Majdanek Victims Enumerated

This next story is an amazing admission especially in light of the recent incarcerations of David Irving, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zuendel, Siegfried Verbeke and others. The official Web-site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has published this article showing that the number of victims at the Majdanek concentration camp is now estimated at 78,000.

Despite the Museum's claim that the ususal estimate for Majdanek victims has been from 235,000 to 360,000 it is frequently a much higher number that is given. For example Lucy Dawidowicz in her "The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945" gives the number of 1,380,000 (p.200) The Saturday Evening Post in an article entitled, "Here the Nazi Butchers Wasted Nothing" published on October 28, 1944 estimated 1,000,000 corpses.

The revisionist position was recently published in a volume by Jurgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, "Concentration Camp Majdanek: A Historical and Technical Study." This volume was published by Germar Rudolf's Theses & Dissertations Press in November 2004. Mattogno and Graf write, "Therefore taking all this into account, the total number of deaths in Majdanek from the time of its establishment to the day of its liberation on July 23, 1944 was approximately 42,200 (p.79). Therefore, assuming the new estimate as the correct one, Lucy Dawidowicz was off by 1,302,000 while the book published by Germar Rudolf was off by 35,800. That puts the revisionists off by 45% and the exterminationists off by 1669%.

Could someone remind me why Germar Rudolf is in prison?

Free the Revisionist Thought-Criminals Now!!!

Majdanek Victims Enumerated

Paweł P. Reszka, Lublin, Gazeta Wyborcza / 2005/12/23, 13:09


Changes in the history textbooks? Lublin scholar Tomasz Kranz has established that the Nazis murdered 78,000 people at the Majdanek concentration camp—several times fewer than previous estimates

Two figures of the number of Majdanek victims have usually been in use—360,000 or 235,000. Kranz, director of the Research Department of the State Museum at Majdanek, asserts that approximately 59,000 Jews and 19,000 people of other ethnic backgrounds, mostly Poles and Byelorussians, died there. Kranz published his estimate in the latest edition of the journal Zeszyty Majdanka.

The figure of 360,000 victims appears in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, the Britannica Polish edition, and the Polish Nowa Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN. In all three cases, the source is a 1948 publication by Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz, a judge who was a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland.

The second figure, of 235,000, comes from a 1992 article by Dr. Czesaw Rajca, now retired from the Majdanek museum staff. Rajca’s estimate appears in the Wikipedia internet encyclopedia and in the exhibit at the Majdanek Museum.

Rajca said that he “established that estimate on the basis of calculations by historians as published by the museum in the 1991 monograph on the camp. The people doing the research did not have access to all the sources, including some in Germany. Nor did I use all the records available in the museum archives, because they are fragmentary, and they will not be useful in analyzing the mortality figures at Majdanek until the data they contain is entered in the computers.”

Rajca emphasized that he had “not yet read Tomasz Kranz’s article, but, at first glance, his figures for the number of people killed in the camp seem incredibly low.”

Kranz claims to have examined all available sources, including the extant fragments of the camp death book, the death registry, the notifications of prisoner deaths that the Nazis sent to parishes in Lublin, testimony at their trial in Dusseldorf in the late 1970s and early 1980s by SS men garrisoned at Majdanek, and accounts by surviving prisoners.

Before it went to press, Kranz’s article was read by most of the Majdanek museum staff and discussed at a special meeting. No one raised any objections. “The findings are highly authoritative,” said Prof. Zygmunt Mańkowski, chairman of the Majdanek Museum board. “However, we do not know the definitive number of prisoners who passed through the camp or the number of those whose deaths the camp administration did not register. It cannot be ruled out that new documents will come to light that alter Kranz’s findings. This must be borne in mind, and his calculations accepted with a certain caution.”

Majdanek museum director Edward Balawejder recommended that guides inform the visitors to whom they show the camp about the new calculations as to the number of victims, but also tell them that research is still underway to determine how many prisoners passed through the camp.

“78,000 deaths over the course of three years is a crime on an enormous scale, and not only in comparison with other camps like Buchenwald, where about 56,000 people died over eight years,” said Kranz. “It must be remembered, however, that the number of victims only gives an idea about the scale of genocide; it does not convey the measureless pain and suffering experienced by the people imprisoned and murdered at Majdanek.”

Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau Original Story