Filip Mueller

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Filip Müller (born January 3, 1922 in Sereď , Czechoslovakia ; † November 9, 2013 in Mannheim ) was a Slovak survivor of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , who witnessed the mass extermination in the crematoria and gas chambers of the camp and then later in his Has published the book "Special Treatment".

Life

Filip Müller was in mid-April 1942 at the age of twenty with the fifth RSHA transport and the first transport of Jewish men from Slovakia into the concentration camp Auschwitz deported , where he received the "prisoner number 29236".

As part of the Jewish Sonderkommando , he witnessed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other inmates during his work, which mainly consisted of removing the corpses and maintaining the extermination facilities. After a month he was able to escape the crematorium work in the main camp , but was recognized in Auschwitz-Birkenau and reassigned to the special command for a total of around twenty months.

During his incarceration, after realizing what he was doing, he planned his suicide, which was to consist of following a group of his compatriots into the gas chamber. He was then stopped by a woman from this group who believed that his death would not save anyone. His task, however, is to report what happened in the camp to posterity.

He worked in the Sonderkommando until January 1945 . After the "evacuation" of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was brought to the Mauthausen concentration camp and liberated in the Gunskirchen satellite camp in May 1945 .

After the end of the war

Until 1953 he was unable to work and stayed mainly in sanatoriums, until 1969 he lived in Slovakia and then emigrated to Germany .

In 1964 he testified as an eyewitness in Frankfurt am Main during the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial; Great weight was attached to his report, which was one of the reasons for making his story available to the public.

Filip Müller's survivor memoir “Special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz ”were published at the beginning of July 1979 by the Munich publishing house Steinhausen, after 15 years of working on his work and another 7 years on the German version, 34 years after his liberation. In April 1980 it was finally published by Bertelsmann Verlag with a total circulation of around 100,000 copies and as a "unique document" and as "testimony of the only man who saw the Jewish people die and survived to report what he saw" marketed. In 1979 a British and an American edition appeared. The author did not agree to an American new edition in 1999 under the title "Eyewitness Auschwitz". Filip Müller did not want a new German edition either.

He himself said about his motivation to write such a work: After the Second World War, each of the survivors wanted to be a know-it-all and the mysterious Sonderkommando excited them so much that they fantasized a lot. (...) My job was to show what was going on between the walls and how it was possible to kill almost 30,000 people within 24 hours. It was my job to reveal this secret.

In Claude Lanzmann's highly acclaimed documentary Shoah , Müller reports in detail and impressively on his experiences in Auschwitz. This made him known because of the fame of the film.

Filip Müller was the only survivor of the Sonderkommando who lived in Germany. He lived in Mannheim for several decades, where he also died in 2013.

See also

literature

  • Filip Müller: Special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz , Munich 1979.
  • Filip Müller: Auschwitz Inferno. The testimony of a Sonderkommando , London 1979
  • Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three years in the gas chambers at Auschwitz , New Yorker 1979
  • Filip Müller: Eyewitness Auschwitz , Chicago 1999
  • Filip Müller: Trois ans dans une chambre a gaz , Paris 1980
  • Filip Müller: Tres años en las cámaras de gas. Confluencias, Madrid 2016 [Unauthorized edition; Spanish]. ISBN 978-8494585333 .
  • Filip Müller: special treatment - neboli zvláštní zacházení. Tři roky v osvětimských krematoriích a plynových komorách. Rybka, Praha 2018 [Czech]. ISBN 978-80-87950-50-0 .
  • Filip Müller: Special treatment alebo zvláštne zaobchádzanie. Tri roky v osvienčimských krematóriách a plynových komorách. Marencin, Bratislava 2019 [Slovak]. ISBN 978-80-569-0230-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dieter Schlesak: Capesius, der Auschwitzapotheker, Dietz, 2006
  2. ↑ Bulletin 2014 (34th year) of the Auschwitz camp community - Friends of Auschwitz, p. 39.
  3. ^ Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies: G. Greif: The poorest among the poor. Retrieved February 3, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Müller, Filip
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovak survivor of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Sereď , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2013
Place of death Mannheim