War Starvation Disease and its aftermath (1 Viewer)

[wiggins]

I've been researching Starvation Disease and the Muselmaenner.

The following articles are on this subject.

Starvation Disease is the bodies changes to lack of food. From hunger, to severe hunger, to leathergy and finally to a sweet contentment and lack of hunger or even any cares at all as the line between life and death is reached. This last stage was called the Muselman, those so debiliated by starvation that even pain ceased to bother them anymore. They had their food stolen, they were beaten because they could no longer work or their brains so slowed by starvation that they did not understand what was being said to them. Shunned by all they died on parade or were sent to the ovens during the next selection. Even after liberation it was almost impossible to save them, despite NG feeds, IV fluids etc. They died in their thousands.

There is a feeling in the following literature that the Muselmann was the final product of the camps. The fear of becoming one was what made other inmates avoid looking at them.

They were always cold and liked to rub themselves on things. When two of them got together they would stand back to back rubbing against each other, the so called 'dance of the muselmenen'. There is something so macarbe about this phenomonon that I am still trying to comprehend. Allied POW's of the Japanese reached similar levels of starvation but they had self organised based on the military units they were and had camp hospitals where extermination was not a goal and so we do not seem to get a Japanese POW Muselmann phenomenon.

World War II: The Holocaust

Part 18 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II

www.theatlantic.com

Wollheim Memorial

How one man's photographic memory helped preserve the music of the Nazi camps

Aleksander Kulisiewicz survived Sachsenhausen and went on to create a jaw-dropping archive of music from the Nazi camps.

forward.com

Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

collections.ushmm.org

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340242122_The_phenomenon_of_man_between_life_and_death_in_the_space_of_the_Nazi_concentration_camp

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=bmrcl

 

[Chief Queef]

Looks like this term has been around for millenia yet the word was hijacked by the jews to elevate thier "suffering"...

 

[The anarchist]

Fantastic post @wiggins 👍 very interesting, thanks😉

 

[madnessmel]

Awesome post!!

 

[wiggins]

"Over 10 years of their existence, millions of people passed through the Nazi
concentration camps, most of whom died. Inhuman torments, violence, hard la-
bor, the daily death of prisoners led to the fact that the camps imprisoners came to
a biological and psychophysical state, an analogue of which is diffi cult to fi nd.
The apotheosis of the prisoner’s stay in the Nazi concentration camp was the con-
dition described in the camp jargon by the term “Muslim” (мuselmänn). “I saw
strange creatures that at first even puzzled me a little, – as one of the prisoners testi-
fi ed, – at a distance, they all looked like ancient elders: a protruding nose, a head
pulled in the shoulders, a dirty striped robe hanging on the sharp shoulders, like on
a hanger; even on the hottest summer days they looked like frozen winter crows.


In each of their unsure, lunatic step, it was as if they asked: was it really
worth this incredible effort? These walking question marks – even if you look at
the figure, even at the volume (you can say they didn’t have thickness at all), I can’t
describe them differently – were called ‘Muslims’ in the camp, as I soon externally
learned [1], the Muslim was a man who had reached an extreme degree of exhaus-
tion, that is, weighed 35–40 kg, was emaciated into a skeleton and moved with dif-
fi culty. He had erased sex and age limits and internally he was in a state of almost
complete fading of the psyche. Normal interest in the environment disappeared in
him more and more, so that in the end interest in his own destiny went out. In this
condition, a Muslim imperceptibly died – he simply fell asleep and did not wake
up” [2. Pp. 64–65]."

"Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, 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

 

[wiggins]

I note that the German's would not allow the dead Muselmennen to be called 'corpses' but only 'figuren', which is the noun for inanimate objects like dolls.

There was a whole psychology around not seeing the Muselmennen as human which all participated in.

Awesome post!!

Why thank you. I find ww2 a fascinating area to study and the death camps, well, the world has never seen anything like them.

I know that people say the British invented them in South Africa during the Boer war but the whole concept was different and deaths there were due to infectious disease not due to design.

I've read some interesting books on the camps by some of the survivors. What they went through was just amazing. Death or life depended on so many things, chance, motivation to live, energy to 'organise' food, the ability to get into work crews that worked in doors or that gave them access to food out side the camps etc.

If this area is of interest I'll generate a reading list of books I have. Primo Levi's 'Is This A Man' is one of the better reads. He was an Italian industrial chemist who was sent to Auscwitz in 1944. He was sick with typhus in the camp 'hospital' (for what its worth... not much care given there) and missed the forced march back to Germany. The Russian's liberated the camp a few days later. He then had to travel all around Europe to get home.

I think the saddest story of all is the fate of the Russian prisoners. Treated as badly as the Jews, those who survived upon liberation were all repatriated to Russia where they were tried as traitors who had surrended and sent to the gulags.

Anyway, wishing you well.

Wiggins.