In the summer of 1944, Soviet soldiers pushed through the gates of a Nazi camp in occupied Poland. And what they found stopped them cold. Hardened Red Army veterans, men who had survived some of the bloodiest battles in human history, broke down and wept. Journalists invited to document the scene could barely hold their cameras steady.
They had stumbled onto a place where death wasn’t just a byproduct of war. It was an industry. And running that industry with a grin on his face and a whip in his hand was one man. His name was Eric Musfelt. And when justice finally caught up to him, it came in the form of a rope. Before we go any further, if you’re new here, welcome to Untold War Stories, the channel that pulls history out of the shadows and puts the truth on screen.
Hit that subscribe button right now and turn on notifications because the stories we tell here are the ones the history books don’t have the stomach to print. You don’t want to miss what’s coming next. The date was July 23rd, 1944. The Soviet 8th Guard’s army was advancing rapidly through German occupied Poland and in their path a complex of barracks, barbed wire, and concrete buildings on the outskirts of the city of Lublin.
It was the Majinik concentration camp and it was still nearly intact. Unlike later liberation scenes where the Nazis had time to destroy evidence, Majin was captured so quickly that the Germans couldn’t cover their tracks, the gas chambers were still standing. The crematoria still held ash. Warehouses were packed with shoes, clothing, and personal belongings stripped from victims.
Soviet officials immediately invited foreign journalists to walk through the grounds and see the evidence with their own eyes. The footage and photographs that emerged from Machin became the first visual proof broadcast to the world of what the Nazi regime had been doing behind closed borders. It was a turning point.
The Holocaust was no longer a rumor. It was documented. It was real. And the men responsible for it were still out there. 7 months later on January 27th 1945 Soviet forces liberated the largest extermination center in Nazi history Ashwitz in German occupied Poland. Historians estimate that at least one thrint town sets 1900 million people were deported to Awitz between 1940 and 1945.
Of those a minimum of 1 1 million were murdered. The scale of it is almost impossible to process. But behind those numbers are individual killers, men who chose every single day to participate. Eric Moosefeld was one of them. Eric Moosefeld was born on February 18th, 1913 in Nebrook, at the time part of the German Empire.
There was nothing extraordinary about his early life. He finished 8 years of elementary school in 1927 and 3 years later qualified as a baker. He married, had a son, and by all appearances was living an entirely unremarkable life. Then Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933, and Musfeld made his choice.
That same year, he joined the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force. By 1937, he had moved up to the SS. By 1939, he was a full member of the Nazi party. And when World War II began on September 1st, 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, Musfelt was ready to serve the regime. In January 1940, he was absorbed into the SS division Totenkov, the Death’s Head units.
The name alone tells you everything. These units established in 1934 by Theodora Aik, the first commonant of Dau, were a skull and crossbones insignia on their collar. They were trained with a specific philosophy. The prisoners in their care were not human beings. They were enemies of the state. They were to be destroyed. The death’s head units were the administrative backbone of the entire Nazi concentration camp system.
They ran the gas chambers, the crematoria, the killing operations. They were the machinery of the Holocaust. And Moosefelt was about to become one of its most ruthless operators. In August 1940, Moosefelt was assigned to Awitz where he served as head of prisoner commandos and block leader.
But it was his transfer in November 1941 to Maiden concentration camp that revealed the full measure of the monster he had become. At Majin, Musfell was placed in charge of the crematorium, the facility where the bodies of murdered prisoners were burned. During the winter of 1941 to 1942, camp authorities began using Cyclon B.
The same pesticide derived gas the Nazis deployed across their extermination network to kill prisoners deemed too weak to work. Two shower rooms had been converted into gas chambers. People walked in believing they would be cleaned. They never walked out. Mass using poison gas at Majin began in October 1942 and continued through the end of 1943.
Tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were killed there. Some were gassed immediately upon arrival. Others were worked until their bodies gave out, then killed. Many more died from disease, starvation, exposure, and the deliberately brutal living conditions engineered by the SS. Musfeld didn’t just oversee the crematoria.
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He participated actively and with apparent enthusiasm. Witnesses described him walking through the camp drunk, swinging a thick wooden trenchon, beating prisoners unconscious for no reason at all. One survivor recalled watching Musefeld strike a prisoner simply because the man had smiled at a passing worker.
Musfeld knocked him to the ground, then kicked him repeatedly until three teeth were gone. On another occasion, Musfeld beat a prisoner with his bare hands until the man collapsed. Then he picked up a shovel handle, forced it into the prisoner’s throat, and walked away, leaving the man to die slowly, choking in agony. He would walk through the camp and stop prisoners at random.
