December 22, 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German Nazi
concentration camp - hears their sentences read. After a month of gruesome testimonies,
23 defendants out of the 41 are sentenced to death by hanging.
One of them is Erich Muhsfeldt, one of the most sadistic Nazi criminals.
Erich Muhsfeldt was born on February 18, 1913
and was a baker by profession. He joined the SA in 1933 and in 1939 he joined the Nazi Party.
On January 15, 1940 he joined the SS and in July 1940 he came into 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.
Muhsfeldt was extremely cruel and enjoyed mistreating the prisoners.
On a few occasions, he was seen drowning inmates in cesspools in Majdanek.
Erich 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 did know that
they were digging their own mass graves. 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 were 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.
In May 1944, Muhsfeldt returned to Auschwitz, where he supervised the
crematoria in Birkenau during the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian 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 Erich
Musfeldt shot 80 prisoners in the back of the head, Musfeldt 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 15 year old girl survived the gas chamber
which was extremely rare. Nyiszli asked Muhsfeldt to spare her.
The request was denied and to ensure that 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. The camp was evacuated soon after 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, the Third Reich awarded Erich Muhsfeldt with War Merit Cross Second Class.
After the end of the war, Erich Muhsfeldt had to finally face justice and pay for his crimes.
He was captured by the allies and the US military court sentenced Musfeldt to life
imprisonment on January 22, 1947. However, soon after he was extradited to Poland where he was
retried at the Auschwitz Trial which began on November 24, 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” . Musfeldt couldn’t be more wrong.
In the end, it was the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow that found
Musfeldt guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging.
He was 34 years old when he was executed on the 24 January 1948. His body was subsequently
made available to medical students at the University of Kraków as illustrative material.
There were no tears shed for Erich Muhsfeldt.
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