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Muselmann (German pluralMuselmänner) was a term used amongst prisoners of GermanNazi concentration camps during theHolocaust ofWorld War II to refer to those suffering from a combination ofstarvation (known also as "hunger disease") and exhaustion, as well as those who were resigned to their impending death.[1][2] The Muselmann prisoners exhibited severeemaciation and physical weakness, anapathetic listlessness regarding their own fate, and unresponsiveness to their surroundings owing to their barbaric treatment.[3]
Some scholars argue that the term possibly comes from the Muselmanns' inability to stand for any time due to the loss of leg muscle, thus leading them to spend much of their time in aprone position.[4] Muselmann also literally means "aMuslim" inYiddish and a number of other languages (albeit with spelling differences), and ultimately derives from the Old Turkish word for Muslim,مسلمان (müsliman).
"Muselmann" seemingly derives from theGerman:Muselman, a historical term for "Muslim" (literally'mussulman') which is now consideredderogatory. If this derivation is correct, "Muselmann" would literally mean "Muslim man" (Muselman +Mann); but how this term later came to be used to denote starving concentration camp prisoners is uncertain. Some scholars argue that the term may derive from the Muselmann's inability to stand due to a combination of exhaustion andstarvation-induced muscular atrophy in their legs, thus forcing them to spend much of their time in aprone position, which may have evoked the image of the Muslim practice ofprostration during prayer,[4] calledSujud.
Viktor Frankl, who survived internment in theAuschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, wrote in his memoirs that the term was first used by camp's prisoners to refer to theKapos –prisoners assigned to supervise forced labor by theSS guards− as to them, the term"Muslim" carried a connotation ofbarbarism.[5] On the other hand,Eugen Kogon, who survived internment inBuchenwald, wrote that the term originated from Nazi staff-members, who ascribed the Muselmann's apparent apathy to their circumstances (likely the result of weakness and acute hunger) to Islamicfatalism.[6]
Other theories as to the term's origins completely eschew any intimate connection to the notions of Islam, as even by the outbreak of World War II, the termMuselman was considered archaic, and was rarely used to refer to Muslims.Marie Jalowicz-Simon, aphilologist who also survived Nazi persecution, argued that by the 1940s,Muselmann had become a colloquial term for the elderly or infirm,[7] which allowed it to be co-opted into the Nazi vocabulary.
The American psychologistDavid P. Boder assisted in identifying the termmusselman when in 1946 he conducted interviews with camp survivors in Europe. He asked them to describe, spell and pronounce the word for camp inmates so emaciated that they had lost the will to live.[8][9]
Primo Levi tried to explain the term (he also usesMusselman) in a footnote ofIf This Is a Man (the commonly found English translation is titledSurvival in Auschwitz), his autobiographical account of his time inAuschwitz:[1]
This word 'Muselmann', I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.
— Primo Levi,If This Is a Man, chapter "The Drowned and the Saved".
Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, theMuselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand ...
— Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
Thepsychologist and Auschwitz survivorViktor Frankl, in his bookMan's Search for Meaning, provides the example of a prisoner who decides to use up his last cigarettes (used as currency in the concentration camps) in the evening because he is convinced he won't survive theAppell (roll call assembly) the next morning; his fellow captives derided him as aMuselmann. Frankl compares this to the dehumanized behavior and attitudes of thekapos.[10]
Italian philosopherGiorgio Agamben defined his key examples of 'bare life', the Muselmann and the patient in an overcoma, in relation to their passivity and inertia. The Muselmann was for him "a being from whom humiliation, horror and fear had so taken away all consciousness and personality as to make him absolutely apathetic", "[m]ute and absolutely alone ... without memory and without grief."[11]
The testimonial of Polish witnessAdolf Gawalewicz,Refleksje z poczekalni do gazu: ze wspomnień muzułmana ("Reflections in the Gas Chamber's Waiting Room: From the Memoirs of a Muselmann"), published in 1968, incorporates the term in the title of the work.[12]
Canadian Jewish author Eli Pfefferkorn published a novel in 2011 with the titleThe Muselmann at the Water Cooler.[13]
The narrator of British authorMichael Moorcock'sPyat Quartet is a concentration camp survivor who frequently states "I will not become a musselman" when recalling past traumas. The narrative intentionally plays on the etymology of the term, as the titularPyat is a subject focus with theOttoman conquest of Constantinople.
The wordMusselman is frequently used in a demeaning manner.[citation needed] For example, in his bookMan's Search for Meaning author and Holocaust survivorViktor Frankl berates the attitudes of those who fit his definition of the wordMusselman by associating the word with those who are unable to psychologically endure the brutal tactics utilized by the Nazis.[10]
The term spread from Auschwitz-Birkenau to other concentration camps. Its equivalent in theMajdanek concentration camp wasGamel (derived from Germangammeln, colloquial for "rotting") and in theStutthof concentration campKrypel (derived from GermanKrüppel, "cripple"). When prisoners reached this emaciated condition, they were selected by camp doctors and murdered by gas, bullets or various other methods.[citation needed]
In the SovietGulags, the termdokhodyaga (Russian доходяга, "goner") was used for someone in a similar situation.[citation needed]
Those prisoners consideredMuselmänner and thus unable to work were also very likely to be labelled "excess ballast" inside the concentration camps.[14] In spring 1941Heinrich Himmler expressed his desire to relieve concentration camps of sick prisoners and those no longer able to work.[15]Aktion T4, a "euthanasia" programme formentally ill,disabled and other inmates of hospitals and nursing homes who were deemed unworthy of life, was extended to include the weakest concentration-camp prisoners.[16][17] Himmler, together withPhilipp Bouhler, transferred technology and techniques used in the Aktion T4 programme to the concentration camps, and later toEinsatzgruppen anddeath camps.[18][19]
The first concentration-camp victims of this program were gassed bycarbon monoxide poisoning and the first knownSelektion took place in April 1941 atSachsenhausen concentration camp. By the summer of 1941 at least 400 prisoners from Sachsenhausen had been "retired". The scheme operated under theConcentration Camps Inspector and theReichsführer-SS under the name "Sonderbehandlung 14f13".[20] The combination of numbers and letters derived from theSS record-keeping system and consists of the number "14" for the Concentration Camps Inspector, the letter "f" for the German word for "deaths" (Todesfälle), and the number "13" for the cause of death, in this case "special treatment", a bureaucratic euphemism for gassing.[21]