January 24, 1948, Montelupes prison, Krakow, Poland. Erish Musfeld walks to the scaffold where he will be hanged. Former member of the SS, he was responsible for unimaginable atrocities. He burned people alive, threw children into the gas chambers, and commanded mass executions in concentration camps. But who was this man behind the uniform? What transformed him into one of the cruelest executioners in the Holocaust? And why was his body handed over to science after death?
The birth of a criminal. Erich Mursfelt was born on February 18, 1913, in Pacata, a city in Nubrck, which at the time was part of the vast German empire. It was a common, quiet street scene of humble workers, where nothing indicated that he would become one of the most feared names in the Nazi extermination camps. Son of a factory worker, Musfeld had an apparently normal childhood, marked by financial limitations, but also due to the typical German working-class stability of that period. He completed 8 years of primary education and at the age of 17, he learned the trade of a baker—a simple but honest profession, which symbolized a life of routine and sweat.
He married early, had a son, and for a time seemed destined for a common existence, without great feats or great tragedies. But how did this man of modest origins, a simple country baker, end up becoming one of the Nazi regime’s most sadistic executioners? The answer to this dark transformation goes through a decisive date in the history of Germany and the world.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich by President Paul von Hindenburg. At that moment, millions saw in the new leader the promise of national redemption, economic recovery, and healed pride. Musfeld was one of those millions. Still in 1933, the young baker left the ovens and dough behind and joined the SA, the Sturmabteilung or stormtroopers, a paramilitary militia that acted as the violent arm of the Nazi party in the streets.
What began as an act of political adherence and social opportunism would soon become something much deeper and darker. In 1937, Musfeld took a crucial step in his escalation within the regime: transfer to the SS, the dreaded Schutzstaffel, the ideological and repressive core of the Third Reich. From then on, in 1939, he officially became a member of the Nazi Party, sealing his commitment to the machine of violence and death that was consolidating in Germany. It is important to highlight that Musfeld wasn’t forced. At no point was he dragged or coerced. Every step of this climb was taken by his own choice, driven by ambition, by ideological belief, or perhaps for the sadistic pleasure which he would later demonstrate.
When the Second World War began on September 1st, 1939, Mosfeld finally found the ideal environment to operate. In January of 1940, he was incorporated into the Totenkopf division of the SS, the infamous units of the skull of death, created in 1934 by Theodor Eicke. These units displayed the skull and crossbones uniform, not as an adornment, but as a symbol of their role: the administration of concentration and extermination camps.
These men were indoctrinated into an absolute contempt for human life. They were trained in blind discipline, in brutal obedience, and systematic hatred. They were machines programmed to eliminate, torture, and subjugate. And Musfelt fit that mold perfectly. In August 1940, the cruelest phase of his trajectory began. He was sent to Auschwitz, which was still being structured, but which would soon become the epicenter of the European genocide.
There he assumed authority functions: head of forced labor commandos, block leader. It was a position of power, and he made a point of using it with maximum brutality. His reputation soon preceded him. Even among the Nazis, there were those who noticed his unnecessarily cruel behavior. He always carried a massive wooden club with him, used not as a tool for containment, but as an extension of his perversity. He beat prisoners until they fainted, sometimes without any reason. All it took was one look, one posture, a gesture that seemed insolent to him.
On one occasion, upon seeing a prisoner smiling at a cart driver—something so simple, so human—Mousfeld reacted with uncontrolled fury. He broke his jaw with a single punch, kicked him repeatedly, and crushed three of his teeth. No reason other than the pleasure to inflict pain. In another episode, even more cruel, he beat a prisoner until he fell to the ground, already without strength, but he didn’t stop there. He took the handle of a shovel and stuck it with force into the victim’s throat, watching coldly as the man agonized until death.
Can you imagine such cruelty? Hitting someone defenseless, killing slowly, not for revenge, not out of personal hatred, but only because he could, just because he was in control. And that was just the beginning of the journey by Eric Musfeld through the horrors of the Holocaust.
