The night of 22-23 July 1944. Soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek - the first major Nazi
camp to be liberated located in German-occupied Poland. This event becomes one of the most
significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust as only after the liberation
of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi crimes is finally exposed to the world.
Soviet officials invite journalists to inspect the camp and to see for themselves the evidence of the
horrors that have occurred there. As Allied troops move across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944
and 1945, they encounter concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. Among them
is Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centers located in German occupied Poland, which
the Soviet forces liberate on the 27th of January 1945. It is estimated that a minimum of 1.3
million people were deported to this camp between 1940 and 1945 and of these, at least 1.1 million
were murdered. One of the perpetrators responsible for these atrocities is Erich Musfeldt.
Erich Muhsfeldt was born on the 18th of February 1913 in Neubrück
then part of the German Empire. In 1927, he completed 8 classes of elementary school,
and three years later he gained the profession of baker. Muhsfeldt was married and had 1 son.
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von
Hindenburg and the same year Muhsfeldt joined the SA. In 1937 he switched to the SS and in
1939 he became a member of the Nazi Party. The Second World War began on 1 September
1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In January 1940 Muhsfeldt became a member of
the SS Division Totenkopf, or Death's Head Units, which was an elite division of the Waffen-SS.
Waffen SS was the military branch of the SS. The SS Death's Head Units named for the
skull-and-cross-bones symbol worn on the right collar of their uniforms was established in 1934
by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of Dachau and later inspector of concentration
camps. It was an independent unit within the SS responsible for administering the
Nazi concentration and extermination camps throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe.
The units were trained to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty, and to view
the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the state who should be destroyed if possible.
They were responsible for facilitating what the Nazis called the Final Solution,
known since the war as the Holocaust which was the genocide of Jews in Europe.
In August 1940 Muhsfeldt arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp where he worked as the head of
the prisoner commandos and block leader. In November 1941, he was transferred to
Majdanek concentration camp where he served as the head of a crematorium and a commando unit
that burned the bodies of murdered prisoners. It was in the winter of 1941-1942, when camp
authorities began to use Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas
chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued
until the end of 1943. There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek; at least two were
shower rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon B gas. At least one of these two was used to kill
human beings. The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek. Most of them arrived at the camp
as forced laborers and either died because of the brutally inhumane living conditions or were killed
in the gas chambers after the Germans determined that they could no longer work. Majdanek’s gas
chambers were also used to kill prisoners from the other camps in Lublin who were no
longer able to work. Some Jewish victims were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival. Many,
however, were killed in shooting operations and many others died of disease, starvation,
exposure, and overwork. Majdanek also contained storage facilities for clothing and personal items
stolen from the Jews before their deaths in the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II killing centers.
Muhsfeldt was one of those responsible for carrying out an action code-named
“Operation Harvest Festival “. In late October 1943 Jewish laborers
were asked to dig trenches allegedly for air defense. However, the inmates guessed
their true purpose. Approximately 43,000 Jews were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and
Trawniki concentration camps between 3–4 November 1943. The Jewish prisoners were ordered to strip
naked and walk into the previously dug trenches and once there they were subsequently shot. Loud
music was played to cover the sound of gunfire. Operation Harvest Festival was carried out after
several uprisings by Jewish prisoners under the direct orders of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the
SS. It became the largest single massacre of Jews carried out by German forces during the Holocaust.
Erich Muhsfeldt was a twisted sadist who enjoyed mistreating the prisoners and would celebrate if
he managed to murder a significant number of people on a given day. He was constantly drunk
and would carry a thick truncheon, which he used to trash inmates unconscious for no reason. Once
he noticed that a prisoner had smiled at a waggoner. He immediately walked up to him,
hit him on the jaw, causing him to fall. Then he started kicking him all over his body knocking
out three of his teeth in the process. On a different occasion Muhsfeldt was
beating some prisoner with his hands. When this prisoner fell to the ground, as a result of the
blows received, he took a shovel handle and stuck it in the prisoner’s throat,
and then left him lying with the handle in his throat until the prisoner died in great torment.
As the head of the crematorium, Muhsfeldt would go around the camp and say to random prisoners:
“I’m going to get you soon and, I’m warning you, I’m going to burn you alive.”
