CUNTICA
2011-12-08 23:57:07 UTC
Rudolf Höss - Commandant of Auschwitz
By Laurence Rees
Last updated 2011-02-17
Auschwitz is a place of unparalleled horror and the site of the
largest mass murder in history. Laurence Rees looks inside the mind of
the man who built and ran the camp.
.
Man or monster?
What sort of man was the commandant of Auschwitz, the site of the
largest mass murder in the history of the world? A place crammed with
suffering, where acts of nightmarish atrocity were everyday
occurrences. Try to conceive of the person capable of holding down
such a job. Who do you see?
There is no record of him ever hitting - let alone killing - anyone.
At a guess, you are picturing someone like Amon Goeth, commandant of
Plaszow labour camp in Poland, memorably portrayed in Schindler's List
by Ralph Fiennes - an irrational, sadistic monster who took pleasure
in personally inflicting torture. Someone utterly different from the
people you encounter in everyday life. But if you imagined such a
person was commandant of Auschwitz, then you're wrong.
According to Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor who interrogated
him at the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Höss appeared 'normal', 'like a
grocery clerk'. And former prisoners who encountered him at Auschwitz
confirmed this view, adding that Höss always appeared calm and
collected. He is the greatest mass murderer the world has ever seen,
and yet there is no record of him ever personally hitting - let alone
killing - anyone at the camp.
Höss lived with his wife and four children in a house just yards from
the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp, where some of the earliest
killing experiments were conducted using the poisonous insecticide
Zyklon B. During his working days, Höss presided over the murder of
more than a million people, but once he came home he lived the life of
a solid, middle-class German husband and father.
It is this apparent 'normality' that ultimately makes Höss a much more
terrifying figure than an unhinged brute like Amon Goeth. It compels
us to try - in so far as it is ever possible - to understand him and
the historical circumstances that made his murderous career possible.
Top
Character and beliefs
Registration at Dachau ©Like most ardent Nazis, Höss's character and
beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the previous thirty years
of German history. Born in the Black Forest in 1900 to Catholic
parents, Höss had a domineering father who insisted on unquestioning
obedience.
He served in World War One as the youngest NCO in the German Army,
experiencing a desperate sense of betrayal at the subsequent loss of
the war. In the early 1920s, Höss joined the paramilitary Freikorps to
help counter the perceived communist threat on the boundaries of
Germany, before his involvement in violent right wing politics led to
his imprisonment in 1923.
The most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war.
Many, many other Nazis were forged in a similar crucible, not least
Adolf Hitler. For Hitler, Höss and others on the Nationalist Right,
the most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war
and made such a humiliating peace. And in the immediate post war years
they believed they had found the answer.
Was it not obvious, they felt, that the Jews - with their alleged
Communist sympathies - had 'stabbed Germany in the back'? It didn't
matter that large numbers of loyal German Jews had fought and died
during the war. Nor that thousands were neither left-wing nor
Communist. It was much easier to make the Jews a scapegoat for
Germany's predicament.
Höss claimed to have little quarrel with individual Jews. The problem
for him was the 'International World Jewish Conspiracy' - the anti-
Semitic fantasy that Jews secretly held the levers of power and sought
to assist each other across national boundaries. He later wrote: 'As a
fanatical National Socialist I was firmly convinced that our ideals
would gradually be accepted and would prevail throughout the world...
Jewish supremacy would thus be abolished.'
Höss joined the Nazi party in November 1922, shortly after it was
founded. Heinrich Himmler, an ardent Nazi talent spotter who knew Höss
from the early days, invited him to become an active member of the SS.
Höss accepted and in November 1934 arrived at Dachau concentration
camp in Bavaria to start his service as a guard.
Top
Into the system
Ruins of crematorium and gas chamber at Auschwitz ©tDachau in the
1930s was not a place of mass extermination. The majority of prisoners
sent there were released after a stay of imprisonment of around a year
to eighteen months. Intense mental and physical suffering were
inflicted on the prisoners, many of whom died, but it was easy for
Höss to rationalise. He felt it was important to imprison and forcibly
're-educate' the internal opponents of the Third Reich.
Höss's three-and-a-half years at Dachau were to play a defining role
in shaping his mentality. Above all else, it is where Höss learnt the
essential philosophy of the SS, as preached by Theodor Eicke, the
first commandant of the camp - hardness: 'Anyone who shows even the
slightest vestige of sympathy towards [the prisoners] must immediately
vanish from our ranks. I need only hard, totally committed SS men.
