Observations on hunger disease in Nazi German concentration camps

Severe malnourishment is a fairly common condition in medicine because it is part of many somatic and mental diseases. Since the dawn of history, mankind has periodically been experiencing famine, especially due to crop failure. Despite our great technological progress, the 20th century has not been free of deaths of starvation on a terrifying, massive scale affecting economically underdeveloped countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization set up by the United Nations has calculated that two-thirds of the world’s population is suffering from food shortage. Over half of the malnourished are actually starving; for example, in India the average daily intake of food amounts to 1,590 calories per person. In an age of great progress, we can observe extremes and contrasts: men on the moon but also terribly emaciated Biafran children.¹

The problem of starvation has often been addressed in scientific studies. It has also been a motif in various literary works. Here I would like to refer to two monographs: Geografia da fome: o dilema brasileiro: pão ou aço (first published in 1946; first English edition: The Geography of Hunger, Little, Brown, 1952) by Josué de Castro,² and Must Men Starve? The Malthusian Controversy, by Jacob Oser.³

There are various causes of hunger disease. Sometimes, it is due to an internal disease for which we have no cure. At other times, most often on an epidemic scale, hunger disease results from shortages of food in relation to rising needs due to uncontrolled, excessive population growth, accompanied by simultaneous failure to use the reserves which could increase the world’s food production of products more than threefold. In addition to wars and economic disturbances, hatred is another factor leading to hunger disease: some peoples have made others starve to death in fully premeditated acts of aggression, motivated by a criminal ideology of the superiority of their race, religion or nationality, and usurping the right to annihilate all who are different from them in terms of class or ideology.

As we know, the last War turned into a vast extermination camp for the nations of occupied Europe, in line with the implementation of the murderous plans of Nazi Germany to gradually eliminate all of the peoples it had conquered. Following Hitler’s orders, special forms of destruction, in particular starvation, were to be applied to prisoners of war as well as to all prisoners in Nazi German concentration camps. The primary aim of the concentration camp policy was to isolate and get rid of all opponents of Nazism, whether on racial, ideological, political or national grounds. It was assumed that on average concentration camp prisoners should not survive for longer than a hundred days. This was to be achieved by forcing them to do extremely heavy labor and applying various kinds of repression and harassment, keeping them in inhuman living conditions and on a caloric deficit, with practically no protein in their food.

In these conditions, with an intake of less than 1,000 calories a day, the average prisoner was inevitably undernourished; and if he did not receive help or could not “organize”⁴ his life in the camp, he was inevitably doomed to starvation, from which death was practically the only effective relief.

 There have been numerous studies on hunger disease, which affects the entire human body. Researchers have studied and described the different metabolic changes that emerge in particular organs. They have found that starvation first uses up the glycogen stored in the liver and other organs, while the body’s protein is consumed last; its resting metabolic rate⁵ falls; mucosal atrophy occurs; and these conditions are accompanied by hypothyroid edema, etc. Moreover, scientists have examined human behavior in conditions of extreme hunger, trying to explain or justify some of the symptoms of moral degradation observed in this state. So hunger disease seems to have been described thoroughly and comprehensively.

Obviously, the physician’s view of disease is different from the patient’s view. The doctor’s diagnosis is objective, supported by documentary evidence and observation of the patient’s symptoms. Doctors have a profound medical knowledge and are able to form their opinions on the basis of logical scientific principles. However, their assessments usually lack the abundant store of personal experience and observation which only a patient can give. In ordinary medical procedures, we doctors take a critical approach to patients’ complaints, admitting only those that confirm our diagnostic propositions or treatment procedures. We follow the reasoning of a good judge, who compares the charges brought against the defendant with the arguments for the defense in order to issue a fair verdict.

 However, in medical procedures doctors rely more on specific physical and laboratory tests rather than on a patient’s medical history. Moreover, it is difficult for doctors to obtain an objective evaluation of the patient’s subjective experiences. After all, they have no “pain meter”⁶ to measure pain the way they do with body temperature, pulse or blood pressure. How can we objectively assess sadness or happiness? We can diagnose a heart attack, but in most cases, we are not able to see the tempestuous experiences it causes in the patient. Therefore, our picture of this disease is not complete, so only seldom is our treatment fully satisfactory.

 For these reasons, it is always worth building up our knowledge of every disease from the point of view of introspection, and this is what we should be doing, yet it can only be done by those who have gone through the disease. This condition may easily be satisfied for starvation sickness. Practically every concentration camp survivor can add their own experiences and observations to the picture of hunger disease. In particular, prisoner doctors who treated inmates in the camp hospitals and those who became doctors after liberation have a special right and authority to share their introspective and retrospective observations.