Once a young Polish woman in her late 20’s learnt that she was to be gassed. Upon learning
she would be killed, she fought for her life and scratched Muhsfeldt. She screamed at him,
"Why am I to die?" He yelled back, "you will be burnt alive". Muhsfeldt then had
her hands and feet bound and she was tied to the trolley that loaded corpses into
the crematorium. The young woman was then pushed into the flames of crematoria alive.
There was often a long queue of inmates in front of the crematorium, waiting to
be hanged by Muhsfeldt’s people on the hooks of the crematorium wall and the corpses were then
burned. The prisoners to be hanged on the hooks were selected from among the weaker ones, on days
when few prisoners had died in the camp, so that the mortality rate would be kept at a fixed level.
According to some witnesses Muhsfeldt also enjoyed himself by throwing small, mostly
Jewish children into the gas chamber. Jerzy Lang, a Holocaust survivor, testified after the war,
how Muhsfeldt was heading for crematorium with two Jewish children in each hand. He would
then enter the crematorium and Jerzy would hear revolver shots. In order to drown out
the cries during such executions, the engine of the truck was started, which was parked next to
the crematorium and normally used for taking out the corpses. At that time, corpses were
transported by car to the forest, where they were burned, as the old crematorium could not keep up.
When the Red army liberated the camp on 24 July 1944, it was virtually intact and less than 500
Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect
the camp and evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 – 120,000 people
perished in Majdanek between October 1941 and July 1944 when the camp was operational.
In May 1944 Muhsfeldt returned to Auschwitz, where he supervised the
crematoria in Birkenau during the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Birkenau, the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex,
served as a center for the extermination of Jews. In the crematorium, his commandos were seen
beating some women to death with rods. One of his specialties was hitting the
back of the prisoners with his whip. Musfeldt was reported to have a smile on his face when those
who did not obey his orders were pushed, sometimes alive, into the fiery furnace.
On one occasion, Musfeldt became furious about the Jewish boys from the Warsaw Ghetto. After
they were separated from their parents, the poor children were summoned for a roll-call
but a commotion broke out among them and the children dispersed. After they were found,
these boys were sent to the gas chambers where they were killed.
Miklós Nyiszli, Hungarian Jewish prisoner and doctor at Auschwitz said that once after Musfeldt
shot 80 prisoners in the back of the head, he came to him for a check-up and had high blood pressure.
When Nyiszli asked him if it was because had had shot 80 prisoners, Musfeldt angrily replied that
it made no difference to him if he killed 1 or 80 inmates and added that if his blood pressure was
high, it was because he drank too much. On another occasion, a 16-year-old girl
survived the gas chamber, which was extremely rare. Nyiszli asked Muhsfeldt to spare her but
the request was denied and to ensure that the girl died, she was shot in the back of her neck.
In August 1944, Muhsfeldt was sent to the front lines where among other things he
took part in the battle for Hungary but after being injured, he was sent to the Flossenbürg
concentration camp in early April 1945. In addition to the dreadful conditions, in
Flossenbürg the Germans created such harsh living conditions for the prisoners that they often
committed suicide. The camp’s Nazi personnel would often carry out executions, punish the prisoners
with whipping, and order long and extremely tiring roll calls. The camp was evacuated
soon after Muhsfeldt’s arrival and during the death march, he was seen shooting dozens of
prisoners who were too weak or too sick to walk. For all these atrocities, Muhsfeldt was awarded
War Merit Cross Second Class. After the end of the war,
Muhsfeldt had to finally face justice and pay for his crimes. He was captured by the allies
and in January 1947 he was sentenced by the US military court to life imprisonment. However,
soon after he was extradited to Poland where he was retried at the Auschwitz Trial which began
on 24 November 1947 and lasted one month. During the war, Musfeldt told one Polish
political prisoner. “If you, Poles, weren’t such fools like you are, we wouldn’t have to
burn you in crematoria.” In the end, however, it was the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow
that found Musfeldt guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging.
When Erich Muhsfeldt was executed at Montelupich Prison in Krakow on 24 January 1948, he was
34 years old. His body was subsequently made available to medical students at the
University of Krakow as illustrative material. ccording to the previously mentioned holocaust
survivor Miklós Nyiszli, Muhsfeldt's family did not fare any better. His wife was killed in an
air raid, and his son sent to the Russian front. There were no tears shed for Erich Muhsfeldt.
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