Stefan Budziaszek, prisoner doctor in charge of the Auschwitz-Monowitz prisoners’ hospital Bogdan Musiał
U
ntil late 1941, medically trained prisoners were prohibited from work‑ ing as prisoner doctors in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was not an exception in this regard, as the situation was the same in the other German con‑
centration camps. After the war, Rudolf Höß, ex‑comandant of Auschwitz, testified
in court that it was so on Heinrich Himmler’s orders. Himmler feared that prison‑ ers working as camp doctors would hide their colleagues—sometimes for several weeks—by claiming that they were sick and needed a rest, even if they were in fact perfectly healthy.1 So the ban was needed to prevent such “abuses.”
About the author: Bogdan Musial studied history, political science and sociology at the Leibniz University of Hannover (1990–1998) and the University of Manchester (1992/93). In 1998, he gained his doctorate with a work on the treatment of Jews in occupied Poland. Afterwards, he was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (1999–2004) and later the Insti‑ tute of National Remembrance in Warsaw (2007–2011). In 2004, he obtained his habilitation from the Cardinal Wyszynski University Warsaw, where he was a professor for Central and Eastern European Studies (2010–2015). In 2017 he returned to the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and began working on a research project focusing on prisoner physicians in Auschwitz.
1
AIPN, GK 196/103, pp. 124–141, here p. 126.