Departure to Majdanek. November 1941. Winter was already beginning to cover occupied Poland with its gray cloak when Erich Musfeld was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp, in the surroundings of Lublin. There he took on a position even more sinister than that occupied in Auschwitz. He became head of the crematorium. It was the perfect position for someone like him, a place where death was not just routine, but a spectacle, where power over life and pain became absolute.
At Majdanek, the sadistic nature of Musfeld would flourish to its fullest. He walked around the field with the arrogance of a predator looking prisoners in the eyes like someone who chooses their prey. Many reported that he would approach without warning and whisper coldly:
“Soon I’ll catch you and warn you: I’ll burn you alive.”
That wasn’t an empty threat; it was a death sentence. And Musfeld fulfilled each of his words. Among the cruelest cases is that of a young Polish woman of approximately 20 years old. Upon discovering that she would be sent to the gas chamber, she went into despair, screamed, cried, and tried to resist. In a moment of desperate courage, she scratched Musfeld’s face and, through tears, cried out:
“Why do I have to die?”
His answer was immediate, without emotion, without hesitation:
“You will be burned alive.”
The sentence was executed with unimaginable coldness. They tied the girl’s hands and feet. Then they tied her body to the metal cart used to transport corpses into the oven. She was pushed, still alive, into the flames. And while the screams mixed with the crackling of firewood and the muffled sound of the fire devouring human flesh, Musfeld watched impassively and smiled.
That wasn’t madness; it was pure sadism. It was the mind of someone who saw the suffering of others not as an obstacle, but as a source of pleasure. For Musfelt, the pain was a spectacle. Death was fun. But the worst, the most brutal, the most numerically devastating event was yet to come.
In October 1943, he was designated as one of the central figures of Action Erntefest or Operation Harvest Festival. An ironic, almost cynical name that hid the true nature of the mission: the systematic annihilation of Jews still alive in camps like Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki. For weeks, Jewish prisoners were forced to dig trenches under the pretext that they would be used for defense against air attacks.
But those who dug knew, deep down, the bitter truth: they dug their own graves. Imagine the psychological terror. Each shovel of earth thrown to the side was a step closer to death. Every meter of depth brought the end closer, and there was no escape, there was no salvation. Between the 3rd and 4th of November 1943, the killing began.
Approximately 43,000 Jews were executed in just two days, shot to death in droves inside the trenches opened by themselves. It was the biggest massacre of Jews in a single episode during the entire Holocaust. To muffle the sounds of gunshots and screams, the Nazis put speakers spread across the field, playing classical music at high volume. Death danced to the sound of waltz marches and German choirs.
And there was Musfeld, at the center of it all, overseeing the killing, ordering executions, observing blood run in open trenches in the mud. Reports have him smiling, smoking, as if witnessing a carefully staged show. There, in that scenario of absolute horror, Musfelt wasn’t just an enforcer; he was a maestro of death. And his involvement with death was still far from finished, because Majdanek would be just one more stage among so many where he would leave his mark of blood.
The peak: the return to Auschwitz. May 1944. The smoke from the crematoriums was already rising constantly in Auschwitz-Birkenau when Eric Musfeld returned to the most lethal extermination camp of the Nazi regime, but this time he wouldn’t assume a secondary function. He was assigned to directly supervise the crematoriums of Birkenau at a time when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews arrived to be murdered en masse.
Auschwitz was the beating heart of the Nazi genocidal machine. Birkenau, its extension, was the epicenter of extermination. It was there that crowded trains arrived every day, carrying men, women, and children to their death. And it was there that Musfelt was the master of fire. Can you imagine what it was like to work under the orders of someone like him?
His subordinates imitated him with fervor. They were seen beating women to death with wooden sticks, following the example of the boss. One of his favorite hobbies was to whip the backs of prisoners until the flesh split open into wounds. Witnesses say he smiled when he saw prisoners being dragged away, sometimes still alive, and thrown into incandescent ovens. But the cruelty of Mousfelt had no limits or exceptions.
One of the most revolting episodes recorded by survivors involved Jewish children brought from the Warsaw Ghetto. After being separated from their parents, they caused confusion during the counting, crying, calling for their mothers, clinging to each other, like any child would do in the face of terror. Musfelt’s response was immediate fury.
