Filip Müller

Filip Müller (1922–2013) secretly gathered evidence of the genocide carried out at Auschwitz-Birkenau while he was a forced worker there.

Filip Müller, place and date unknown.

Müller was a Slovak Jew born in Sered’. Deported to Auschwitz in mid-April 1942, he was a forced worker at Auschwitz I and later at the IG Farben factory in Auschwitz-Monowitz. Since July 1943, he had to work at the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Müller gathered evidence of the atrocities that he witnessed and obtained a plan of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp crematoria and gas chambers, lists of the names of the SS members working there and notes on the transports that arrived. He also obtained a label from a can of Zyklon B. Müller passed this evidence to his fellow inmates Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg) who escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1944. Shortly afterwards, they produced The Auschwitz Protocols based on evidence of Nazi activities and plans at Auschwitz-Birkenau, partly gathered by Müller.

Prisoner list from Mauthausen camp, 1945. The list contains information about Müller’s place of origin, his date of birth and his pre-war occupation.

In 1944, members of the Jewish Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to carry out tasks at the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz-Birkenau revolted but were suppressed by the SS. The Wiener Library collected Müller’s account of this in 1957.

In January 1945, Müller was forced by the Nazis to be part of a “Todesmarsch” (death march) to Mauthausen camp. He was then transported to Gunskirchen subcamp nearby, from where he was liberated by the Allies in early May 1945.

Later Müller gave testimony of his experiences to The Wiener Library in the 1950s, at the second Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt/Main in 1964 and to Claude Lanzmann for his documentary film Shoah (1985). He published a memoir of his time in Auschwitz in 1979. In the 1960s, Müller lived in Prague for some time. He died at the age of 91 in 2013.