His greeting was always the same. I’m going to get you soon and I’m warning you. I’m going to burn you alive. One of the most haunting testimonies from Majinik involves a young Polish woman in her late 20s who discovered she was scheduled to be gassed. She fought. She screamed. She scratched Musfeld’s face and demanded to know why she had to die.
His answer was cold. You will be burnt alive. He had her hands and feet bound. strapped her to the trolley used to load corpses into the crematorium and pushed her living body into the flames. Jersey Lang, a Holocaust survivor, testified after the war that he had personally witnessed Musefeld walking toward the crematorium carrying two Jewish children in each hand.
Moments later, Lang heard gunshots from inside. To drown out the sounds of children screaming during such executions, a truck parked beside the crematorium was started. Its engine noise used as cover. In late October 1943, Jewish laborers at Modk and surrounding camps were ordered to dig long trenches. The official reason given was air defense preparation.
The prisoners knew better. On November 3rd and 4th, 1943, German SS and police units executed approximately 43,000 Jewish men, women, and children across the Majin, Ponyatala, and Trroniki camps in what the Nazis cnamed Aionfest, Operation Harvest Festival. It remains the single largest massacre of Jews carried out by German forces during the entire Holocaust.
At Minek, the prisoners were ordered to strip naked, march into the trenches they had dug and lie face down. They were shot from above. To cover the sound of gunfire and screaming, the SS played loud music over loudspeakers. Musfelt was directly involved in carrying out this operation. This wasn’t following orders reluctantly.
Survivor testimony and post-war tribunal evidence made clear that Moosefeld embraced this work. He celebrated days with high body counts. He was described by multiple witnesses as visibly pleased when large numbers of people were killed. In May 1944, Moosefeld returned to Ashvitz, specifically to the Burkinau subcamp, the largest component of the Ashwitz complex and the epicenter of Jewish extermination.
His assignment supervised the crematoria during the mass deportation and liquidation of Hungarian Jews. Between May and July 1944, over 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Ashwitz. The majority were gassed within hours of arrival. The crematoria were operating at absolute capacity. Musfelt’s unit was seen beating women to death with metal rods.
His personal signature was a whip which he used on prisoners backs. With what witnesses described as a look of satisfaction, Dr. uh Miklo Nicely, a Hungarian Jewish physician and prisoner forced to work as a pathologist at Awitz, left behind one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of Musefeld’s behavior. He described the day Moosefeld walked into the medical block after personally shooting 80 prisoners in the back of the head and asked for a checkup because he had high blood pressure.
When Neasley suggested that perhaps the stress of what he had just done was a factor, Musefelt became furious. It makes no difference to me, he said, whether I kill one prisoner or 80. If my blood pressure is high, it’s because I drink too much. Nisli also documented one of the most heartbreaking events in Awitz’s documented history.
A 16-year-old girl somehow survived the gas chamber, an almost impossible occurrence. Missly personally pleaded with Musfelt to spare her life. The request was denied. The girl was shot in the back of the neck. In August 1944, Musfelt was deployed to the front lines and participated in the fighting in Hungary.
He was wounded and in early April 1945 was transferred to Flozenberg concentration camp in Bavaria, a facility known for brutal conditions, suicides among prisoners, and regular executions. Musfelt arrived just as the camp was being evacuated before Allied forces closed in. During the death march that followed the evacuation, Musfelt was witnessed shooting prisoners who were too sick or too exhausted to keep walking.
For all of this, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the beatings, the children, the trenches, the death marches. Eric Musfeld was awarded the War Merit Cross Second Class. After Germany’s defeat in May 1945, the Allies began the systematic process of capturing and prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Musfelt was captured and in January 1947 was sentenced by a US military court to life imprisonment.
But that wasn’t the end. He was extradited to Poland where on November 24th, 1947, the Awitz trial began in KCO. The tribunal lasted one month. The evidence was overwhelming. Survivor testimony, documentation, physical evidence from the camps themselves. During his time overseeing the crematoria, Moosefeld had once told a Polish political prisoner, “If you Poles weren’t such fools, we wouldn’t have to burn you in Crematoria.
” In the end, it was a Polish court that had the last word. The Polish Supreme National Tribunal found Eric Mushfeld guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by hanging. On January 24th, 1948, Eric Musfelt was executed at Montalupich prison in Kkow. He was 34 years old. His body was donated to medical students at the University of Kkow for anatomical study. According to Dr.
Crackowed for anatomical study. Nisley Musfeld’s family did not escape the war’s consequences either. His wife was killed in an Allied air raid. His son was sent to the Russian front. There were no tears shed for Eric Musfelt. Not one. History doesn’t forget, and neither do we. Here untold war stories, we exist to make sure the names of the victims and the faces of the perpetrators are never allowed to fade into silence.
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