SS-Oberscharführer Erich Muhsfeldt was born in Neubrück, Brandenburg on 18 February 1913. He was a qualified baker in therms of his civilian profession and he was married with two children.

He joined the SA in 1933, and in 1939 he became a member of the NSDAP. In 1940 he switched to the SS, where he first completed a short training course in Sachsenhausen and was transferred to the main camp at Auschwitz in August of the same year.

He was transferred to work in extermination camp Majdanek on 15 November 1941. Where he was involved in the final mass shooting of the camp’s remaining Jewish inmates known as the Operation Harvest Festival or “Erntefest”. It was the largest single-day, single-camp massacre of the Holocaust. Where he was responsible for the disposel of the corpses. The removel had to be carried out as efficiently as possible because of hygiene and the threat of epidemics and of course for removing the evidence of mass murder.

Because the furnaces at the Majdanek concentration camp came from the Sachsenhausen camp, the camp command sent Muhsfeldt there to be trained in incineration before the Majdanek crematorium was put into operation. He spend a week learning how to operate the furnaces and he was immediately promoted on 1 September 1942 to SS Scharführer.

On 19 February 1943 Muhsfeldt was sent for further training, because the mass graves, where the corpses of people who had been shot or gassed were burned, could only be a temporary solution. This time he learned how to burn corpses in open pits at Auschwitz Birkenau. This was a technique he was to develop and perfect. The day after his short and intensive training he started his work straightaway.

After the war in the Kraków Auschwitz trial in 1946-47 Muhsfeldt explained, sometimes not without pride, the techniques he had developed in detail. Apparently he became reconciled to his work over time and in fact he developed not only expertise but also ambition. In his own estimation, he and his team cremated 33,000 corpses during his two and half years of employment at Majdanek, that is between November 1941 and May 1944.

His work was esteemed by his superiors, and on 1 June 1943 the departing Commandant promoted Muhsfeldt to SS Oberscharführer.

Muhsfeldt’s self-image and his professional ambition were based on the importance and value attached to his work. Along with the specialist knowledge he also developed proffesional-ethical principles. For Muhsfeldt the mass murder of jews was primarily a ‘logistical problem’ and solving it was a great challange for him.

Muhsfeldt caused a lot of fear among the prisoners because he was surrounded by the aura of terror caused by his actions in the crematorium. Many prisoners believed that in this crematorium he not only burned the corpses but also murdered the people. Stated Stanisław Zelent during a trial interrogation, who was a Polish political prisoner in Majdanek.

Stanisław Goljan, who was a cart driver in Majdanek, told the District Commision for the Investigation of German Crimes that Muhsfeldt was notorious for his cruelty towards the prisoners. One day in 1943 he saw the Oberscharführer beating some prisoner with his bare hands. When he fell to the ground as a result of the receiving blows, Muhsfeldt took a shovel handle and stuck it in the prisoner’s throat, and then left him lying with the handle still in his throat until the prisoner died in great torment.

Stanisław Znój, commander of the Voivodeship Citizens’ Militia Station in Lublin, said that the Oberscharführer distinguished himself with his cruelty. On many occasions he would beat prisoners encountered on the grounds of the camp, quite often without any visible cause. Znój was beaten by him too. Once, Muhsfeldt noticed that he had smiled towards a cart driver, the aforementioned Stanisław Goljan. Muhsfeldt immediatly walked up to him and hit him on the jaw, causing him to fall, whereupon he started kicking Znój over his entire body. During this attack he knocked out three of his teeth.

When the Majdanek camp was liquidated, he transferred back in May 1944 to Auschwitz, where he then served as supervising SS officer of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Crematorium II and III in Auschwitz – Birkenau.

According to some estimates, Muhsfeldt cremated another 10,000 – 12,000 corpes altogether during his time working in Auschwitz, between the end of May and the beginning of August 1944.

To go deeper into his personal characteristics and actions, Oberscharführer Muhsfeldt was described by Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz, who had came to know him already in Majdanek, what a merciless and brutal slave-driver he was. He had a steel rod with him which he used to beat the Sondercommando and other victims. But on the contrary the SS Technical sergeant and chief of the crematorium had according to them a harmless countenance and almost a frail build.

To his suprise Filip Müller, forced to work at the Sonderkommando and survivor of concentrationcamp Auschwitz, said that Muhsfeldt looked like an honest and harmless person with a graceful figure. Müller wrote in his book that the last Sonderkommando was planning to assassinate Muhsfeldt, but this was stopped on 2 August 1944 by Hauptscharführer Otto Moll who shot kapo Kaminski, initiator of the resistance group, with a bullet through the head when the nazi’s found out about these plans. This happened two months before the uprising in crematorium IV on 7 October 1944.

Marian Król, who worked as a coachman and often saw the chief of the crematorium, said that Muhsfeldt was stout with a full face and dreary look with the features of a bandit. He often saw Muhsfeldt torment prisoners and he would beat them with his whip and wheels.

Muhsfeldt was also described by Obersturmführer Anton Therner, who worked with him in Majdanek, to be a fanatical and brutal person. His out put appearance was that of a human beast. A restless and unsettle man that can’t look you in the eye. He was not firm, but changeable.