Without hesitation, he ordered all to be taken directly to the gas chambers, without registration, without pity, just the cold decision to exterminate innocent lives. Pause for a moment and think about it. They were children. Small, defenseless human beings, scared. Children who dreamed, who sang, holding their parents’ hands, scared. And for Musfelt, they deserved to die for making a mess.
One of the most valuable sources on Musfeld’s personality is the testimony by Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor forced to work in Auschwitz. Nyiszli performed autopsies for the experiments of Josef Mengele and, therefore, was in constant contact with the gear of death. Musfelt often visited the doctor. They talked about politics, about the war, like two colleagues in a common work environment—an executioner in the morning, a gentleman in the afternoon.
In one of these meetings, shortly after having executed 80 prisoners with shots to the neck, Musfelt complained of high blood pressure. Nyiszli, trying to maintain a shred of humanity, asked if this had any relation to the executions. The answer was brutal:
“It doesn’t make any difference whether I killed one or 80. If my blood pressure is high, it’s because I drank too much.”
This sentence sums it all up. For him, death was a statistic, murder a routine, human suffering irrelevant. Nyiszli also registered an extraordinary case. A 16-year-old girl, a survivor of a gas chamber, was found with signs of life. She was weak, but alive. An almost impossible miracle. The doctor took care of the young woman and tried to stabilize her, and in a rare gesture asked Musfelt to spare her life.
It was a chance for compassion, an exception, a spark of possible humanity. Musfelt listened, reflected for a moment, and replied:
“There’s no way around it. The child will have to die.”
Thirty minutes later, the girl was executed with a shot to the back of the head, a miracle transformed into execution. And he smiled. But it wasn’t a nervous smile; it wasn’t the smile of a man who hid his guilt. It was the calm smile of someone who reveled in the pain of others.
He walked between the crematoriums like a farmer among his fields, choosing, pointing, deciding who would live another day and who would be released to the flames. On days when the production of deaths decreased, he chose the weaker prisoners to be hung from hooks on the walls. Death was his instrument of control, and he wanted to keep it active, constant, like a machine that couldn’t stop.
A survivor, Jerzy Lang, witnessed one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire Holocaust. He saw Mosfeld walking calmly towards the crematorium, carrying two Jewish children, one in each hand, like someone carrying bags, as if they were things, not people. Shortly after, shots were heard. To hide the screams, the Nazis started the engine of a truck, the same one used to transport the bodies to the forest, where they were burned when the ovens couldn’t keep up with the volume.
The engine covered the screams, but did not hide the truth. For all these acts—for burning people alive, for executing innocent people, for leading the murder of hundreds of thousands of people—the Third Reich granted Eric Musfelt the War Merit Cross, Second Class. Yes, he was awarded.
In the distorted logic of the regime, he was a hero, an efficient officer, a defender of the homeland. Musfelt wore the medal with pride. For him, it represented honor, merit, and duty fulfilled. In the mind of a psychopath, genocide was just a question of competence, but the end approached.
Liberation of Majdanek, July 1944. Soviet troops advanced quickly through occupied Polish territory. And it was then that, in the midst of dust and the smell of death, the Red Army freed the Majdanek concentration camp. Different from other camps, Majdanek was not destroyed by fleeing Nazis.
It was practically intact, with sheds still standing, ovens still visible, scattered documents, piles of shoes, human hair, and remains of ash and bones not completely burned. It was living proof of the Nazi genocide, a scene that could not be denied, a horror that stood out to the eyes of the world. Fewer than 500 Jews were still alive: men, women, and children, skeletal, traumatized, survivors by chance.
Everyone had been left behind in a hurry, while the Nazis tried to cover up the traces of the crime. But Eric Musfeld was no longer there. As we already said, two months earlier, he had been transferred back to Auschwitz. Even while the Third Reich began to fall apart, Musfeld continued tirelessly in the gear of death. The weather, however, was against him. The Soviet advance accelerated, the fronts broke, and Hitler’s empire began to crumble.
In August 1944, with the pressure increasing, Musfelt was sent to the front line in violent battles that occurred on Hungarian territory. There, at the front, he temporarily swapped the crematoriums for crossfire, not out of conviction, but out of military necessity. He was injured in combat, and the regime, still faithful to its heroes, transferred him in April 1945 to the Flossenbürg camp in the south of Germany.