There is no place among us for soft people.'
His experience at Dachau and Sachsenhausen offered a clear blueprint.
Höss was a model SS man and rose through the ranks, eventually being
promoted to Rapportfuehrer, chief assistant to the commander of
Dachau. In September 1936 he was made a lieutenant and transferred to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until his
elevation to commandant of the new concentration camp at Auschwitz.
This then was the man who arrived at Auschwitz in May 1940. He now
felt ready to take on his biggest challenge - creating a new
concentration camp from a handful of vermin-infested barracks. His
experience at Dachau and Sachsenhausen offered a clear blueprint.
During his first year at the camp, Höss oversaw the expansion of
Auschwitz from a poorly-resourced but brutal concentration camp for
Poles into a source of slave labour for the construction of the giant
synthetic oil and rubber factory at nearby Monowitz. It was also
readied for the arrival of selected Soviet prisoners of war in July
1941.
Top
Extermination
Funeral procession of Auschwitz dead ©It was to murder these 'sub-
human' Soviet prisoners, as well as to kill those considered 'unfit'
to work, that Zyklon B was first used at Auschwitz. It was Höss's
deputy, Karl Fritzch, who first thought of using the readily available
insecticide to kill human beings.
Höss records that he personally attended an early gassing experiment:
'Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded
cells death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown
in. A short, almost smothered cry and it was all over.'
Höss was an active innovator in the way he organised the killing
process.
While the evidence is that death could be far from 'instantaneous',
Höss was nonetheless 'relieved' that this new method of killing had
been found so he would be 'spared' a 'bloodbath'. He saw his
subordinate's innovation as an 'improvement' - a method of murder that
would cause less psychological damage to his men than killing by
firing squad.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, a new camp being built two miles away from the
main camp, Höss oversaw the conversion of two cottages into makeshift
gas chambers. By 1943, a total of four purpose-built crematoria with
attached gas chambers had been completed. These killing installations
would eventually contribute to the physical destruction of one
million, one hundred thousand people, a million of whom were Jews.
Höss's long career in concentration camps prepared him step-by-step
for the moment when the gassings began at Auschwitz, thereby allowing
him carry on, calmly and faithfully, organising the killing. He was
never faced with one sudden, stark command that he should commit mass
murder.
But Höss was no mere 'robot', blindly following orders. He was an
active innovator in the way he organised the killing process. On a
number of occasions he even felt able to criticise his boss, Heinrich
Himmler. Höss knew he never needed to fear terrible retribution if he
criticised an order because, strange as it may seem, the Nazi
leadership allowed functionaries lower down the chain of command
openly to use their initiative and voice their views. He believed
wholeheartedly in the overall Nazi vision, and this meant he felt free
to question the details of its implementation.
Top
Justifying atrocity
Höss was behaving in a similar manner to many former Nazis who, unlike
him (Höss was executed in 1947), survived to be integrated back into
post-war German society. But there is something about the mentality of
the Nazis that seems at odds with the perpetrators who flourished in
many other totalitarian regimes. I have met and questioned
perpetrators from all three of the major totalitarian powers -
Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Having done so I can confirm that
the Nazi war criminals I met were different.
In the Soviet Union the climate of fear under Stalin was pervasive in
a way it never was in Germany under Hitler until the last days of the
war. Such was Stalin's malevolence that no one was safe from the knock
at the door at midnight. But in Nazi Germany, unless you were a member
of a specific risk group - like the Jews, the Communists, the
'Gypsies', homosexuals, the 'work-shy' - you could live comparatively
free from fear. The central truth still holds that the majority of the
German population - almost certainly right up until the moment Germany
started to lose the war - felt so personally secure and happy that
they would have voted to keep Hitler in power if there had been free
and fair elections.
The mentality of the Nazis seems at odds with the perpetrators who
flourished elsewhere.
Such was the intense insecurity of those who perpetrated crimes at
Stalin's behest that they often didn't know the reasons for the
suffering they inflicted. The former Soviet secret policeman I met who
bundled Kalmyks into exile in Siberia had committed a crime because he
was told to, and knew that if he didn't then he would be shot, so he
trusted that his bosses knew what they were doing. He said he had been
'acting under orders' - the justification so commonly ascribed to
Nazis. When Stalin died, the policeman was free to move on and leave
the past behind.
Then there were the Japanese war criminals who committed some of the
most appalling atrocities in modern history. In China, Japanese
soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the
foetuses. They tied up and used local farmers for target practice.
They tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the
Gestapo at their worst. And they were pursuing deadly medical
experiments long before Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.
The Japanese soldiers of World War Two had grown up in an intensely
militaristic society; had been subjected to military training of the
most brutal sort; had been told since they were children to worship
their Emperor (who was also their commander in chief); and lived in a
culture that elevated the desire for conformity into a semi-religion.
This is encapsulated by the veteran I met who, when asked to take part
in the gang rape of a Chinese woman, saw it less as a sexual act and
more as a sign of final acceptance by the group, many of whom had
previously bullied him mercilessly. Like the Soviet secret policeman,
many Japanese veterans attempted to justify their actions almost
exclusively by reference to an external source - the regime itself.
Top
No remorse
Something different appears in the minds of many Nazi war criminals.
Not just Rudolf Höss, but also members of Nazi killing squads who shot
Jews in the Soviet Union. Even today, many of those I have interviewed
are not sorry for what they did. Indeed they almost appear proud of
their actions.
The easy course would be to hide behind 'acting under orders' or
'brainwashed by propaganda' excuses, but such is the strength of their
own internal conviction that they don't. It is a loathsome, despicable
position - but nonetheless an intriguing one.
Many of those I have interviewed are not sorry for what they did.
Contemporary evidence shows that this frame of mind is not unique. At
Auschwitz, for example, there is not one recorded case of an SS man
being prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings. On the
contrary, the real discipline problem in the camp - from the point of
view of the SS leadership - was theft. There were even suspicions that
Höss himself was personally profiting from the murders.
The SS at the camp thus appear to have agreed with the Nazi leadership
that it was right to kill the Jews, but disagreed with Himmler's
policy of not letting them individually enrich themselves from the
crime. The penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian
- almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to kill.
Men like Rudolf Höss and many of his SS colleagues were not
automatons, mindlessly responding to the commands of their masters.
Their role is at once more complex and more troubling, for it reveals
that one of the worst crimes in the history of the world was committed
- to a large part - not by those touched with obvious lunacy like Amon
Goeth, but by human beings who calmly and coldly thought through their
actions, and then made possible the murder of millions.
That knowledge alone makes this a history that should be studied now
and in the future, and is a warning for us and for those who will come
after.
By Laurence Rees
Last updated 2011-02-17
Auschwitz is a place of unparalleled horror and the site of the
largest mass murder in history. Laurence Rees looks inside the mind of
the man who built and ran the camp.
.
Man or monster?
What sort of man was the commandant of Auschwitz, the site of the
largest mass murder in the history of the world? A place crammed with
suffering, where acts of nightmarish atrocity were everyday
occurrences. Try to conceive of the person capable of holding down
such a job. Who do you see?
There is no record of him ever hitting - let alone killing - anyone.
At a guess, you are picturing someone like Amon Goeth, commandant of
Plaszow labour camp in Poland, memorably portrayed in Schindler's List
by Ralph Fiennes - an irrational, sadistic monster who took pleasure
in personally inflicting torture. Someone utterly different from the
people you encounter in everyday life. But if you imagined such a
person was commandant of Auschwitz, then you're wrong.
According to Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor who interrogated
him at the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Höss appeared 'normal', 'like a
grocery clerk'. And former prisoners who encountered him at Auschwitz
confirmed this view, adding that Höss always appeared calm and
collected. He is the greatest mass murderer the world has ever seen,
and yet there is no record of him ever personally hitting - let alone
killing - anyone at the camp.
Höss lived with his wife and four children in a house just yards from
the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp, where some of the earliest
killing experiments were conducted using the poisonous insecticide
Zyklon B. During his working days, Höss presided over the murder of
more than a million people, but once he came home he lived the life of
a solid, middle-class German husband and father.
It is this apparent 'normality' that ultimately makes Höss a much more
terrifying figure than an unhinged brute like Amon Goeth. It compels
us to try - in so far as it is ever possible - to understand him and
the historical circumstances that made his murderous career possible.
Top
Character and beliefs
Registration at Dachau ©Like most ardent Nazis, Höss's character and
beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the previous thirty years
of German history. Born in the Black Forest in 1900 to Catholic
parents, Höss had a domineering father who insisted on unquestioning
obedience.
He served in World War One as the youngest NCO in the German Army,
experiencing a desperate sense of betrayal at the subsequent loss of
the war. In the early 1920s, Höss joined the paramilitary Freikorps to
help counter the perceived communist threat on the boundaries of
Germany, before his involvement in violent right wing politics led to
his imprisonment in 1923.
