On the night of July 22–23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army reached Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp to be liberated, located in German-occupied Poland. The discovery became one of the most significant moments of World War II and the Holocaust, exposing the full scale of Nazi crimes to the world. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and witness the evidence of the horrors firsthand.
As Allied forces advanced across Europe in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi atrocities. Among them was Auschwitz, the largest extermination center, liberated by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945. Between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, and of those, at least 1.1 million were murdered.
One of the perpetrators responsible for these crimes was Erich Muhsfeldt. Born on February 18, 1913, in Neuhof, then part of the German Empire, he completed eight years of elementary school in 1927 and trained as a baker three years later. Muhsfeldt was married and had one son.
In 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Muhsfeldt joined the SA. He switched to the SS in 1937 and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1939. After the outbreak of World War II, he joined the SS Division Totenkopf, or Death’s Head units, in January 1940. These units, named for the skull and crossbones insignia on their collars, were responsible for administering Nazi concentration and extermination camps. They were trained to treat prisoners as enemies of the state and were central to the implementation of the Holocaust.
In August 1940, Muhsfeldt arrived at Auschwitz, where he worked as a block leader and head of prisoner commandos. In November 1941, he was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he served as head of the crematorium and commanded a unit that burned the bodies of murdered prisoners.
Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. The camp had at least three gas chambers, with at least one used to kill human beings. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed at Majdanek, either through brutal living conditions, shootings, or gassing after being deemed unable to work.
Muhsfeldt was also involved in Operation Harvest Festival. In late October 1943, Jewish laborers were forced to dig trenches, allegedly for air defense. Between November 3 and 4, 1943, approximately 43,000 Jews were murdered at Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki. Prisoners were ordered to strip naked, walk into the trenches, and were shot. Loud music was played to cover the gunfire. It was the largest single massacre of Jews carried out by German forces during the Holocaust.
Witnesses described Muhsfeldt as a sadist who enjoyed mistreating prisoners. He was often drunk and carried a thick truncheon, which he used to beat inmates unconscious without reason. On one occasion, he struck a prisoner for smiling at a wagoner, knocking out three of his teeth. On another, he beat a prisoner until he fell, then shoved a shovel handle into the man’s throat and left him to die in agony.
As head of the crematorium, Muhsfeldt would tell prisoners he intended to burn them alive. One young Polish woman, upon learning she was to be gassed, fought for her life and scratched him. He had her bound and pushed alive into the flames of the crematorium. Prisoners were also hanged on hooks along the crematorium wall, selected from the weaker inmates to keep mortality rates at a fixed level.
According to survivor testimony, Muhsfeldt threw small children, mostly Jewish, into the gas chamber. Jerzy Lang, a Holocaust survivor, testified that Muhsfeldt would enter the crematorium holding two Jewish children in each hand, followed by the sound of revolver shots. Truck engines were started to drown out the cries during executions.
When the Red Army liberated Majdanek on July 24, 1944, the camp was virtually intact, and fewer than 500 Jewish prisoners remained alive. Between 80,000 and 120,000 people perished there during its operation.
In May 1944, Muhsfeldt returned to Auschwitz, where he supervised the crematoria in Birkenau during the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. He was seen beating women to death with rods and smiling when prisoners were pushed alive into furnaces. On one occasion, Jewish boys from the Warsaw Ghetto were separated from their parents, recaptured after a commotion, and sent to the gas chambers.
Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner and doctor at Auschwitz, recalled that after Muhsfeldt shot 80 prisoners in the back of the head, he came for a checkup with high blood pressure. When asked if the shootings were the cause, Muhsfeldt angrily replied that it made no difference whether he killed one or 80 inmates. A 16-year-old girl who survived the gas chamber was shot in the back of the neck after Nyiszli’s request to spare her was denied.
In August 1944, Muhsfeldt was sent to the front lines and took part in the battle for Hungary. After being injured, he was sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp in early April 1945. During the evacuation and death march, he shot dozens of prisoners too weak or sick to walk. For his actions, he was awarded the War Merit Cross Second Class.
After the war, Muhsfeldt was captured by the Allies. In January 1947, a U.S. military court sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was later extradited to Poland, where he was retried at the Auschwitz trial, which began on November 24, 1947, and lasted one month.
The Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow found Muhsfeldt guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was executed at Montelupich prison in Krakow on January 24, 1948, at the age of 34. His body was made available to medical students at the University of Krakow as illustrative material.