinfection jobs" was 7,711 kilograms. 9 Here the real meaning of the word "disinfection" is crystal clear: such quantities of gas would never have been needed if it had been used merely as a disinfectant.
According to the Polish resistance, "every day up to a thousand Jews were murdered in the gas chambers" at Maidanek. In May 1943, "240 Polish peasants accused of helping the partisans" were also exterminated there. 10
Feliks Siejwa, who was a prisoner at Maidanek for a year and a half, remembers that at Christmas 1943 Jews from the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and other countries were brought to the camp in three or four big convoys. "The larger part of them were murdered in the gas chambers; the others were transferred to Auschwitz or other camps." Another group also stuck in Siejwa's memory: "One day several dozen members of the special work detail [Son-
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derkommando] of Auschwitz-Birkenau, most of them Jews, were delivered to the camp and were murdered there."11
The head of the gas chambers and crematoria, SS-Hauptscharführer Erich Muhsfeld, testified on 4 August 1947 while a prisoner in Poland that "the arriving convoys were always submitted to a selection process. . . . Those unfit for work were asphyxiated in the gas chamber." 12
As at Auschwitz, the camp administration used the gas chambers as a quick way to get rid of the prisoners who had become unfit for work. Dr. Jan Nowak, a Polish physician assigned to take care of prisoners, succeeded in July 1943 in getting the following information to a correspondent outside the camp: "Every day the weak, the cachectic, and those unable to work are put to death. From the infirmary block I was able to observe, helplessly, these unfortunate people marching to the gas chambers. Yesterday, late in the evening, several dozen Soviet officers were delivered and gassed." 13
Another note written the same month by Dr. Nowak says, "In block 3 of the camp infirmary there were about ten young men from Warsaw, from eighteen to twenty years old. They had had exanthematous typhus. Today an SS orderly made a selection. He took all those who could not be certified as cured and able to work, and led them to the gas chambers." 14
Those who were utterly exhausted physically were collected in special bar-racks, known as the "Gammel block," reserved for those considered to be dying. Tadeusz Stabholz, who was sent to this block but survived, told of how they ended up: "All are apathetic and emaciated. Most have running sores and boils on their legs. Skeletons! The only thing they want is to have something to eat before they die. For we all realize that we are going to be gassed. The minutes pass, and the hours. Evening comes, we shall have nothing else to eat today. It would be pure waste to feed condemned people. . . . The next day we are lined up by numbers. Those who are called go before an SS man. He checks the number hanging around the prisoner's neck and scratches him off the list. The vehicles park in front of the block. They leave for the gas chamber." 15
One day the SS men ordered the Jewish children who had been delivered to the camp with their mothers in May 1943 to assemble in one spot. "But, instead of doing so, the children scattered instinctively all over the lot. The SS men, helped by prisoner-block leaders and the office staff, rushed after them and captured them like stray dogs." More than a hundred of these children were gassed. 16
We have only estimates as to the number of victims of the Maidanek gas chambers. A rough idea is given by information that Polish civilian workers supplied to an underground military organization, which sent it by radio on 17 July 1943 to the Polish government-in-exile in London: "Recently up to seven thousand people have been arriving every day in Lublin. Eighty-five percent are
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sent to Maidanek; the rest go to work in Germany. The commander of the armed forces of the district of Lublin told me he had proof that a portion of them are gassed at Maidanek." 17
A very large majority of the victims of the Maidanek gassings were Jews. On 3 November 1943 all the Jews who were still alive in Maidanek were shot, in a massacre that has no equivalent in any other Nazi concentration camp. The SS called it "the harvest festival." The Düsseldorf court expressed the belief that the Maidanek gas chambers ceased functioning after this date. 18 The camp administration seemed that day to have reached the end of the "final solution," so far as Maidanek was concerned.
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268 Notes to Pages 174–178
Notes to Chapter 8: Gassings in Other Concentration Camps
1 Josef Marszalek, Majdanek: Geschichte und Wirklichkeit des Vernichtungslagers (Maidanek: History and reality of the extermination center) (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), p. 144.
2 StA Düsseldorf AZ: 8 Ks 1/75, judgment of 30 June 1981, p. 81 (ZSL Coll.: 577).
3 Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz, "Oboz Koncentracyjny i zaglady Majdanek" (The Maidanek concentration camp and extermination center), in the Biuletyn Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce (Bulletin of the Main Commission for the Investigation of National-Socialist Crimes in Poland) (War-saw, 1948), vol. 4, pp. 66, 69.
4 Letter to the head office of the Central Construction Department of the Waffen SS and the police, dated 26 Sept. 1942, in the Voivodeship State Archives, Lublin.
5 Ibid., letter no. 17. The delivery numbers of the firm were 656, 657, 659.
6 See n. 2 (pp. 80f.).
7 Letter dated 31 Aug. 1943 from the head of the Maidanek camp administration to the Dessau Sugar and Chemical Factories, AZ: 214 d/8.43 Mü. Zeszyty Majdanka (Lublin, 1967), vol. 2, p. 149.
8 Letter from the head camp physician of Lublin camp to the Lublin camp administration dated 11 Aug. 1943, AZ: 14 h/KL/8.43/-Bl./Be. Ibid., p. 158.
9 Zofia Murawska-Gryn and Edward Gryn, Konzentrationslager Majdanek (Maidanek State Museum, 1978), p. 82.
10 See n. 1 (p. 144).
11 Jerzy Kwiatkowski, 485 dni na Majdanku (485 days in Maidanek) (Lublin, 1966), p. 222.
12 Record of the interrogation of Erich Muhsfeld, Maidanek State Museum Archives, microfilm no. 66.
13 See n. 1 (p. 145).
14 Ibid. (p. 147).
15 Ibid. (pp. 145f.).
16 Ibid.
17 Zacheusz Pawlak, Ich babe überlebt: Ein Häftling berichtet über Majdanek (I survived: A prisoner reports about Maidanek) (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1979), p. 252.