Already in —40, before the ghetto was officially pronounced, the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik the SS district commander who also ran the Jewish reservation , began to relocate the Lublin Jews further away from his staff headquarters at Spokojna Street, [5] and into a new city zone set up for this purpose.
Meanwhile, the first 10, Jews had been expelled from Lublin to the rural surroundings of the city beginning in early March. The Ghetto, referred to as the Jewish quarter or Wohngebiet der Juden , was formally opened a year later on 24 March The expulsion and ghettoization of the Jews was decided when the arriving Wehrmacht troops preparing for the Operation Barbarossa , the invasion of the Soviet Union, needed housing close to the new German—Soviet frontier. Selected members of the prewar political parties such as the Jewish Bund in Poland were imprisoned in the Lublin Castle and continued to carry out their underground activities from there.
Dressed like a German official, Grajer summoned to his restaurant a number of wealthy Jews and extracted a ransom of 20, zloty from every one of them.
They were shot dead together, during the final liquidation of Majdan. At the time of its founding, the ghetto imprisoned 34, Polish Jews , [1] and an unknown number of Roma people. Virtually all of them were dead by the war's end. Most of the victims, about 30, were deported to the Belzec extermination camp some of them through the Piaski ghetto between 17 March and 11 April by the Reserve Police Battalion from Orpo helped by Schutzpolizei.
Not much will remain of the Jews. After liquidating the ghetto, German authorities employed a slave labor workforce of inmates of Majdanek to demolish and dismantle the area of the former ghetto, including in the nearby village of Wieniawa and the Podzamcze district. In a symbolic event, the Maharam's Synagogue built in the 17th century in honor of Meir Lublin was blown up with explosives.
