The man known to history as Rudolf Höss was
born as Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss on the 25th of November 1900 in Baden-Baden in western
Germany. His father was Franz Xavier Höss, a former
German army officer, who had served in the colony of German East Africa, situated roughly
where Tanzania lies today. Later on, once back in Germany, he worked
as a senior clerk at a merchant’s house which specialised in the importation of tea
and coffee. He was a strict, austere individual, one who
raised Rudolf, the only boy of four children, according to strict Catholic and military
principles. Rudolf’s mother was Pauline Höss, whose
maiden name was Speck. She was a housewife who raised Rudolf and
his three sisters. The Höss household, which was based in Baden-Baden
until Rudolf was six years of age, was prosperous owing to Rudolf’s father’s successful
job. And later in life Höss would nostalgically
write about an idyllic childhood in which his horse was his closest companion. In many ways, it resembled a typical upper-middle
class German family of the early twentieth century, particularly one that was deeply
religious. When Rudolf was around six or seven years
of age, the Höss family moved to the nearby town of Mannheim, where Rudolf’s education
began under a private tutor. This continued for two years before he was
enrolled in a local elementary school, where he proved himself a capable, though hardly
exceptional student. Rudolf’s father, in line with the family’s
extreme Catholic piety, wished for his son to enter the priesthood and after young Rudolf
graduated from elementary school, he was enrolled in a humanities school with a view to potentially
entering a seminary in due course. But his father’s wish for Rudolf to follow
this path was scuppered in the early 1910s, when Rudolf’s father died. With the influence which was driving him towards
the priesthood removed, Rudolf would begin to gravitate towards a life in the military. Yet this was not an unusual pursuit in early
twentieth century Germany, a country which was filled with nationalist sentiment. Höss was born and was growing up, just as
Europe was bubbling over, with a vast assortment of tensions and resentments rising between
the Great Powers. Most of this focused on Germany. When the country had united into the Second
German Reich in 1871, this severely disrupted the power balance across Europe. Germany was now a threat to Britain, which
for long had been Europe’s foremost power. As a result, in the decades that followed
a series of military alliances were concluded by the major powers, one consisting of Britain,
France and Russia and the other of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy. These powers would constantly clash in the
early twentieth century, over rivalry for colonial possessions and other matters. Added to this division of the continent into
two armed camps, was a host of other problems, foremost amongst which was nationalist tensions
in regions such as the Balkans, where the Ottoman Turkish Empire was collapsing and
both Austria-Hungary and Russia wanted to step into the vacuum created by Istanbul’s
political and military collapse. Yet other groupings within the Balkans, such
as the Serbs, had other ideas about this. Eventually it would be the desire of these
ethnic people to establish their own states, which would see Europe enveloped in war. The outbreak of a major conflict in Europe
would have profound implications for Höss, despite the fact, that he was still in his
early teenage years. The war, which both then as well as in retrospect,
seemed somewhat inevitable, eventually broke out in the summer of 1914. The pressure cooker that was the Balkans was
the source. In late June, while on a state visit to the
city of Sarajevo, the heir to the Empire of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist. Then, in the weeks that followed, the Austrian
government in Vienna attempted to exploit the situation, in order to crush the nascent
Serbian state on its south-eastern border and curb the rising nationalist wave in the
Balkans more generally. In response, Russia began mobilising its troops
in the region and the situation then gradually escalated as Germany, Britain and France all
began trading threats in late July of 1914. On the 1st of August, Germany declared war
on Russia, in defence of its Austrian ally and on the 3rd of August, Berlin opened a
second front by declaring war on France. A day later, Germany invaded neutral Belgium,
which led Britain, in turn, to declare war on Germany. Thus, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
ballooned in the weeks that followed into the outbreak of the First World War. Despite being only thirteen years of age upon
the outbreak of the conflict, Höss was soon involved. In 1915, having turned fourteen the previous
year, he abandoned plans to join the priesthood and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. As such, he joined the German army and, despite
his age, was allowed to enlist in the 21st Reserve Squadron of the Second Baden Dragoon
Regiment, the regiment which both his father and grandfather had previously served in. After four weeks of initial training, his
unit was amalgamated into the German army’s Asia Corps, which was assigned to serve alongside
the Sixth Army of the Ottoman Turks, one of Germany’s foremost allies, in the Middle
East. Then, between 1916 and 1918, he fought in
several campaigns in the region around modern-day Iraq and Palestine and it has been noted,
that he may have witnessed some of the atrocities which amounted to the genocide by the Ottoman
Turks, of one and a half million Armenians during the course of the war in Turkey. He was also wounded three times during his
service and received the Iron Cross Second Class as well as the Iron Crescent, the latter
being a commendation from the Turkish government. Finally, in the spring of 1918, he was even
placed in command of his own cavalry unit, despite still being only seventeen years of
age. The First World War came to an end in November
1918. It had been a tortuous affair. While the British and their allies had gained
the upper hand in the Middle East campaign, the main arena of fighting was in northern
France, where the Germans had fought the French and the British over a small portion of land
for four years. The entry of the United States into the war
in 1917, provided these western allies with an injection of men and resources. This happened just as Germany’s ability
