On July 24, 1944, Soviet soldiers and Polish military units arrived at the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of the city of Lublin in eastern Poland.
A US war reporter would later describe Majdanek as "the most terrible place on the face of the Earth," comparing it to a huge car factory "for the production of death."
Ahead of the arrival of the Red Army, the Nazis had hastily abandoned Majdanek, one of six purpose-built killing centers called extermination camps that the Nazis built in the area of Poland under German occupation. They evacuated the remaining prisoners and tried to destroy the crematoriums and other buildings in an attempt to cover up the mass murder that took place at the death camp.
A least 78,000 people, including 59,000 Jews, were killed at Majdanek during its nearly three years of existence.
"Shocking evidence of the crimes committed by the Germans was found: ashes, bones, human remains and the bodies of the murdered prisoners, mainly Jews and Poles," Wieslaw Wysok, the deputy director of the Majdanek State Museum, told DW.
"The tragic dimension of the site was further emphasized by the surviving traces of the crime: gas chambers, crematoriums, prisoners' barracks, hundreds of thousands of shoes."
The discovery of Majdanek provided clear evidence of the Nazi extermination system almost six months before the liberation in January 1945 of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where some 900,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers.
Nazi Germany killed some 6 million Jews between 1941 and the end of World War II in 1945 in the deliberate, systematic and state-sponsored murder of Jews know as the Holocaust. The Nazis also persecuted other groups, leading to the deaths........