Majdanek cannot be denied

PLUS: I visited an extermination camp and MAGA Holocaust denier Mark Robinson is unfit for office

Lublin is a small Polish city a few hours from Warsaw with a beautiful old town — and a death camp that sits on its outskirts. 

Lublin was busy on Wednesday morning, springing to life after a long holiday weekend. Traffic was consistent heading out of town at 8 am, nothing diabolical, but heavy. The roads were filled with cars, commercial vehicles, trucks and delivery lorries, over a series of turns and hills that led away from the city. Off to the right there was an opening, a green space of sorts. At first glance, it presented like a thousand municipal golf courses might somewhere in the United States or Canada, but this wasn’t that. 

Majdanek, a Nazi concentration and extermination camp, was captured by the Red Army in 1944 during a lightning surge forward. The SS kommandant was completely incompetent, and failed to destroy the camp’s infrastructure and records. It was captured intact, exactly as it was. The gas chambers and ovens stood as they were: 

The showers were captured intact:

The empty Zyklon B canisters littered the floors, and were stacked like artillery shells: 

The entirety of the infrastructure where the Nazi selection process played out was captured as it was, and as it functioned. 

The prisoners’ barracks were captured:

The stolen shoes of the murdered were discovered in enormous bins, awaiting shipment back to the Reich:

At the top of a slight rise stood the main crematorium:

The chimney once shot flame and smoke from it. When it did, the occasion was primarily the immolation of murdered Jews.

The enormity of the crime and the details of the planning process involved in its execution are simply mind-boggling. Even when Germany was losing the war and retreating, the cover-up of the murders remained a priority of the highest magnitude. 

What had begun with political rhetoric in Munich beer halls and rallies in Nuremberg ended here:

They ended in a horror that overwhelms the mind. 

This is where unbridled hate and unrestrained power lead. 

This is fascism. 

The people who committed these crimes were not monsters. They were ordinary. 

When evil manifests itself through a political party or the power of a state, that power can be made to feel universal and ubiquitous. It never is. In the end, it is relatively small numbers of people who carry out, plan, conceive and perform the horrors.  This is why it matters a great deal that Stephen Miller asked if the US military could murder migrants at sea in the Oval Office.

There is a disease that runs through all of history that compels some to seek power and kill with it. They are attracted towards a sphere where there is room for simpletons who see the world in disordered colorings. Politics has always attracted the weak, sad, lonely, desperate and needy. When those qualities become unmoored from any higher principle and cause, there is always danger. There has never been a shortage of politicians who, when they feel the adulation from the crowd and the power of possibility, go off the rails. When they do, they have an instinct to conquer and kill. It has always been this way. It is precisely what is happening in Ukraine. 

What began as promises of national greatness in Germany ended in cataclysm for all of humanity. It occurred across a thousand killing fields and a vast network of death camps that were the last exit in a system of slavery and madness. It resulted in the killing of 11 million human beings. 

The achievements of the Third Reich represent the apogee of humanity’s capacity to commit evil at an industrial scale. It killed millions, based on a dogma of madness that destroyed a thousand years of civilization — and nearly exterminated the whole of a people who had existed, thrived, been persecuted and endured for a thousand years of European history. 

More than 400,000 Americans were killed, and multitudes more maimed psychologically and physically, in an all-consuming national effort that saved the world, remade it and made the United States of America the most powerful nation in world history. The war was fought to defeat an evil called fascism. What was it? What did it believe? How did it come to power? 

These are the most important questions across the millenniums of recorded human history because the answer is key to our collective survival. They are urgent questions with simple answers that have become complicated because of the disorientations that result from the blinding impact of ignorance and forgetfulness on human memory. 

The death camps were the fulfillment of a promise made and kept. 

The Nazis promised retribution and revenge. They delivered. 

What is most important to grasp about the Nazis and the industrial scale of the murder is that it happened, and the people who did it said they would. 

The height of the killing at Madjanek came during Operation “Harvest Festival,” which played out on November 3-4, 1943. During those days, more than 40,000 Jews were executed in trenches that they had dug themselves. This was the bloodiest single action of the entire Holocaust. Because the camp was so close to the city of Lublin —and scores of civilians lived around it — the SS tried to obscure 40 hours of continuous gunfire with loud music. The gunfire was heard. 

The zig zag trenches can be seen. So can the mass graves. 

This is where fascism led. 

The lesson is as relevant today as it was the moment this place of evil was discovered. 

At a minimum, between 95,000 and 130,000 prisoners died in the Madjanek system between November 1941 and January 1945.

May their memory be a blessing. 

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VIDEO COMMENTARY: I visited an extermination camp and MAGA Holocaust denier Mark Robinson is unfit for office

Yesterday, I wrote about my visit to Treblinka, a German extermination camp in present-day Poland where 900,000 people were killed in the Holocaust. From the site of the atrocities, I speak directly to Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina. The Republican, who is also the party's candidate for governor, is a Holocaust denier who has called it "hogwash." He is unfit for office, and anyone who votes for him is an accessory to denying the memory of those killed.

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