The liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in 1944 and 1945 exposed to the world the full extent of the crimes committed under Adolf Hitler's regime. On the night of July 22 and 23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army reached Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated, located in German-occupied Poland. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see for themselves the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there.
As Allied troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. Among them was Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centers, which Soviet forces liberated on January 27, 1945. It is estimated that a minimum of 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and of these, at least 1.1 million were murdered.
One of the perpetrators responsible for these atrocities was Erich Muhsfeldt. He was born on February 18, 1913, in Neuhof, then part of the German Empire. In 1927 he completed eight classes of elementary school, and three years later he gained the profession of a baker. Muhsfeldt was married and had one son.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. In 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 September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In January 1940, Muhsfeldt became a member of the SS Division Totenkopf, or Death's Head units, an elite division of the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS. The Death's Head units, named for the skull and crossbones symbol worn on the right collar of their uniforms, were established in 1934 by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of Dachau and later inspector of concentration camps.
The units were an independent formation within the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe. They were trained to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty and viewed 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, 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 as a block leader. In November 1941 he was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he served as the head of the crematorium and of a commander unit that burned the bodies of murdered prisoners.
It was in the winter of 1941 to 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 of them shower rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon B gas, and at least one of these 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, but many 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 Jews before their deaths in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, two of them 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, but the inmates guessed their true purpose. Approximately 43,000 Jews were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki concentration camps between November 3 and 4, 1943. The Jewish prisoners were ordered to strip naked and walk into the previously dug trenches, and once there they 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.
Erich Muhsfeldt was a twisted sadist who enjoyed mistreating 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 smash inmates unconscious for no reason. Once he noticed that a prisoner had smiled at a wagoner, he immediately walked up to him and 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 a prisoner with his hands. When the prisoner fell to the ground as a result of the blows, he took a shovel handle and stuck it in the prisoner's throat, 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 20s learned 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 burned alive." Muhsfeldt then had her hands and feet bound, and she was tied to a trolley that loaded corpses into the crematorium. The young woman was then pushed into the flames of the 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 the 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 parked next to the crematorium, normally used for taking out the corpses, was started. 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 July 24, 1944, it was virtually intact and fewer than 500 Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 and 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 more than 40 camps and subcamps that made up the Auschwitz complex, served as a center for the extermination of Jews. In the crematorium, his commanders were seen beating some women to death with rods. One of his specialties was hitting the back of prisoners with his whip. Muhsfeldt 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, Muhsfeldt became furious about the Jewish boys from the Warsaw Ghetto. After they were separated from their parents, the 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.
Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner and doctor at Auschwitz, said that once, after Muhsfeldt shot 80 prisoners in the back of the head, he came to him for a checkup and had high blood pressure. When Nyiszli asked him if it was because he had shot 80 prisoners, Muhsfeldt angrily replied that it made no difference to him if he killed one 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. To ensure that the girl died, she was shot in the back of the neck.
In August 1944, Muhsfeldt was sent to the front lines, where among other things he took part in the battle for Hungary. 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. 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 the 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. 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, Muhsfeldt told one Polish political prisoner, "If you Poles weren't such fools like you are, we wouldn't have to burn you in the crematoria." In the end, it was the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow that found Muhsfeldt guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging.
When Erich Muhsfeldt was executed at Montelupich prison in Krakow on January 24, 1948, he was 34 years old. His body was subsequently made available to medical students at the University of Krakow as illustrative material. According to the previously mentioned Holocaust survivor Miklos Nyiszli, Mengele's family did not fare any better: his wife was killed in an air raid, and his son was sent to the Russian front. There were no tears shed for Erich Muhsfeldt.