Muselmann

Muselmann was the term concentration camp prisoners used during the Holocaust for a fellow inmate who had reached a state of severe emaciation, extreme physical weakness, and an apathetic detachment from his own fate and surroundings. The condition emerged from a combination of what prisoners called hunger disease, the prolonged starvation and exhaustion inflicted by camp conditions, together with a psychological resignation to death. First documented at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the term and the condition it named spread to other camps under local names, including Gamel at Majdanek and Krypel at Stutthof, suggesting camp populations across the Nazi system recognized it as a distinct and recurring state. Prisoners who reached this stage were frequently selected by camp doctors for death, making the term both a medical description of starvation's endpoint and a grim marker of who the camp administration would kill next.