Muzulman

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Inmates of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp after the liberation

Muzulman (also mussulman, literally, Muslim; also Gamel and Krypel) was a term used among prisoners of German World War II Nazi concentration camps to refer to prisoners suffering from extreme stages of starvation, dubbed hunger disease by survivors. Often it refers to an extremely emaciated person often entirely detached from the outside world.

The term itself was a loan word from the Polish language term Muzułmanin, a standard noun for Muslim people, and was most probably coined because people in the final stages of muzulmanisation were almost unable to move and spent much of their time cringing in a position similar to the one adopted by Muslim people during their prayers. The term spread from Auschwitz-Birkenau to other places of detention; its equivalent in Majdanek concentration camp was Gamel (derived from German Gammeln - colloquial for "rotting") and in Stutthof concentration camp krypel (derived from German Krüppel, "cripple").

The opposite of this condition is represented in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. A prisoner who decides to use up his last cigarettes (used as currency in the concentration camps) in the evening because he knows he won't last to the appeal the next morning is derided as muselmann by his inmates.

Frankl parallels this with the Kapos as another example where the desperate conditions in the camps like famine and forced labor can bring out the worst in each individual.