After the camp's liberation by the advancing Red Army on 23 July 1944, the site was formally protected. With the war still ongoing, it was preserved as a museum by the autumn of 1944. It remains one the best examples of a
Nazi death camp, with largely intact gas chambers and crematoria. The camp became a state monument of
martyrology by the 1947 decree of the
Polish Parliament (Sejm). Majdanek received the status of Poland's national museum in 1965. 18,400 Jews were killed at Majdanek on 3 November 1943, during the largest single-day, single-camp massacre of
the Holocaust, named
Harvest Festival (totalling 43,000 with two subcamps). In 1969, on the 25th anniversary of the Majdanek liberation, a stunningly emotional monument dedicated to Holocaust victims was erected on the grounds of the former Nazi extermination camp. It was designed by a Polish sculptor and architect
Wiktor Tołkin, The monument consists of three parts, the symbolic
Pylon (gate, 11
meters tall and 35 meters wide), the road, and the Mausoleum, containing a mound of ashes of the victims. The Museum is also in possession of the archives left behind by the
SS after a failed attempt at their destruction by
Obersturmführer Anton Thernes, tried at the
Majdanek Trials. ==Recent history==