Muselmann

If this derivation is correct, "Muselmann" would literally mean "Muslim man" (Muselman + Mann); but how this term later came to be used to denote starving concentration camp prisoners is uncertain.

Some scholars argue that the term may derive from the Muselmann's inability to stand due to a combination of exhaustion and starvation-induced muscular atrophy in their legs, thus forcing them to spend much of their time in a prone position, which may have evoked the image of the Muslim practice of prostration during prayer,[4] called Sujud.

[5] On the other hand, Eugen Kogon, who survived internment in Buchenwald, wrote that the term originated from Nazi staff-members, who ascribed the Muselmann's apparent apathy to their circumstances (likely the result of weakness and acute hunger) to Islamic fatalism.

[8][9] Primo Levi tried to explain the term (he also uses Musselman) in a footnote of If This Is a Man (the commonly found English translation is titled Survival in Auschwitz), his autobiographical account of his time in Auschwitz:[1] This word ‘Muselmann’, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer.

"[11] The testimonial of Polish witness Adolf Gawalewicz, Refleksje z poczekalni do gazu: ze wspomnień muzułmana ("Reflections in the Gas Chamber's Waiting Room: From the Memoirs of a Muselmann"), published in 1968, incorporates the term in the title of the work.

[13] The narrator of British author Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet is a concentration camp survivor who frequently states "I will not become a musselman" when recalling past traumas.

[15] Aktion T4, a "euthanasia" programme for mentally ill, disabled and other inmates of hospitals and nursing homes who were deemed unworthy of life, was extended to include the weakest concentration-camp prisoners.