to maintain its war effort was diminishing, and despite its effective victory over Russia
in 1917, when the revolutionary government of that country had elected to give away vast
tracts of land in Eastern Europe, in return for the ability to leave the war. But, in the end, owing to dissent at home
in Germany and a realisation that the war could not be won, a full-blown invasion of
Germany was not needed in 1918, before the country surrendered, effectively bringing
the war to an end and bringing victory to Britain, France and their allies, and utter
defeat for Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Turks. When the news of the armistice reached the
Middle East, Höss was stationed in Damascus, a city which he quickly left, returning to
Germany in secret, in order to avoid being placed in an internment camp as a German officer. Höss’s return to Germany was not idyllic. His mother had died during his absence in
the Middle East and he soon clashed with the remaining members of his family, who wished
for him to return to his path to the priesthood which his deceased parents had set him on,
before the war had interrupted affairs. Instead Höss became a quite disaffected individual,
unhappy with the humiliating peace terms which Britain and France had imposed on Germany
in the Treaty of Versailles, which had brought the war to an end. And he wasn’t alone in his disaffection. In the immediate aftermath of the war, tens
of thousands of former German soldiers and officers began forming themselves into quasi-military
associations, such as the East Prussian Free Corps and The Steel Helmet League of Front-Line
Soldiers. These were partly social clubs for army veterans,
but also partly borderline paramilitary groups, some of which posed a genuine threat to the
peace and stability of the Weimar Republic, which had been established to govern Germany
in the aftermath of the war. Höss soon joined the East Prussian Free Corps
or Freikorps, which was associated with the government in curbing workers’ strikes and
other bouts of unrest in Germany during the early 1920s. It was the beginning of his association with
fringe paramilitary groups in interwar Germany. During the course of the early 1920s, the
Freikorps were involved in some controversial activities and ones which were indicative
of Höss’s increasingly right-wing and violent political leanings. For instance, in 1920, he was part of a group
which curbed some unrest in East Prussia, while just months later, his brigade of Freikorps
aggressively broke up a strike by industrial workers in the Ruhr area of western Germany. Consequently, it is not surprising to find,
that when the Freikorps were disbanded by the German government in 1922, Höss gravitated
to a different ring-wing movement. This was the National Socialist German Workers’
Party, or Nazi Party for short, which had been established in Munich in 1920 and which
by 1922, was coming increasingly under the control of an Austrian firebrand by the name
of Adolf Hitler. And having heard a speech delivered by Hitler
while in the Bavarian capital, Höss decided to join the party, becoming member number
3,240. It was the beginning of a quarter of a century
long association with a party whose ideology would shape Höss’s life. And that ideology was based around authoritarianism,
retaliation for Germany’s loss in the war, and xenophobia, but above all, a searing Anti-Semitism
against the Jews of Germany and Europe more broadly. Höss was soon involved with the Nazi Party
in a substantial capacity. In January 1923, following the Weimar government’s
failure to meet some of its war reparations payments, French and Belgian troops occupied
parts of the heavily industrialised Upper Rhine region of western Germany. Höss became part of a group which organised
acts of sabotage and violence against the occupiers. And in this capacity, he and two other former
members of the Freikorps murdered a local schoolteacher, Walther Kadow, who had acted
as an informer for the French. The act was carried out on a farm belonging
to Martin Bormann, later a personal secretary to Hitler and senior government figure. Later, both Höss and Bormann were arrested
for the crime and in March 1923, Höss was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role
in murdering Kadow. As a result Höss was unable to take part
in an attempted military rebellion or Putsch, which the Nazi Party launched in Munich in
November 1923. It was a complete failure and Hitler too found
himself imprisoned for several years shortly thereafter. However, in acts of leniency which all of
Europe would come to regret, Hitler was released after serving less than a year of his sentence
and Höss was released after he had served just half of his ten-year sentence. Having served five years in prison, Höss
was released in the late 1920s as the situation in Germany was shifting. After a decade of economic expansion throughout
Europe and North America, and a boom period which led to these years becoming known as
the Roaring Twenties, an abrupt financial crash occurred in the autumn of 1929. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression
which followed it, for years afterwards, had profound consequences for Germany. And as ordinary people lost their jobs and
life savings, they turned to extremist parties in local and national elections. Thus, the Nazis, who had been a small fringe
group for outcasts and disaffected extremists up to that point, suddenly started to grow
quickly in popularity, eventually becoming the largest political party in Germany in
the early 1930s. Meanwhile, following his release, Höss decided
to take a back seat from politics himself, although he did maintain ties with the Nazis. In the immediate aftermath of his release,
his main priority was starting a family. Consequently, in the late summer of 1929,
he married Hedwig Hensel whom he had met through the Artaman League, a German rural, agrarian
and traditionalist movement, which he had become involved with, following his release
from prison. They would go on to have five children, two
sons and three daughters. Höss kept a low profile for the next several
years. But Hitler and his Nazi Party decidedly did
not. In 1932, they became the most popular party
in Germany with nearly 40% of the vote in one election. Still, they could not gain a majority and
never would have, had it not been for a Faustian pact which the leaders of Germany’s major