The list of publications on hunger disease related to Nazi German oppression would require a large brochure. Numerous reports, diaries and studies on the War include notes and observations about the forms of starvation from which prisoners suffered in camps, prisons and ghettos in occupied Poland. The key publications include “Głód w Oświęcimiu” by Władysław Fejkel (in the collective volume Wspomnienia więźniów obozu oświęcimskiego, Państwowe Muzeum w Oświęcimiu, 1968), and “Głód i czas przeżycia w obozie oświęcimskim” by Hans Münch (Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1967, no. 1, pp. 79-88).⁷ Readers can find many articles on hunger disease in concentration camps as well as various papers with remarks on this topic in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim.⁸

Nevertheless, these observations still do not make up a closed list, and each new contribution, even if it reproduces views that were made already, can turn out to be valuable. If some old observations are confirmed in a new perspective, it shows they were right. If they bring something new, they contribute to our knowledge of hunger disease. For we should know as much as possible about hunger disease.

Our young doctors are lucky not to know very much about hunger as a disease entity, because they have never encountered it on an epidemic scale. Sadly though, they know very little about hunger disease as such since a knowledge of this disease would make them aware of those terrible times when man wreaked havoc on man—the cruelest tragedies, untold and unseen tortures on a mass scale, the most violent deaths. We will never be able to exhaust the subject.

 Motivated by these considerations, I would like to present my observations on hunger disease, assessing it retrospectively from the point of view of my fellow prisoners who suffered from it, and introspectively from my own experiences as a Muselmann⁹ who was only days away from death. These observations are very subjective and not supported by any clinical data. It was impossible to conduct systematic scientific research in these dreadful conditions and as an observer of them. Thus, my division of the phases of starvation, based on my observations of prisoners’ behavior, is merely a proposal. Presumably, the observations I present are specific to the most extreme conditions prevailing in concentration camps and should not be projected on other types of hunger disease.

The course of hunger disease can be divided into four stages: a) Phase One, the initial phase, b) Phase Two, prostration, c) Phase Three, stagnation (the beginning of the Muselmann condition), and d) Phase Four, the ultimate phase, the terminal Muselmann condition.

Phrase One: the initial phase. The first period of malnutrition started when the prisoner was arrested. The mental stress of his isolation and the uncertainty of what lay ahead took his appetite away and forced him to concentrate mentally and physically on the situation he was in. This period passed fairly quickly if the investigation against him did not take long and ended in a sentence. In the next period, having thrown off the heavy ballast of uncertainty, anticipation, anxiety and fear, the prisoner was able to fully discern his situation and prospects, and his instincts told him to fight for survival, to save his life. He wanted to survive, and wanting to live came to be integrally associated with the want of nourishment, hunger and thirst due to a low calorie intake. At this time, prisoners’ vitality and physical strength were still good enough to let them make various efforts to obtain extra food and not to take food which had gone bad but was easier to get and would only be eaten by Muselmänner.

At this time, inmates’ interest focused on food. They had long conversations on food, but not about the food they got in the camp or prison, but the food which they had before and would again have after liberation. So there were long talks and disputes which kind of food was better and tastier: a fried beefsteak with onions, or a pork chop with cabbage. There were discussions on the details of how to prepare each dish, so that at least in their dreams they could again enjoy a real culinary feast and experience what it feels like to have a full stomach—a feeling they had quite forgotten. These conversations were a kind of illusory surrogate for food. However, it made their feeling of hunger even worse. Their culinary visions were a psychogenic stimulus which made the stomach secrete more gastric juices, but gave them no opportunity to satisfy their hunger.

 These medical conditions were accompanied by various activities to organize extra food rations. The extent to which such efforts were in line with ethics varied depending on the prisoner’s morality. Extreme conditions exacerbated the struggle for survival. In the endeavor to stay alive, prisoners soon learned that only someone who had more energy, was smarter, or sometimes even immoral, had a better chance of survival. And already at this first stage of starvation disease, you could tell the difference between different categories of prisoners: you could tell the honest ones from the dishonest ones, and in each category, you could distinguish between the smart ones and the timid ones. The honest ones tried to get extra food, for example, by getting a job in a better commando, or a better place in the marching column, i.e. closer to the curb because there they were more likely to find cigarette butts, and the tobacco from them was a valuable commodity which could be bartered for food. The dishonest ones tried to obtain food using such methods, but also by stealing food from their fellow prisoners when they were not watching or asleep, or if they had carelessly put their food reserves within easy reach of a crafty neighbor.

