KRAKOW, Poland — Erich Muhsfeldt, the notorious SS officer who supervised the crematoria at Auschwitz and Majdanek and personally burned prisoners alive, was executed by hanging at Montelupich prison on January 24, 1948, bringing an end to one of the most sadistic careers in the Nazi extermination machine.
Muhsfeldt was 34 years old when the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow carried out the sentence, following a month-long trial that began on November 24, 1947, during which survivors testified to the systematic brutality he inflicted upon helpless prisoners.
His body was subsequently made available to medical students at the University of Krakow as illustrative material, a final indignity that reflected the contempt in which his crimes were held by the Polish authorities who had retried him after an initial life sentence by a US military court in January 1947.
Born on February 18, 1913, in Neuhof, then part of the German Empire, Muhsfeldt completed eight classes of elementary school in 1927 and trained as a baker three years later. He was married and had one son before his descent into infamy.
The trajectory of his life changed irrevocably when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. That same year, Muhsfeldt joined the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, before switching to the SS in 1937 and becoming a member of the Nazi Party in 1939.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering the Second World War, Muhsfeldt was already steeped in the ideology of racial hatred that would define his subsequent actions. In January 1940, he became a member of the SS Division Totenkopf, or Death’s Head units, an elite division of the Waffen-SS.
The SS 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. These units were trained to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty, viewing prisoners under their guard as enemies of the state who should be destroyed.
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 the crematorium and commanded a 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 were three gas chambers at Majdanek, at least two of which were shower rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon B gas. At least one of these was used to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 human beings. The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek, most of whom arrived as forced laborers and either died from brutally inhumane living conditions or were killed in the gas chambers after the Germans determined they could no longer work.
Majdanek’s gas chambers were also used to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 prisoners from other camps in Lublin who were no longer able to work. Some Jewish victims were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival, while many others were killed in shooting operations or died of disease, starvation, exposure, and overwork.
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, though 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. Jewish prisoners were ordered to strip naked and walk into the previously dug trenches, where 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 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, 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 received, 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 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 July 24, 1944, it was virtually intact and less 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. The liberation of Majdanek was the first major Nazi camp to be liberated, located in German-occupied Poland, and it became one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps was the full extent of Nazi crimes finally 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the world. As Allied troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes.
Among them was Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centers, located in German-occupied Poland, which the Soviet forces liberated on January 27, 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.
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 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.
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. 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 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. 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, 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, however, 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.
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.
The execution of Muhsfeldt stands as a stark reminder of the justice that eventually caught up with those who perpetrated the horrors of the Holocaust. His name remains synonymous with the brutality and inhumanity that characterized the Nazi extermination camps, where millions of innocent lives were extinguished in gas chambers and crematoria across German-occupied Europe.
The liberation of Majdanek on July 22-23, 1944, by soldiers of the Red Army marked the first major Nazi camp to be liberated, and it was only after this event that the full extent of Nazi crimes was finally 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the world. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and see for themselves the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there.
As the world commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, the case of Erich Muhsfeldt serves as a chilling testament to the capacity for human cruelty and the importance of holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes against humanity, no matter how much time has passed.