Penny Hodgins's Album: Wall Photos

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75th anniversary of "Bloody Wednesday" at Majdanek

On November 9, 1939, Heinrich Himmler appointed Austrian Nazi Odilo Globocnik as S.S. and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government territory. By mid-1943, Globocnik had around 45,000 Jewish slave laborers in the network of camps. This included all able-bodied Jews in Poland aged 16 to 60.

After small groups of Jews escaped from Warsaw, Treblinka and Sobibor in separate revolts in 1943, the S.S. leadership established a goal of eliminating all Jews who remained in the Lublin district. A plan was established -- 3,000 S.S. and police troops from Krakow and Warsaw arrived in Lublin, as did S.S. men from Auschwitz, Poznan and Konigsberg.

On November 3-4, 1943, during a 48 hour period, the remaining Jewish slave laborers in the Lublin district -- 45,000 in total -- were murdered on "Bloody Wednesday". All were shot execution style, one after the other, and buried in mass graves in eastern Poland.

The names and identities of most of the victims, some of whom were pregnant women and children, will never be known.

Today we mark the 75th anniversary of these murders.

http://chelm.freeyellow.com/aktion.html