 The situation made for a preemptive response generally observed already at this stage. Prisoners would eat everything they got or organized all in one go, even if they did not feel very hungry. This practice was supposed to be a kind of defense measure against an uncertain future. The longer this period went on for, the deeper prisoners’ inclination to give the cold shoulder to altruistic feelings: sharing your extra food with fellow prisoners meant that you would go hungry. Slowly, they started to begrudge their neighbor’s slice of bread; they envied those who received food parcels from their relatives or simply worked in better commandos. As malnutrition became more aggravated, a veil of selfishness slowly began to settle over people’s sense of empathy; egoism told prisoners that they should not worry for others, since that would mean their own downfall. The fundamental rule was that you should think about yourself first, and only then about others. Prisoners imperceptibly stopped cultivating friendship with other inmates; they experienced personality crises and broke down; they faced a dilemma whether to be virtuous and merciful, which would mean an empty stomach and malnutrition, or go for selfishness and fill their own belly.

Nevertheless, at this stage moral degradation had not yet become very serious; people were not yet debasing themselves to get a bowl of food, and there were no attempts to beg or elicit sympathy from Nazi butchers. Prisoners still had enough physical strength left, despite it slowly ebbing away, to keep their self-respect, to maintain the posture of a man who may be oppressed but not broken by starvation.

Phase Two, prostration. There was no strict dividing line between the phases. The second phase of hunger disease was connected with a large weight loss, and hence a depletion of physical strength as well. The idle conversations about culinary delicacies died down. Prisoners began to take an interest in camp food; they dreamt of getting a piece of meat in their soup, more potatoes, more swede. If they could, they tried to diversify their poor menu, for example, by toasting their bread on the stove. No matter how the food was shared out among prisoners, there were always squabbles and different proposals how to distribute the food rations. Bread and potatoes were allocated according to special rituals to achieve the fairest possible distribution. But even this procedure could not eliminate quarrels, literally over every crumb of bread or piece of potato. Fighting for extra food became fiercer and fiercer. But prudence still prevailed in the decision-making. Most (though not all) prisoners still turned down food that had gone bad or looked likely to cause food poisoning. But they no longer discarded dry grains, bread that was starting to go moldy, or a withered swede.

 They were overwhelmed by a craving to feel their belly was full, even for a while. This led to various behaviors, more or less reasonable, more or less fair. Some prisoners ate anything that could satiate their stomach, for instance, ersatz coffee grounds, others swapped a slice of bread or a piece of margarine for a bowl of watery soup, although the soup was undoubtedly less calorific, but they got a bigger volume of food inside them. After having two plates of swede soup, they felt full for a while. But at the same time, they missed out on valuable fat or carbohydrates. Some inmates scavenged the SS kitchen garbage for bones that had already been picked clean and tried to suck them to extract microscopic pieces of meat. When they finally discarded the bones, other hungry prisoners came up to repeat the procedure. And so, one bone was sometimes sucked by a dozen or so prisoners, giving them nothing but an illusion of food.

A brutal struggle for food started among dishonest prisoners who still had some strength left. This fighting was no longer pilfering but outright robbery. It started with attacks on individual prisoners carrying their food ration and grabbing it from them. Sometimes it turned into an organized assault on a group of prisoners bringing their block’s midday meal from the kitchen. In its most horrific form, there were incidents of necrophagy: extremely hungry inmates cut out the liver and spleen from the corpses of fellow prisoners and consumed them raw.

 Along with the loss of vitality and physical strength, there was a loss of the so-called moral virtues: honesty, pity, compassion, humanitarianism, the sense of friendship. People began to turn into wolves, distrustfully watching the scraps of food being dished out. The more predatory and bolder inmates wrested what was not theirs from others. Everyone tried to keep what they had gained for themselves. Those who got a food parcel tried to find a nook where they hurriedly gobbled up whatever they had received. They ate it in a hurry so that other prisoners would not ask them to share the leftovers. Like a dog in the manger, growling over a bone if anyone tried to take it from him, the lucky inmate defended his prize, in the sure knowledge that his treasure would not be safe from other inmates until it was in his stomach. That was why he avoided looking his companions of misery in the eye, and hurriedly ate it all up, so that if asked for a morsel later, he could say he had nothing left. How triumphant it was to say, “I have nothing left.”

