On December 22, 1947, in Krakow, Poland, the former staff of Auschwitz heard their sentences read aloud. After a month of gruesome testimonies, 23 of the 41 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. Among them was Erich Muhsfeldt, one of the most sadistic Nazi criminals.
Muhsfeldt was born on February 18, 1913, and worked as a baker by profession. He joined the SA in 1933 and the Nazi Party in 1939. On January 15, 1940, he joined the SS.
In July 1940, Muhsfeldt arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp, where he served as head of the prisoner commandos and as a block leader. In November 1941, he was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he oversaw a crematorium and a commando unit that burned the bodies of murdered prisoners.
Muhsfeldt was extremely cruel and took pleasure in mistreating prisoners. On several occasions, he was seen drowning inmates in cesspools at Majdanek.
He was among those responsible for carrying out an action code-named Operation Harvest Festival. In late October 1943, Jewish laborers at the camp were ordered to dig trenches, supposedly for air defense. The inmates did not know they were digging their own mass graves.
Between November 3 and 4, 1943, approximately 43,000 Jews were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki concentration camps. The Jewish prisoners were ordered to strip naked and walk into the trenches, where they were shot. Loud music was played to cover the sound of gunfire.
Operation Harvest Festival was carried out after several attempted 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 striking prisoners on the back with his whip. Muhsfeldt was reported to have smiled when those who disobeyed his orders were pushed into the fiery furnace, sometimes while still alive.
On one occasion, Muhsfeldt became furious about a group of Jewish boys from the Warsaw Ghetto. After being separated from their parents, the children were summoned for a roll call, but a commotion broke out and they dispersed. Once found, the boys were sent to the gas chambers and killed.
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 to Nyiszli for a checkup and had high blood pressure. When Nyiszli asked if it was because he had shot 80 prisoners, Muhsfeldt angrily replied that it made no difference to him whether he killed one or 80 inmates, adding 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 the girl died, she was shot in the back of her neck.
In August 1944, Muhsfeldt was sent to the front lines, where he took part in the battle for Hungary. 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 these atrocities, the Third Reich awarded Muhsfeldt the War Merit Cross, second class.
After the war, Muhsfeldt faced justice. He was captured by the Allies, and on January 22, 1947, a US military court sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was soon 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 crematoria." He could not have been more wrong.
In the end, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow found Muhsfeldt guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was 34 years old when he was executed on January 24, 1948.
His body was subsequently made available to medical students at the University of Krakow as illustrative material. There were no tears shed for Erich Muhsfeldt.