On this day 15th November 1941, Erich Muhsfeldt was transferred from Auschwitz Concentration Camp to Majdanek Concentration Camp as the chief of the crematorium.

On this day 15th November 1941, Erich Muhsfeldt was transferred from Auschwitz Concentration Camp to Majdanek Concentration Camp as the chief of the crematorium.

Erich Muhsfeldt (also spelt Muβfeldt), was the chief of the crematoria at Majdanek, he spent time at Auschwitz honing his skills.

His main task was the disposal of dead bodies and overtime he became a specialist.

In November 1943 his expertise was needed again, this time with particular urgency.

The day after the massacre of 3 November 1943 (in Operation Harvest Festival), on the orders of the departing Commandant Florstedt and his successor, Weiss, Muhsfeldt's squad set about cremating 18,000 corpses behind the crematorium, in the pits.

Here, the chief of the crematorium used the cremation technique he had learned in Auschwitz, and which he explained in detail at an interrogation:

On the 4th I collected wood and planks and on 5 November 1943 I began cremating the corpses.

Because the part of the ditch where the victims entered did not have corpses in it, I filled it with some soil so that the ditch was a bit flatter and had a better draught.

Then I built a kind of grill out of wood on the ground.The prisoners placed the corpses from the ditches in layers on top.

Once there was a stack of corpses it was covered in methanol and set alight.

The next corpses were then constantly piled up in the ditch in the places where corpses had been taken away for cremation.

Once the ash had cooled after the cremation it was brought to the top by prisoners in my squad, where it was ground with a special petrol-powered mill and turned into bone meal.

The bone meal was put into paper sacks and taken by car to SS land near the camp

Muhsfeldt, a committed mass murderer, had an unusual relationship with renowned Jewish-Hungarian pathologist Miklas Nyiszli, who was forced to carry out autopsies on behalf of Josef Mengele.

Nyiszli survived the war and later gave evidence about what happened at Auschwitz. Nyiszli described one incident when Muhsfeldt came to him for a routine check-up, after shooting 80 prisoners in the back of the head prior to their cremation.

Nyiszli commented that Muhsfeldt’s blood pressure was high, and inquired as to whether this could be related to the recent increase in “traffic”, as the mass murder of newly arrived victims was euphemistically called.

Muhsfeldt replied angrily that it made no difference to him, whether he shot one person or eighty.

If his blood pressure was too high, it was because he drank too much he said.