A journalist films the main gate of the former concentration camp in Dachau near Munich where the door with the Nazi slogan "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free) has been stolen November 3, 2014.
A journalist films the main gate of the former concentration camp in Dachau near Munich where the door with the Nazi slogan "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free) has been stolen November 3, 2014. REUTERS/Michael Dalder

Eight shoes belonging to former Jewish holocaust victims were stolen from an earlier concentration camp at the Majdanek museum near Lublin, between Nov. 18 and 20, according to BBC.

An employee noticed that shoes were missing during a routine check on Saturday, said museum spokeswoman, Agnieszka Kowalczyk-Nowak. She said that when they began counting, they found the shoes missing. There is a total of 280,000 shoes that belong to inmates of the camp, with several thousand in the exhibition. The footwear was reported missing after a museum employee became aware that one wire net over a shelf of 56,000 shoes had got cut.

The exhibition was a massive showpiece to hit home the scale of the Nazis' crime. She said that the theft was "a great loss to the museum" as these objects have a "huge historical value."

Earlier items have also been stolen from the museum. Last year, a Jewish prisoner's cap stolen from the museum 20 years ago was discovered, while exploring an eBay auction in the U.S., where it was valued at $1,750, or 1,400 euros. In 2013, a Jewish prisoner's hat had got stolen from Majdanak. The FBI recovered it after identifying the thief who had tried to sell it online.

Even much before that, in 1989, Swedish artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff stole the ashes of Holocaust victims from a crematorium at Majdanek that was from the Nazi era. He triggered a public outrage in 2012, when he displayed a water-colour painting in which he had "used the ashes." He put it up on display at a Swedish gallery. Eventually, it was removed, but the Polish and Swedish justice officials did not take the investigation forward. They dropped it without pressing charges because of a statute of limitations on the case, according to thejerusalempost.com.

In August 2010, a fire had broken out at the Majdanek concentration camp barracks and destroyed 10,000 pairs of shoes belonging to earlier prisoners. In October, another iron gate from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany had been robbed. It bore a Nazi slogan that said "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work sets you free."

Almost 78,000 victims had been gassed and the chambers at Majdanek were built up by the Nazis in 1941 and abandoned in 1944. The camp's museum says in a notice that 78,000 prisoners, including 60,000 Jews, had been killed. Half of them had gone through the camp.