Majdanek

Majdanek - darkometer rating : 10 - A former concentration camp and death camp near the city of Lublin – as the first one of its kind in this occupied territory. Madjanek was also one of the first such places to be declared a memorial site, straight after its liberation in the summer of 1944, i.e. while WWII A sizeable proportion of the original buildings and the camp grounds are still intact. Despite this, it is one of the lesser visited such Holocaust sites (but still draws around 100,000 visitors annually) simply because it is located much further off the beaten tourist tracks than, say, the more accessible sites at Auschwitz , Dachau or Sachsenhausen . However, in my view Majdanek is possibly the most impressive such Holocaust memorial site of them all. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Following a visit to occupied Lublin by top- Nazi and head of the SS , Heinrich Himmler, the camp in the Lublin suburb of Majdanek was set up, from late 1941, initially as a POW camp, officially at least. But before long it became a full-blown concentration camp , in which the principles of deprivation, random violence and, ultimately, "extermination through labour" ('Vernichtung durch Arbeit') were applied as much as they were in other such camps. The victims of Majdanek were primarily Polish Jews, but also POWs from the occupied Eastern European territories, in particular the Soviet Union . Many people were murdered in mass shootings, but Majdanek was also one of those camps in which gas chambers were systematically used; just as in Auschwitz, the infamous gas Zyklon B was employed here (as opposed to most other such places which used carbon monoxide).