Majdanek State Museum
| Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku | |
One of the exhibits at the Majdanek Museum
|
|
| Established | 1944, confirmed by an act of the Polish parliament of July 2, 1947. |
|---|---|
| Location | Majdanek, Poland |
| Coordinates | 51°07′54″N 22°21′21″E / 51.1318°N 22.35579°E |
| Visitors | 121,404 (2011) |
| Director | Tomasz Kranz |
| Website | http://www.majdanek.eu/ |
The Majdanek State Museum (Polish: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku) is a memorial museum and education centre founded in the fall of 1944 on the grounds of the Majdanek death camp located in Lublin, Poland. It was the first museum of its kind in the world, devoted entirely to the memory of atrocities committed in the network of slave-labor camps and subcamps of KL Lublin during World War II. The museum performs several tasks including scholarly research into the Holocaust in Poland. It houses a permanent collection of rare artifacts, archival photographs, and testimony.
The Majdanek concentration camp site was preserved as a museum by the fall of 1944, the best example of the Holocaust death camps, with intact gas chambers and crematoria. After the camp's liberation by the advancing Red Army on July 23, 1944, the site has been formally protected. The camp became a state monument of martyrology by the 1947 decree of the Polish Parliament (Sejm). In the same year, some 1,300 m³ of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones were collected and arranged into a large mound (since turned into a mausoleum). By comparison, the Auschwitz concentration camp liberated a half a year later, on January 27, 1945 was first declared a national monument in April 1946, but handed over to Poland by the Red Army only in 1947. The act of Polish Parliament of July 2, 1947 declared them both as state monuments of martyrology at the same time (Dz.U. 1947 nr 52 poz. 264/265). Majdanek received the status of Poland's national museum in 1965.
The retreating Germans did not have time to destroy the facility. During its 34 months of operation, more than 79,000 people were murdered at Majdanek main camp alone (59,000 of them Polish Jews) and between 95,000 and 130,000 people in the entire Majdanek system of subcamps. Some 18,000 Jews were killed at Majdanek on November 3, 1943, during the largest single-day, single-camp massacre of the Holocaust, named Harvest Festival (totalling 43,000 with 2 subcamps).
...
Wikipedia