Glossary beginning with M

Nazi concentration and labor camp with killing center near Lublin in eastern Poland. Opened in late 1941 for men and women prisoners. Initially, Majdanek was a labor camp for Poles and a POW camp for Russians, it was classified as a concentration camp in April 1943. Like Auschwitz, it was also a major killing center. Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Army in July 1944, one of the first war crimes trials was held there in October 1944.

A camp for men opened in August 1938 near Linz. Mauthausen was established to exploit nearby stone quarries, it was classified by the SS as a camp of utmost severity. The prisoners included Italian, French, Yugoslavian, and Spanish political prisoners, Jews from Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands (1941), Gypsies from Austria (1938-40), nearly 30,000 Polish prisoners, and thousands of Soviet prisoners of war. The total number of prisoners who passed through Mauthausen is about 200,000, of whom 119,000 perished, including 38,000 Jews. Mauthausen was liberated by the U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.

1895-1946. Salesman, served in World War I, joined Nazi party, 1932, and the SS, 1933, promoted to SS Lieutenant Colonel, 1942, staff member of the Dachau concentration camp, 1933, Adjutant at Columbia Haus concentration camp, 1936, Adjutant at Dachau concentration camp, 1937, Commandant of the women's concentration camps at Lichtenburg, 1938, and Ravensbrück, 1940,.Commandant of the Lublin-Maidanek concentration camp, 1942, and Flossenbürg concentration camp, 1943, committed suicide, 1946.

Named for Stanley Milgram, the Milgram experiment revealed the willingness of most people to obey authority even if it involved inflicting severe pain on others. It has serious implications for the issues of "responsibility and intent," "brutality and emotional response," and "moral judgment and peer influence."

Established in August 1943 as a subsidiary of the Buchenwald concentration camp, this facility was originally named Dora. The camp for men, located near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, provided labor for the production of V-2 rockets in underground factories. Renamed Mittelbau, this concentration camp became independent in November 1944. Of 60,000 prisoners from 40 countries used for forced labor at Mittelbau-Dora, more than 20,000 were killed because of brutal conditions.

1877-1944. Rumkowski was a partner in a failed Lodz velvet factory before World War I. In the 1920s, he was active in communal work, especially child welfare. Rumkowski organized the Helenowek orphanage near Lodz and served as its director until 1939. After 1931, he also served as a leading Zionist on the Lodz Jewish community council. With German occupation, this community council was replaced by the Judenrat with Rumkowski appointed as chairman. Rumkowski and his family were deported from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz on August 20, 1944.

Located between Göttingen and Hanover, Moringen was the first central concentration camp for women from October 1933 to March 1938. It became a concentration camp for juveniles from August 1940 to April 6, 1945, holding nearly 1,600 male juvenile prisoners aged 12-22 and sometimes younger. These children were arrested for: refusal to serve in the Hitler Youth, sabotage or refusal to work, criminality, membership in the Swing youth movement, homosexuality or prostitution, and political resistance (especially young partisans from the Slovenian-Austrian border region).