But there were no hiding places in the camp or in prison. The lucky prisoner was surrounded by fellow prisoners, colleagues, friends, and they begged a favor of him, they beseeched him by word, a look in the eye, or a gesture. The beggars no longer had the human dignity they once had. But there was no mercy in the lucky ones, who had received extra food thanks to serendipity. The happy egoist knew well that the less he gave away, the later he would turn into a Muselmann. For every inmate wanted to survive.

Human pride and dignity, as well as physical strength, slowly began to ebb out of prisoners suffering from hunger disease. They no longer felt ashamed to lick the remains out of SS-men’s food bowls. They were not ashamed to kiss the SS man’s boot just to get a scrap of food. Some were not ashamed of their debasement, which could only be explained by their moral degradation caused by hunger. Obviously, not all of them did so. But fighting over an extra bowl of food could cause great hatred, great contention and great degradation. A man’s degradation started so quickly.

Many were overwhelmed by their irresistible craving for food, to eat at all costs. Whatever you get hold of, eat it up quick, almost in the blink of an eye. Only a few tried to divide up their modest rations to eat them slowly or to keep chewing them throughout the day. But they were easy targets for the predatory wolves among the prisoners out to get such naive people. None of the thieves felt any remorse for the wrong and unethical deeds they committed. For each reproach, they had a ready answer: “Serves them right! Why were they so stupid and did not eat it all up right away!”

Almost all the prisoners of this group started to suffer from severe diarrhea, which led to further loss of strength and a poorer digestion of the miserable food rations. Now there was hardly a chance to avoid turning into a Muselmann. Some tried to stop the process by not eating anything at all, others by eating charred bread. But there were practically no measures at all that could save them from the continuing, gradual physical degradation which would inevitably lead to death.

Phase Three, stagnation. This was the beginning of the Muselmann condition, cachexia and emaciation. A characteristic feature of this stage was the gradual decline of the prisoner’s will to fight for his life. As a rule, the survival instinct was lost gradually with the progress of stagnation. Perhaps it was just an apparent decline of the instinct, because in the rivalry for food, the weaker had to give way to the stronger. The brute law of nature that there is no mercy for the weak was demonstrated on people in the extreme conditions of the concentration camps. Muselmänner had no chance to compete with prisoners in a better physical condition for relatively better sustenance. For them, there were only the leftovers, and Muselmänner did not despise such food.

The camp was a mixed community. Every individual who arrived in the camp was inevitably doomed to hunger disease, but not all of them had to go through all its stages, although basically they were all destined to do so. In one commando, there were prisoners in different phases of starvation. So when they were working in their commando, some inmates managed to get a swede or a beetroot, which they carefully peeled. The Muselmänner picked the peels and ate them. Once they reached the apathy phase, prisoners were not so fussy about the food they could get. Unfortunately, they could only get the worst leftovers, things which were not edible.

In this phase, prisoners had no strength to fight for food, and so they collected what hungry dogs, cats, rats or mice despised. So they ate peels, rotten fish, rotten swedes. They drank toxic machine oil. Their brain stopped controlling and monitoring what they were doing. Contrary to common sense, even when made aware and warned that what they were eating was harmful, poisonous and dangerous, they still continued to eat anything that looked like food. Not surprisingly, that was why they developed diarrhea, bloody dysentery, and other diseases, which brought on death sooner. But their death did not evoke any sympathy in fellow prisoners, who were still at a less advanced stage of hunger disease. When a Muselmann died, many prisoners said, “Serves him right! Why did he eat potato peel and drink machine oil? We knew it would finish him off.”

At the advanced stage of stagnation, prisoners were no longer divided into an honest and a dishonest group. You needed strength to commit dishonest deeds, but Muselmänner had no strength at all. By the law of biological selection, it was the weakest, the least resilient and the most honest who fell into this group. This certainly does not mean that only dishonest people could survive. Yet there can be no doubt that those who could neither organize their life in the camp nor knew how to adapt to the dreadful conditions were doomed to go through all the stages of starvation disease faster.

If prisoners suffering from starvation went through moral degradation, we may say that it ended at the second stage of hunger disease. As their life was ebbing away both physically and mentally, it imposed a certain degree of mental atrophy, automatic activity, schematic behavior almost like catalepsy. From this point of view, the Muselmann’s interest in the outside world narrowed down more and more to the most primitive problems in the camp. Their homesickness and nostalgia seemed to disappear, but their longing for freedom was still there, though muffled as if by a mist. The dying soma pulled the psyche down with it. The most striking thing about it all was the Muselmann’s growing indifference to the more and more intensified blows he got from the world around him. And although death was approaching fast and he could feel it instinctively, he did not defend himself against it, though he did not rush into its arms, either. His instinct of self-preservation died away gradually as his prostration grew more and more profound. The Muselmann no longer felt the fear of death. He passed from life to death in a stupor, in a cataleptic or lethargic somnolence.

