Above Image: Soviet soldiers inspect the ovens at Majdanek, July 1944. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.On the night of July 22-23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek, the first of the Nazi camps to be liberated. They freed just under 500 prisoners and occupied the nearby city of Lublin on July 24. What Soviet and Polish researchers uncovered and documented behind the camp’s electrified barbed wire, soon reinforced by the investigative work conducted by others outside of the USSR, definitively shaped our understanding of the Nazi genocide. While still largely unfamiliar to most Americans, the liberation of Majdanek was one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.Its name, taken from Majdan-Tatarski, a suburb of the major industrial center of Lublin, Majdanek had originally been envisioned by the SS as a key link in the colonization and exploitation of the General Government, the area of Poland under German occupation. Jewish soldiers in the Polish army, who had been taken prisoner, had been doing work in Lublin for the firm, the German Supply Establishment, since late 1940. In July 1941, a month after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Reichsführer-SS traveled to Lublin, for a meeting with Odilo Globocnik, the notorious SS and Police Leader in the region. Himmler made his intentions clear to Globocnik—establish a concentration camp near the city that could hold up to 50,000 inmates. They would work in SS economic enterprises for as long as they could endure. Poles, many of them political prisoners, Jews, and Soviet prisoners of war would constitute this unfree labor army.In short, Majdanek began as a forced-labor operation, not as an extermination center, like the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor) that Himmler later ordered Globocnik to create. Construction of the site, which was never completely finished, started in October 1941, when 2,000 Soviet POWs were dragooned. The first Jewish inmates, literally grabbed off the streets of Lublin, set foot in Majdanek in mid-December of that year. Non-Jewish Poles arrived two months later. In 1942-43, Majdanek transformed, however. As the Nazi mass annihilation of European Jews escalated, the SS installed gas chambers and crematoria there. Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and Hungarian Jews were deported directly or diverted to Majdanek because of overcrowding at other killing centers. The Nazis also transported Jews from Germany, France, and the Low Countries to the camp. In 1943, SS personnel at Majdanek murdered thousands from the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos in Poland after Himmler called for their liquidation. The camp’s “efficiency†increased as its usefulness to the “Final Solution†expanded.Even within the culture of the SS, a culture defined by cruelty and contempt for the “other,†the staff at Majdanek gained a reputation for savagery. , The collapse of the German war effort in the Soviet Union in the spring and early summer of 1944 threatened Majdanek. A combination of the rapid Soviet advance following Operation Bagration, launched on June 22, 1944, and SS incompetence meant that most of Majdanek’s infrastructure of murder remained intact when Soviet units seized the camp a , Soviet forces liberate the Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp (located three miles east southeast of Lublin) and find fewer than 500 prisoners left in the camp. The SS evacuated most of the prisoners to concentration camps further west during the spring of 1944..