After presented the mugshot of Erich Muhsfeldt in court, camp survivor Jan Novak stated that the chief of the crematorium looked emaciated in the photo, but it beared a resemblance to the man he ones encountered. He said Muhsfeldt would get drunk and, under alcoholic excitement, was capable of various deeds, including the atrocities ascribed to him.

Józef Habrajski, who was incarcerated in Auschwitz from 30 October 1942 until the evacuation of the camp, said that he came across Muhsfeldt everytime he went to the crematoria. He remembered his face very well, especially his light-colored, catlike eyes. He said the Oberscharführer was hardly ever sober, and as an aquaintance told him, the prisoners who worked in the crematoria were forced to supply Muhsfeldt with alcohol for the reason that when he didn’t have vodka, Muhsfeldt would literally go crazy and was thus a terror not only for the prisoners, but even for the SS men assigned to the Sonderkommando.

Adam Panasiewicz, a survivor of concentration camp Majdanek, also got presented the mugshot of Muhsfeldt during the trial. He said it was difficult for him to recognize Muhsfeldt in the picture that was shown to him. He said that the Oberscharführer was slightly obesed, when he saw him in the concentration camp, but that he looked gaunt in the photograph before him. This photograph was taken after the war, so it’s safe to assume that Muhsfeldt had quite a transformation over the last period of the war and after.

Miklós Nyiszli, an inmate physician in the crematorium, describes how Muhsfeldt once asked him for an examination, complaining of heart trouble and a severe headache. Since Nyiszli had just observed Muhsfeldt killing eighty men by shooting them in the neck, he pointed out that this activity had probably caused his complaints. Muhsfeldt angrily denied this and asserted that it did not matter to him whether he shot eighty people or a thousand. He said the reason he did not feel well was because he drunk too much. Muhsfeldt was, according to a lot of witnesses, a very heavy drinker. Something that wasn’t uncommon for the Nazi’s working in the camps. Not surprising when you consider that you must be very disturbed to do this kind of work when you are sober.

Miklós Nyiszli has also recorded the following incident involving Muhsfeldt. When the inmates on the Sonderkommando were once again clearing the full gas chamber, they found a girl of about sixteen who was miraculously still breathing. They sent for Dr. Nyiszli and he was able to restore the girl to full consciousness. Meanwhile Muhsfeldt had come on the scene, and Nyiszli, who had a certain personal relationship with him, managed to have a private conversation with the Oberscharführer. He urged him to save this young girl’s life. Since she could not remain in the crematorium, perhaps it would be possible to smuggle her onto a female detail working in the vicinity. Muhsfeldt visibly mulled this proposal over, but he finally rejected it by saying that this would be possible if the girl were older and more sensible. In the case of a sixteen-year-old, there was a risk that she would talk about her experience in the gas chamber, and this would have unpleasant consequences. That is why the girl had to die. However, departing from his custom he did not shoot the girl himself but ordered al lower-ranking ss man to kill her with the customary shot in the neck.

When men of the last Sonderkommando were working on a project for Muhsfeldt, Nyiszli came up with a plan to hide a message from this Sonderkommando in the sleeping couch that Muhsfeldt had commissioned for his own home in Mannheim. All the two hundred members would signed it. They wanted the world to know about the horrible events that took place in the concentration camps. The message was written in India ink so it wouldn’t fade and was thereafter hidden in a metal tube. It was soldered so that it was watertight and airtight and was placed between the springs of the bed. It is not known whether the message was ever recovered after the war.

Nyiszli also claimed that, drunk on hot tea with rum, Muhsfeldt told him bitterly, when the war was coming to an end and the Oberscharführer was looking more and more depressed every day, that his wife had disappeared in a bombing raid and that his son had fallen on the Russian battlefield. The latter seems very unlikely because Muhsfeldt himself was only 31 years old at that time.

It is strange that some testimonials are contrasting with each other. We learnt that during his time in Majdanek Muhsfeldt was close to obesity, but during his stay in Auschwitz and thereafter, according to eyewitnesses, he had a frail build, or even looked emaciated. Also he had the face of a monster according to one and to others he looked harmless. But we can be clear on one thing and that is that Muhsfeldt was a brutally evil person without any consious.

Muhsfeldt had requested to be transferred to the Front while working at Majdanek because he was enjoying his work less and less. By mid-August 1944 his request was finally granted, and he was assigned to a combat unit of the Waffen SS in Bohemia and Moravia, where he first fought in Hungary and then finally, up to May 1945, in the Alsace and Lorraine. After being wounded he was again sent into service in a concentration camp, Flossenbürg as roll-call leader, against his will.

After the war had ended, Muhsfeldt was arrested and charged by the War Crimes Group, European Command initially. He was retried in Kraków by the Supreme National Tribunal on 22 December 1947, where he was sentenced to death for his war crimes. He was executed by hanging on 24 January 1948.

Sources: Erich Muhsfeldt, chief of the crematorium by Elissa Mailänder / People in Auschwitz by Hermann Langbein / A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli / Eyewitness Auschwitz by Filip Müller / zapisyterroru.pl, Chronicles of Terror 39-45, database of the Witold Pilecki Institute of Solidarity and Valor / Wikipedia / Youtube