Of course, there were still vestiges of the impulse to save himself, the last shreds of a sense of self-preservation, but these attempts were futile. Muselmänner gathered around those who were able to organize some extra food, their eyes and the gestures of their hands silently begging for mercy. However, usually there was no more room for mercy in the hardened, ashen hearts and minds of their fellow inmates. Many prisoners pushed Muselmänner away, with brutal but logical arguments, saying that such people did not deserve any help because they would die anyway.

Thus, the Muselmann reached the ultimate, usually the shortest stage of starvation, from which there was no return or rescue. This was the fourth phase, the full Muselmann condition.

Phase Four was the tragic and sad end of the starving and hunted human, abandoned by men and gods, looking terrible and dreadfully neglected; indifferent to everything. This period was characterized by the Muselmann’s most paradoxical psychogenic loss of appetite and his practically total indifference to the world around him. Now there was hardly anything that could still make him happy or upset. This phase came closest to complete catatonia,¹⁰ in which man’s contact with the world around him seems to vanish completely.

Returning from Harmęże. Artwork by Marian Kołodziej. Photo by Piotr Markowski. Click the image to enlarge.

With their last automatic reflexes, these people continued to perform the activities which the camp regime forced them to do. And often this was where they met their death, a death which in those conditions may be called blessed. They dropped dead while marching with their commando, clinging on to the shoulders of their fellow prisoners. Or they were finished off at work with a strong blow from a guard’s rifle butt. Shriveled up like dried swarf, they died in the prisoners’ hospital. They had no strength to work. They had no strength to fend for themselves. They were completely passive, sluggish, stupefied. They just wanted to lie down and not be disturbed anymore, left alone to die in peace. They let themselves be robbed of their food rations without demur. Perhaps there was still a smattering of defiance in them against this cruelty which the world did not spare them, but their parched, moribund throats and mouths had no energy to voice their objection. Their stupor let them feel no hunger. Sometimes they even refused their food. They seemed to have cerebral decortication—brain death, although the regulating organs still kept their circulation and breathing going.

The changes in the Muselmann’s organs caused by advanced starvation seemed irreversible. In practice, whoever entered this stage of hunger disease could no longer be saved. In the history of the German concentration camps there were cases of Muselmänner surviving in this late stage of starvation until the day of liberation, but they all died pretty soon, despite countless efforts to save their lives. They were given intravenous drip infusions, they were artificially fed—all in vain. The attempt to rescue them came too late, as happens with cerebral decortications cases.

Their indifference to everything in the world around them was not due to profound depression because of the situation they were in, but to the loss of their mental faculties to think logically, to associate and perceive things. These people died in terrible loneliness, in a terrifying psychic condition, abandoned by gods and men in the literal sense of the word.

Perhaps, like those who are anesthetized or decorticated, they were unable to feel the inner isolation that surrounded them in the camp. It is hard to say whether they felt any pain, cold or hunger. Presumably, as in agonal states, this feeling was very vague, or who knows, perhaps there was no sense of pain, cold, or hunger at all.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of 20th-century civilization lies in these prisoners’ dramatic and terrifying death of starvation, in their state of complete abandonment. This kind of death did not befall individuals. It was reproduced daily in thousands of human beings, and humanity has kind of erased these victims from the pages of its history. We find this sort of death abominable and utterly unacceptable from the point of view of universal standards, we bid it defiance, yet even today it does not allow us to understand how our brothers could die abandoned, even though we were with them. Our earth, scorched after centuries of history and carrying the stigma of millions of graves, gently received them into its bowels. But on doing so, did the earth too put a seal on the cruel secrets of that Nazi German age? Does time, blessed for many, have the right to erase the memory of those days?

Starvation in the concentration camp was divided into various stages. Not every prisoner had to go through all of them, and not every prisoner went through them at the same rate. Thanks to their good fortune, skills, cleverness, the “organization” in the camp, their constitution, physical resilience, often with the help of camp organizations or friends, many managed to stop at the first or second stage and stay there, from which it was easiest to recover. It was enough for you to be assigned to a relatively good commando, where there were better working conditions or opportunities to get extra food, to postpone your tumble down the camp’s ladder of starvation.

