COMMUNIQUE of the
Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigating the Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Majdanek Extermination Camp in Lublin, Pages 21, 26.
"Last spring an incalculable number of corpses were exhumed and burnt in furnaces specially built for the purpose, evidently with the object of wiping out the traces of the crimes committed by Hitler's orders.
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"These huge furnaces were built of bricks and iron and constituted a crematorium of a large capacity. Often the stench from the corpses reached the city, at least the east end of it, and consequently, even less informed people realized what was going on in that frightful place. * * *
"The fact that the activities of the 'Extermination Camp' were directed by the Hitler government is proved by the visit Himmler himself paid to the camp when he came to Lublin in the summer of 1943".
The Committee established the fact that in the crematorium alone over six hundred thousand bodies were burnt; on gigantic bonfires in the Krembecki Woods over three hundred thousand corpses were burnt; in the two old furnaces over eighty thousand corpses were burnt; on bonfires in the camp near the crematorium no less than four hundred thousand corpses were burnt.
With the object of covering up the traces of their crimes the Germans killed the attendants, prisoners in the camp, of the gas chamber and crematorium. . -As a result of a thorough investigation of numerous affidavits by medical experts and material proof, the aforesaid Committee of Medical Experts under the chairmanship of Professor Szyling-Syngalewicz, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the Lublin Catholic University, found that:
"During the whole period of four years that the Lublin Majdanek Camp was in existence, a deliberate and consistent system operated for the premeditated, wholesale extermination of people, both prisoners in the camp as well as people especially brought there for the purpose of extermination." '
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The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission finds that during the four years the Majdanek Extermination Camp was in existence the Hitlerite butchers, on the direct orders of their criminal, government, exterminated by means of wholesale shooting and wholesale asphyxiation in gas chambers of about one million five hundred thousand persons—Soviet prisoners of war, prisoners of war of the former Polish army, and civilians of different nationalities, such as Poles, Frenchmen, Italians, Belgians, Netherlanders, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Croatians, hnd'a vast number of Jews.
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Extracts from a report on extermination operations at the Majdanek camp, including the killing of Soviet POWs, several nationalities, and "a vast number of Jews"
Date: Date Unknown
Literal Title: Communique of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigating the Crimes Committed by the Germans in the Majdanek Extermination Camp in Lublin
Total Pages: 3
Language of Text: English
Source of Text: Nazi conspiracy and aggression (Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Washington, D.C. : U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946.)
Evidence Code: L-31
HLSL Item No.: 450988
Notes:The date of the report is not stated. The text in English is followed by one in German. This document was apparently not entered as evidence in the trial.
Trial Issues
Extermination of the Jews (IMT, NMT 4, 9) Prisoners of war, abuse, forced labor, or killing of (IMT, NMT 2, 5, 12)
Document Summary
L-31: Two sets of reports of Soviet State Commission on the German Crimes in various parts of Soviet territory, enclosed in letter from American Embassy, Moscow, to American Embassy, London, 14 July 1945 accompanied by consular certificate as to origin