Prisoners at Majdanek
The Majdanek concentration camp was a German concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin, Poland during the Holocaust. The camp operated from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, killing an estimated 78,000 people, mostly Jews. The camp was one of few German camps to be located near a major urban area, and the Waffen-SS saw it as a prisoner of war camp until 1943. On 22 July 1944, the camp was captured intact by the Soviet Red Army, and it was the first concentration camp discovered by Allied forces during World War II.