The most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war.
Many, many other Nazis were forged in a similar crucible, not least
Adolf Hitler. For Hitler, Höss and others on the Nationalist Right,
the most urgent need was to understand why Germany had lost the war
and made such a humiliating peace. And in the immediate post war years
they believed they had found the answer.
Was it not obvious, they felt, that the Jews - with their alleged
Communist sympathies - had 'stabbed Germany in the back'? It didn't
matter that large numbers of loyal German Jews had fought and died
during the war. Nor that thousands were neither left-wing nor
Communist. It was much easier to make the Jews a scapegoat for
Germany's predicament.
Höss claimed to have little quarrel with individual Jews. The problem
for him was the 'International World Jewish Conspiracy' - the anti-
Semitic fantasy that Jews secretly held the levers of power and sought
to assist each other across national boundaries. He later wrote: 'As a
fanatical National Socialist I was firmly convinced that our ideals
would gradually be accepted and would prevail throughout the world...
Jewish supremacy would thus be abolished.'
Höss joined the Nazi party in November 1922, shortly after it was
founded. Heinrich Himmler, an ardent Nazi talent spotter who knew Höss
from the early days, invited him to become an active member of the SS.
Höss accepted and in November 1934 arrived at Dachau concentration
camp in Bavaria to start his service as a guard.
Top
Into the system
Ruins of crematorium and gas chamber at Auschwitz ©tDachau in the
1930s was not a place of mass extermination. The majority of prisoners
sent there were released after a stay of imprisonment of around a year
to eighteen months. Intense mental and physical suffering were
inflicted on the prisoners, many of whom died, but it was easy for
Höss to rationalise. He felt it was important to imprison and forcibly
're-educate' the internal opponents of the Third Reich.
Höss's three-and-a-half years at Dachau were to play a defining role
in shaping his mentality. Above all else, it is where Höss learnt the
essential philosophy of the SS, as preached by Theodor Eicke, the
first commandant of the camp - hardness: 'Anyone who shows even the
slightest vestige of sympathy towards [the prisoners] must immediately
vanish from our ranks. I need only hard, totally committed SS men.
There is no place among us for soft people.'
His experience at Dachau and Sachsenhausen offered a clear blueprint.
Höss was a model SS man and rose through the ranks, eventually being
promoted to Rapportfuehrer, chief assistant to the commander of
Dachau. In September 1936 he was made a lieutenant and transferred to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until his
elevation to commandant of the new concentration camp at Auschwitz.
This then was the man who arrived at Auschwitz in May 1940. He now
felt ready to take on his biggest challenge - creating a new
concentration camp from a handful of vermin-infested barracks. His
experience at Dachau and Sachsenhausen offered a clear blueprint.
During his first year at the camp, Höss oversaw the expansion of
Auschwitz from a poorly-resourced but brutal concentration camp for
Poles into a source of slave labour for the construction of the giant
synthetic oil and rubber factory at nearby Monowitz. It was also
readied for the arrival of selected Soviet prisoners of war in July
1941.
Top
Extermination
Funeral procession of Auschwitz dead ©It was to murder these 'sub-
human' Soviet prisoners, as well as to kill those considered 'unfit'
to work, that Zyklon B was first used at Auschwitz. It was Höss's
deputy, Karl Fritzch, who first thought of using the readily available
insecticide to kill human beings.
Höss records that he personally attended an early gassing experiment:
'Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded
cells death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown
in. A short, almost smothered cry and it was all over.'
Höss was an active innovator in the way he organised the killing
process.
While the evidence is that death could be far from 'instantaneous',
Höss was nonetheless 'relieved' that this new method of killing had
been found so he would be 'spared' a 'bloodbath'. He saw his
subordinate's innovation as an 'improvement' - a method of murder that
would cause less psychological damage to his men than killing by
firing squad.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, a new camp being built two miles away from the
main camp, Höss oversaw the conversion of two cottages into makeshift
gas chambers. By 1943, a total of four purpose-built crematoria with
attached gas chambers had been completed. These killing installations
would eventually contribute to the physical destruction of one
million, one hundred thousand people, a million of whom were Jews.
Höss's long career in concentration camps prepared him step-by-step
for the moment when the gassings began at Auschwitz, thereby allowing
him carry on, calmly and faithfully, organising the killing. He was
never faced with one sudden, stark command that he should commit mass
murder.
