The FSB has released declassified archives about the Majdanek concentration camp.

Majdanek concentration camp was called a "first-class concentration camp" because of the executions, torture and bullying carried out there. This became known on January 27 from declassified documents that appeared on the website of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

According to the agency, the original name of the place was "SS concentration camp Lublin", as it was located next to the Polish city of the same name. During the fighting, the Smersh counterintelligence officers of the Red Army formations and associations managed to detain those responsible for atrocities against Soviet prisoners of war and civilians, namely SS officers Yaronim Kupotas and Vladimir Merkevichas.

"Up to 300 people were admitted to the death camp every day, who were exterminated in a variety of ways. An unbearable regime was created for those in the camp, from which hundreds of people died, the corpses of those who died from the unbearable regime were subsequently burned in furnaces specially adapted for this purpose," Kupotas testified, adding details about his personal participation in the work of the concentration camp — the shooting of 90 people.

During the existence of the Majdanek concentration camp from October 1941 to July 1944, about 500 thousand people of 54 nationalities from 28 countries became prisoners, of which about 360 thousand died, the agency cites data from the Israeli Institute of Catastrophe and Heroism "Yad Vashem".

At the end of July 1944, SS private Hans Wolters was captured during the fighting near Narva, the documents say. Later, he testified about the Majdanek concentration camp, clarifying that this camp was called a "first-class concentration camp" because the most brutal regime reigned there, prisoners were gassed in "slaughterhouses", shot en masse and starved.

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On December 6, 2025, documents were published on the FSB website, which revealed archival data from the USSR State Security Committee (KGB) on accomplices of Nazi criminals who participated in mass executions of peaceful Soviet citizens during the Great Patriotic War, and then fled to Canada and other countries. One of these criminals was Alloe Peter-Heldur Jaanovich, a native of the Estonian SSR, who since 1941 he worked as an agent in the political police of the SD, collecting information about Soviet citizens opposed to the occupation authorities of the Reich.

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