A former Nazi medical orderly admitted today that he had murdered some 500 concentration camp inmates in Ravensbruck, Mauthausen and Melk. His confession followed a dramatic confrontation by a Jewish inmate–a physician who had been imprisoned at the Mauthausen camp.
The self-confessed slayer was Gottleib Muzikant, 55, who had served in Hitler’s S.S. units as a medical orderly. He was arrested on April 30 and had confessed to the murder of 50 prisoners before his confrontation today by Dr. Claus Salomon.
The accuser, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1936 for “political treason, ” had been transferred from prison to the Auschwitz concentration camp from which he was moved to Mauthausen at the beginning of 1945 where he was put to work as a prisoner-physician. He accused Muzikant of having killed nearly 500 prisoners between February 1945, and the end of the war by giving them lethal injections, by hanging or by throttling his victims to death.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