But Höss was no mere 'robot', blindly following orders. He was an
active innovator in the way he organised the killing process. On a
number of occasions he even felt able to criticise his boss, Heinrich
Himmler. Höss knew he never needed to fear terrible retribution if he
criticised an order because, strange as it may seem, the Nazi
leadership allowed functionaries lower down the chain of command
openly to use their initiative and voice their views. He believed
wholeheartedly in the overall Nazi vision, and this meant he felt free
to question the details of its implementation.
Top
Justifying atrocity
Höss was behaving in a similar manner to many former Nazis who, unlike
him (Höss was executed in 1947), survived to be integrated back into
post-war German society. But there is something about the mentality of
the Nazis that seems at odds with the perpetrators who flourished in
many other totalitarian regimes. I have met and questioned
perpetrators from all three of the major totalitarian powers -
Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Having done so I can confirm that
the Nazi war criminals I met were different.
In the Soviet Union the climate of fear under Stalin was pervasive in
a way it never was in Germany under Hitler until the last days of the
war. Such was Stalin's malevolence that no one was safe from the knock
at the door at midnight. But in Nazi Germany, unless you were a member
of a specific risk group - like the Jews, the Communists, the
'Gypsies', homosexuals, the 'work-shy' - you could live comparatively
free from fear. The central truth still holds that the majority of the
German population - almost certainly right up until the moment Germany
started to lose the war - felt so personally secure and happy that
they would have voted to keep Hitler in power if there had been free
and fair elections.
The mentality of the Nazis seems at odds with the perpetrators who
flourished elsewhere.
Such was the intense insecurity of those who perpetrated crimes at
Stalin's behest that they often didn't know the reasons for the
suffering they inflicted. The former Soviet secret policeman I met who
bundled Kalmyks into exile in Siberia had committed a crime because he
was told to, and knew that if he didn't then he would be shot, so he
trusted that his bosses knew what they were doing. He said he had been
'acting under orders' - the justification so commonly ascribed to
Nazis. When Stalin died, the policeman was free to move on and leave
the past behind.
Then there were the Japanese war criminals who committed some of the
most appalling atrocities in modern history. In China, Japanese
soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the
foetuses. They tied up and used local farmers for target practice.
They tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the
Gestapo at their worst. And they were pursuing deadly medical
experiments long before Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.
The Japanese soldiers of World War Two had grown up in an intensely
militaristic society; had been subjected to military training of the
most brutal sort; had been told since they were children to worship
their Emperor (who was also their commander in chief); and lived in a
culture that elevated the desire for conformity into a semi-religion.
This is encapsulated by the veteran I met who, when asked to take part
in the gang rape of a Chinese woman, saw it less as a sexual act and
more as a sign of final acceptance by the group, many of whom had
previously bullied him mercilessly. Like the Soviet secret policeman,
many Japanese veterans attempted to justify their actions almost
exclusively by reference to an external source - the regime itself.
Top
No remorse
Something different appears in the minds of many Nazi war criminals.
Not just Rudolf Höss, but also members of Nazi killing squads who shot
Jews in the Soviet Union. Even today, many of those I have interviewed
are not sorry for what they did. Indeed they almost appear proud of
their actions.
The easy course would be to hide behind 'acting under orders' or
'brainwashed by propaganda' excuses, but such is the strength of their
own internal conviction that they don't. It is a loathsome, despicable
position - but nonetheless an intriguing one.
Many of those I have interviewed are not sorry for what they did.
Contemporary evidence shows that this frame of mind is not unique. At
Auschwitz, for example, there is not one recorded case of an SS man
being prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings. On the
contrary, the real discipline problem in the camp - from the point of
view of the SS leadership - was theft. There were even suspicions that
Höss himself was personally profiting from the murders.
The SS at the camp thus appear to have agreed with the Nazi leadership
that it was right to kill the Jews, but disagreed with Himmler's
policy of not letting them individually enrich themselves from the
crime. The penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian
- almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to kill.
Men like Rudolf Höss and many of his SS colleagues were not
automatons, mindlessly responding to the commands of their masters.
Their role is at once more complex and more troubling, for it reveals
that one of the worst crimes in the history of the world was committed
- to a large part - not by those touched with obvious lunacy like Amon
Goeth, but by human beings who calmly and coldly thought through their
actions, and then made possible the murder of millions.
That knowledge alone makes this a history that should be studied now
and in the future, and is a warning for us and for those who will come
after.