He was hurt, yes, but still functional. And even in that terminal phase of the war, with chaos settling in all directions, Musfelt had not changed. His cruelty persisted as if he were acting in the glory days of the Third Reich. In the last days of Flossenbürg, with the Allies increasingly closer, the Nazis organized a mass evacuation, forcing prisoners to march for kilometers towards the interior of Germany.
And as in other camps, these marches became death marches. Those who fell, those who fainted, those who could no longer continue, were summarily executed. And witnesses say, without hesitation, that Eric Musfelt was among those pulling the trigger. During the evacuation, he was seen coldly shooting dozens of sick or weakened prisoners, men who could barely stand on their feet let alone walk.
There was no judgment, there was no compassion, only shots. Just deaths. Until the last moment, with Germany collapsing, with the end of the regime knocking on the door, Musfelt kept killing as if he didn’t know how to do anything else, as if other people’s blood were the only language he knew. But he didn’t even know that he wouldn’t escape forever, because the day would soon come when Musfeld would cease giving orders and start receiving them.
The fall of Nazi Germany and the capture of Eric Musfeld. May 1945. After years of terror, the Third Reich finally collapsed under the rubble of its own lies. Adolf Hitler was dead. Berlin had been taken by the Red Army and what was left of the Nazi empire was just ruin, despair, and corpses. With the end of the war, the spotlight returned to the survivors and the executioners.
Now there was nowhere left to hide. Eric Musfelt, the man who oversaw crematoriums, executed children, and chose lives with the same disregard as choosing disposable objects, was finally captured by the Allies. After years of being the absolute lord over life and death, he was now just another prisoner of war: unarmed, handcuffed, powerless.
Imagine the shock. The one who walked with haughtiness among the furnaces of Birkenau, who ordered deaths with a gesture of the finger, now waited in silence for his next meal and orders from his jailers. From all-powerful to nothing. In January 1947, the first trial came to light. An American military court was formed to judge crimes committed in the Flossenbürg camp, especially during the final days of the war, when prisoners were shot on the death marches.
Brave witnesses stood up to tell the story they had seen: about how Mousfelt beat patients with the butt of his gun, about the cold shots in the backs of those who could no longer walk, about the empty or sometimes satisfied expression of someone who killed as easily as breathing. The sentence was clear: life imprisonment, but that was just the beginning of the reckoning.
The Polish authorities knew very well who Erich Musfelt was. They knew about his past in Auschwitz. They knew about Majdanek. They knew about the Harvest Festival, the ovens, the children, the executions, and above all, they knew that the most serious crimes had been committed on Polish soil.
Therefore, they demanded his extradition, and the Americans accepted it. Shortly after his conviction, Mosfeld was taken to Poland, where he would face a much wider and much more blunt trial. This time he wouldn’t be tried only for killing escaping prisoners. He would be tried for having been one of the pillars of the Nazi extermination machine.
The stage was set. At the Auschwitz trials, created especially to judge those responsible for the crimes committed in that camp, preparations were made to do justice. And now the man who one day smiled as he threw children into flames would have to hear, one by one, the survivors’ voices. The sentence of history was about to be written.
Trial in Poland, November 24, 1947. In a packed courtroom in Krakow, the trial began that would place the survivors and executioners of the largest extermination camp in history face to face. The process would last exactly a month. In the dock sat 41 former members of the Auschwitz team, men and women who had voluntarily served the Nazi extermination machine.
Among them, one name in particular called attention: Eris Musfeld. It was the moment that many never thought would arrive. The moment when the man who supervised crematoriums, executed children, and walked over corpses, would have to face the consequences of his choices. During the trial, the court heard devastating reports.
Survivors described in detail the scenes they witnessed, the summary executions, the beatings, the wicked smiles. The posthumous words of Miklos Nyiszli, the Hungarian Jewish doctor who had worked under orders from Mengele and had interacted with Musfeld, completed the portrait of someone cold, methodical, and incapable of remorse. But what shocked the judges the most wasn’t just the testimonies; it was the words of Musfeld himself. In the middle of the war, he had told a Polish political prisoner:
“If you Poles weren’t such idiots, we wouldn’t need to burn you in crematoriums.”