However, for those who reached the third stage of starvation disease, there was practically no turning back from inexorable death. Sooner or later, their emaciation and exhaustion intensified, and once in the grip of the Muselmann condition, every prisoner hurtled down the road to death. In retrospect, it is difficult to assess the average duration of each phase of starvation disease. These stages were different in different camps, commandos and blocks. In general, we can say that the further down a victim got into the disease, the shorter the time of each successive phase in it. On average, the first phase lasted from 2 to 4 months, the second phase was 1-3 months, the third was 3-6 weeks, and the last from one to three weeks. However, the boundaries between the phases cannot be clearly defined and they were different for every individual. Only the last phase of the Muselmann condition was invariably very short and invariably ended in death.

The stages of starvation are unlikely to correspond to starvation and death encountered in other situations in the free world. However, there may certainly be some analogies between starvation disease in the free world and in concentration camp conditions. But there are essential differences as well. Hunger disease in the Nazi German extermination camps had its specific stigma, caused by its mass nature and the reign of terror perpetrated by its makers.

Perhaps the Nazi German extermination camps — the greatest disgrace of the 20th century—will never be repeated in the history of mankind. But for that never to happen again, we must be mindful and alert. For as long as there are evil people, as long as there is malevolent hatred lurking anywhere in the world, ready to awaken infuriated human beasts, the danger of war, murder, torture and rape inflicted on man by man will never disappear. To keep the memory of those times and those cruel acts from fading away, we must pass down this memory from generation to generation. That is the aim of this paper. It is intended not only to provide a fuller understanding of the truth about the Nazi German concentration camps, but also to serve as a warning to those who, driven by the human impulse of mercy, indulge in expunging those shameful years of bestiality and terror from their memory. For if we let the echo of those years fade away, we may be heading for destruction again, just as we were fated in those cruel years when the raging Nazi German beast overran our country.

***

Translated from original article: Sterkowicz, Stanisław. “Uwagi o obozowym wyniszczeniu głodowym.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1971.

1. Biafra, officially the Republic of Biafra, was a partially recognized secessionist state in West Africa that declared independence from Nigeria and existed from 1967 until 1970. The military of Nigeria invaded Biafra shortly after its secession, starting the Nigerian Civil War. During the two-and-a-half years of war almost two million Biafran civilians (three-quarters of them small children) died of starvation, caused by the total blockade of the region by the Nigerian government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra^a
2. Josué de Castro’s book on hunger in Brazil was originally written and published in Portuguese in 1946 and later translated into many languages. Its Polish edition, Geografia głodu, translated by Roman Kutyłowski, was published by Pax in 1954.^a
3. Jacob Oser, Must men starve?: The Malthusian controversy, New York: Abelard Schumann (1956) Polish edition: Jacob Oser, Czy ludzie muszą głodować?: krytyka teorii Malthusa, trans. Jerzy Zdanowicz & Władysław Lewandowski, Warszawa: Polskie Wydawnictwo Gospodarcze; 1960.^a
4. In the prisoners’ concentration camp jargon, “organizing” meant obtaining indispensable items, especially food, by fair means or foul.^b
5. Currently, the term for resting metabolic rate is basal metabolic rate (BMR).^c
6. The first dolorimeters, instruments for the measurement of pain, were introduced in 1940 by a team of scientists from Cornell University, and since then work to advance the field of dolorimetry has been continuing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolorimeter^b
7. In 1967, Hans Münch published a paper entitled “Głód i czas przeżycia w obozie oświęcimskim” [Hunger and survival time in Auschwitz]. Münch’s work is unique, because he was a German physician and a member of the medical staff of Auschwitz. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/310212,hunger-in-the-concentration-camps-part-one^a
8. See also Janina Kowalczykowa, “Hunger disease in Auschwitz,” and Zdzisław J. Ryn and Stanisław Kłodziński, “Hunger in the concentration camps: Part One” and “Hunger in the concentration camps: Part Two,” on this website.^a
9. The expression Muselmann was used by concentration camp inmates to refer to fellowprisoners reduced by inanition to human wrecks in the ultimate stage of hunger disease, just before they died.^b
10. Catatonia is a complex neuropsychiatric behavioral syndrome characterized by abnormal movements, immobility, abnormal behaviors, and withdrawal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatonia^a

a—notes by Maria Kantor, the translator of the above article; b—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; c—note by Maria Ciesielska, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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The contents of this site reflect the views held by the authors and do not constitute the official position of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.