The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.

It was renamed by the Reich Security Main Office as Konzentrationslager Lublin on April 9, 1943, but the local Polish name remained more popular.

The crematorium ovens and gas chambers were largely intact, serving as some of the best examples of the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany.

[8] After large numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war were captured during the Battle of Kiev, the projected camp capacity was subsequently increased to 50,000.

In mid-December, barracks for 20,000 were ready when a typhus epidemic broke out, and by January 1942 all the slave laborers – POWs as well as Polish Jews – were dead.

In July 1942, Himmler visited Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the three secret extermination camps built specifically for Operation Reinhard to eliminate Polish Jewry.

Subsequently, Himmler issued an order that the deportations of Jews to the camps from the five districts of occupied Poland, which constituted the Nazi Generalgouvernement, be completed by the end of 1942.

[9] Majdanek was made into a secondary sorting and storage depot at the onset of Operation Reinhard, for property and valuables taken from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

[10] Due to large Jewish populations in southeastern Poland, including the ghettos at Kraków, Lwów, Zamość and Warsaw, which were not yet "processed", Majdanek was refurbished as a killing center around March 1942.

[12] Due to the pressing need for foreign manpower in the war industry, Jewish laborers from Poland were originally spared.

[10] Minority contingents included Belarusians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Slovenes, Italians, and French and Dutch nationals.

[15] From February 1943 onward, the Germans allowed the Polish Red Cross and Central Welfare Council to bring in food items to the camp.

[16] Until June 1942, the bodies of those murdered at Majdanek were buried in mass graves[17] (these were later exhumed and burned by the prisoners assigned to Sonderkommando 1005).

The building was set on fire by the Germans on 22 July 1944 as they abandoned the camp on the day that the Red Army entered the outskirts of Lublin.

With respect to the main camp at Majdanek, the most notorious executions occurred on November 3, 1943, when 18,400 Jews were murdered in a single day.

By the end of Aktion Erntefest ("Harvest Festival"), Majdanek had only 71 Jews left out of the total number of 6,562 prisoners still alive.

Adjutant Karl Höcker's postwar trial documented his culpability in mass murders committed at this camp: On 3 May 1989 a district court in the German city of Bielefeld sentenced Höcker to four years imprisonment for his involvement in gassing to death prisoners, primarily Polish Jews, in the concentration camp Majdanek in Poland.

Camp records showed that between May 1943 and May 1944 Höcker had acquired at least 3,610 kilograms (7,960 lb) of Zyklon B poisonous gas for use in Majdanek from the Hamburg firm of Tesch & Stabenow.

[20] In addition, Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs, while awaiting trial in Poland, that one method of murder used at Majdanek (KZ Lublin) was Zyklon B.

The official estimate of 78,000 victims, of those 59,000 Jews, was determined in 2005 by Tomasz Kranz [pl], director of the Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum, calculated following the discovery of the Höfle Telegram in 2000.

The current figure is considered "incredibly low" by Rajca,[2] nevertheless, it has been accepted by the Museum Board of Directors "with a certain caution", pending further research into the number of prisoners who were not entered into the Holocaust train records by German camp administration.

[2][28][29] The Soviets initially grossly overestimated the number of murders, claiming at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 that there were no fewer than 400,000 Jewish victims, and the official Soviet count was of 1.5 million victims of different nationalities,[30] Independent Canadian journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, based in Moscow and on the payroll of the Canadian Jewish Congress,[31][32] visited Majdanek on August 28, 1944.

The Soviet figures relied on the crudest methodology, used for Auschwitz estimates also—it assumed that the number of victims more or less corresponded to the crematoria capacity.

In the same year, some 1,300 m3 of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones was collected and turned into a large mound.

[37] The last major, widely publicized prosecution of 16 SS members from Majdanek (Majdanek-Prozess in German) took place from 1975 to 1981 in West Germany.

Of 1,037 SS members who worked at Majdanek and are known by name, 170 were prosecuted, due to a rule applied by the West German justice system allowing only those directly involved in the process to be charged with murder.

After the capture of the camp by the Soviet Army, the NKVD retained the ready-made facility as a prison for soldiers of the Armia Krajowa (AK, the Home Army resistance) loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (National Armed Forces) opposed to both German and Soviet occupation.