It was more than a confession. It was proof that Musfelt didn’t see victims as victims. To him, they deserved to die. The sentence sealed his destiny. No defense would be able to erase the moral content of this statement. December 22, 1947. After a month of hearings, the court gathered to announce the sentence.
Of the 41 defendants, 23 were sentenced to death by hanging, among them, Erich Musfelt. The Supreme National Tribunal of Poland found him guilty of crimes against humanity. It was the most symbolic outcome of all. The man who had sent thousands to improvised crematoriums would now face the same fate.
His last days were spent in Montelupich prison in Krakow, the same prison where the Nazis had executed dozens of Polish resistance fighters during the occupation. The place carried a symbolic weight. The justice of history expressed itself with bitter irony. The executioner was now in the place of the victims. There is no record of regret, not a word of remorse, no attempt at redemption. Even in the face of death, Eric Musfeld seemed unable to understand the depth of the crimes he committed.
January 24, 1948. It was a cold morning in Krakow. Musfeld woke up for the last time. He was only 34 years old, still young, but he had already lived long enough to destroy countless lives. Taken to the prison courtyard, he walked in silence. There is no record of last words. Maybe he tried to say something. Maybe he maintained the same arrogant silence that followed him throughout his life.
The executioner adjusted the rope around his neck. For a few seconds, the two faced each other. In that exchange of eyes was the full weight of history. The executioner was now the executed, but there was a crucial difference: his victims were innocent. He was not.
The trapdoor opened. Eric Musfelt’s body fell. It was agonizing minutes, the same minutes that he had so many times inflicted on others, without hesitation, without mercy. Shortly afterwards, he was declared dead. Justice, finally, had been done, but destiny still reserved a final chapter for him.
Following a common practice at the time, the body of Musfeld was donated to the University of Krakow to be used as teaching material in anatomy classes. The man who had destroyed thousands of human bodies ended up dissected in the name of science. The exterminator of human lives now served, even if against his will, to help save others.
It was the last insult, the last blow to the memory of a man who spent his life turning human beings into ashes and ended up as a nameless body on a dissection table. So fell Eric Musfelt, and however much he took thousands to hell, he himself did not escape facing the final judgment: the legacy.
According to the testimony left by Miklos Nyiszli, the shadow of destruction that Erish Musfelt spread eventually also swallowed his own family. His wife died in an Allied aerial bombing. His son was sent to the Eastern Front and never returned. His destination remains uncertain to this day, but it is almost certain that he died in the freezing snow of the Soviet Union, like so many other young people sacrificed for Nazi ideology.
A violence that Musfelt helped cultivate with every punch, every bullet, every corpse thrown into the fire, ended up consuming also those he was supposed to protect. In the end, there was no one left. No friends attended, no relative asked for clemency. There was no letter, no plea, no tears. He died as he lived: alone, without humanity, without repentance, without redemption.
And his history, although enclosed on the scaffold from Krakow, continues echoing like a grim reminder, a warning that evil can grow stronger, can prosper for a while, but never escapes justice. Even if it takes time, even if it seems distant, it arrives. Eric Musfeld believed he would never be punished.
He believed he could burn people alive, supervise mass murders, exterminate children, and continue to live under the Reich’s protection, honored with medals, respected by his superiors. He was wrong. Today, more than 75 years later, the name Eric Musfeld is not remembered with reverence; he is remembered with disgust. He is studied as a symbol of systematic cruelty, of the banality of evil, of cowardice disguised as authority.
He wanted to be feared, wanted to be admired within the Nazi structure, but he became an example of how not to be human. Meanwhile, the victims he tried to erase from history—men, women, children—remain alive in the collective memory. They are remembered as heroes, as martyrs, as human beings who, even in absolute terror, maintained their dignity, their faith, their love for each other.
Their names are engraved on memorials. Their faces are preserved in photos, museums, books, and hearts. Their stories are told to educate, to alert, to ensure that it never happens again. The executioner was forgotten, the victims were immortalized. And this is the true justice.
