Execution of Erich Muhsfeldt - Bestial NAZI Officer Who BURNED Inmates ALIVE At Majdanek & Auschwitz

The night of 22-23 July 1944. Soldiers of the Red  Army came upon Majdanek - the first major Nazi camp to be liberated located in German-occupied  Poland. This event becomes one of the most significant moments in the history of World War  II and the Holocaust as only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of  Nazi crimes is finally exposed to the world. Soviet officials invite journalists to inspect the  camp and to see for themselves the evidence of the horrors that ha

ve occurred there. As Allied troops  move across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encounter concentration camps, mass  graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. Among them is Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination  centers located in German occupied Poland, which the Soviet forces liberate on the 27th of January  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. One o

f the perpetrators responsible  for these atrocities is Erich Musfeldt. Erich Muhsfeldt was born on the  18th of February 1913 in Neubrück then part of the German Empire. In 1927, he  completed 8 classes of elementary school, and three years later he gained the profession  of baker. Muhsfeldt was married and had 1 son. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed  Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg and the same year Muhsfeldt joined  the SA. In 1937 he switched to the SS an

d in 1939 he became a member of the Nazi Party. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In January 1940 Muhsfeldt became a member of the SS Division Totenkopf, or Death's Head Units,  which was an elite division of the Waffen-SS. Waffen SS was the military branch of the SS. The SS Death's Head Units named for the skull-and-cross-bones symbol worn on the right  collar of their uniforms was established in 1934 by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of  Dach

au and later inspector of concentration camps. It was an independent unit within  the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps  throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe. The units were trained to conduct themselves  with strict discipline and cruelty, and to view 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 th

e war as the Holocaust  which was 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 block leader. In November 1941, he was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp where he served as  the head of a crematorium and a commando unit that burned the bodies of murdered prisoners. It was in the winter of 1941-1942, 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 were shower rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon  B gas. At least one of these two 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 livin

g 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. Many, however, 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 stole

n from the Jews before their deaths in the  Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II 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. However, the inmates guessed their true purpose. Approximately 43,000 Jews  were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps between 3–4 November  1943. The Jewish prisoners were

ordered to strip naked and walk into the previously dug trenches  and once there 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 the 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 trash inmates unconscious for no reason. Once he noticed that a prisoner had smiled at a  waggoner. 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 some prisoner with his ha

nds. When this  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, and 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 20’s  learnt 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 burnt alive". Muhsfeldt then had her hands and feet bound and she was tied  to the trolley that loaded corpses into the crematorium. The young woman was then  pushed into the flames of 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 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 24 July  1944, it was virtually intact and less than 500 Jewish prisoners remai

ned alive. Soviet  officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and evidence of the horrors that had  occurred there. Between 80,000 – 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 the more than 40 camps  and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz comple

x, served as a center for the extermination of Jews. In the crematorium, his commandos were seen beating some women to death with rods. One of his specialties was hitting the back of the prisoners with his whip. Musfeldt 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, Musfeldt 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. Miklós Nyiszli, Hungarian Jewish prisoner and  doctor at Auschwitz said that once after Musfeldt shot 80 prisoners in the back of the head, he came  to him for a check-up and had high blood pressure. When Nyiszli asked him if it was because had had  shot 80 prisoners, Musfeldt angrily replied that it mad

e no difference to him if he killed 1 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 and to ensure that the  girl died, she was shot in the back of her 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 pr

isoners who were too weak or too sick to walk. For all these atrocities, Muhsfeldt was awarded 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 24 November 1947 and lasted one month. During the war, Musfeldt

told one Polish political prisoner. “If you, Poles, weren’t  such fools like you are, we wouldn’t have to burn you in crematoria.” In the end, however, it  was the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow that found Musfeldt guilty of crimes against  humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. When Erich Muhsfeldt was executed at Montelupich  Prison in Krakow on 24 January 1948, he was 34 years old. His body was subsequently  made available to medical students at the University of Krakow

as illustrative material. ccording to the previously mentioned holocaust survivor Miklós Nyiszli, Muhsfeldt's family did  not fare any better. His wife was killed in an air raid, and his son sent to the Russian front. There were no tears shed for Erich Muhsfeldt. thanks for watching the World History  Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notific ification icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank  you and we'll see you next time on the channel