industrial companies now made with Hitler. Banking on the fact, that they could control
Hitler and the Nazis and use them to ensure that the Communists would not come to power
in Germany, industrialists such as Gustav Krupp threw their support behind Hitler in
early 1933. Within weeks, the Nazis exploited this situation,
to dismantle the Weimar Republic, ban the Communists and other opposition groups and
essentially turn Germany into a one-party dictatorship. And this was the spur for Höss to re-enter
political life. In September 1933, he joined the Schutzstaffel
or SS, one of the main paramilitary wings of the Nazi Party, and quickly became a firm
ally of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Significantly, in July 1934, the SS were granted
control and oversight over the concentration camps, which the Nazis had begun establishing
in Germany as soon as they had seized power. At this early date, these were relatively
small make-shift prisons, used to house political opponents of the nascent Nazi regimes, such
as Communists and other left-leaning political groups. In June 1934, Höss was transferred to the
tenth battalion of the Ninth Regiment of the SS, but it was only a temporary posting, and
in December of that year, he was transferred again, this time to Dachau, a concentration
camp which had recently been constructed near Munich in Bavaria. Here, he served under the camp inspector,
Theodor Eicke, for the next several weeks. It was Eicke who developed the system of camp
discipline, which would subsequently be extended to the concentration camps throughout Europe. Höss spent nearly four years here, during
which time he was a relatively low-profile figure. However, his experience and the length of
time spent there, were sufficient enough, that when the Nazis began consolidating the
smaller concentration camps into bigger camps in the late 1930s, he was transferred to one
of these larger interment facilities. This one was just north of Berlin and was
called Sachsenhausen. Here Höss was placed in an administrative
role upon his arrival, on the 1st of August 1938 and he would soon be promoted to more
senior positions, eventually being appointed as Commandant Deputy for Prisoner Affairs
there, one of the most senior positions within the camp administration. Simultaneously he rapidly acquired promotion
within the SS, becoming a captain by the winter of 1938. While Höss was at Sachsenhausen, the Nazi
state which he served was dragging Europe towards conflict. As soon as Hitler and the Nazis had come to
power in 1933, they had begun to dismantle the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. One of the stipulations of the Treaty, was
that Germany would restrict the size of its army. The Nazis quickly breached this provision
and began rebuilding both the armed forces and a new German air-force. Then a second major point was violated in
March 1936, when Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland, the industrialised western
part of Germany which, under the terms of Versailles, was to be left demilitarised. And when this went relatively unopposed, Berlin
moved two years later to annex Austria into a greater Germany in the so-called Anschluss. Then, by the end of the year, Hitler also
pressurised Britain into allowing it to incorporate the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia into Germany
as well. By now, the Nazis were convinced by the constant
appeasement afforded them by Britain and France, that little would be done to stop them. In the spring of 1939, they were allowed to
form Czechoslovakia and Hungary into puppet states. But a few months later, their run of conquests
without a shot ran out. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of
September 1939, the two western powers declared war in response on the 3rd of September. The Second World War had commenced. Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Höss
had joined the Waffen-SS, the more hard-core, military branch of the paramilitary organisation. He was subsequently sent east into Poland,
following the conquest of the country and it is this country, that he would become most
closely associated with, for the remainder of his life. As soon as the German Reich had begun expanding
into regions such as Austria and Poland in 1938 and 1939, concentration camps had been
established in those countries, to house political prisoners and members of those groupings which
the Nazi state reserved its naked hatred for, such as Jehovah’s witnesses, Gypsies and,
above all, the Jewish people. The latter were particularly numerous in Poland
and other parts of Eastern Europe, as in the Late Medieval period, most western European
kingdoms such as England and France, had forcibly expelled their Jewish communities, known as
Ashkenazic Jews. And as they did, a great many of Europe’s
Jews had migrated eastwards to places such as Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic Sea region. Consequently, as the Nazi state conquered
Poland in 1939, it began to encounter ever greater numbers of Jewish people in Eastern
Europe and decided that more concentration camps would be needed in Poland to detain
them. Höss would become central to these operations. Late in 1939, Höss had been appointed as
an interim director of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But he was soon to be moved from this position. In February 1940, surveyors and SS members
in Poland had begun examining the site of an old Polish army barracks, situated about
50 kilometres south of the city of Krakow. It was in a relatively isolated rural setting,
but the former barracks and buildings around it, could be used as the beginnings of a major
concentration camp. Moreover, it was situated in an ideal place
geographically, not too far from Germany and at a crossroads of several large train transit
routes to the east. The barracks lay next to a village called
Oswiecim in Polish, but the whole world knows it today by its German name. It was called Auschwitz. Then, on Himmler’s recommendation, Höss
was sent there in April 1940, to carry out an inspection of the site and to report to
him, on the feasibility of going ahead with siting a concentration camp here. Höss visited and approved of the location,
so on the 27th of April 1940 Himmler gave the order to establish what is now known as
Camp 1 at Auschwitz or Auschwitz I, with an initial capacity for 10,000 prisoners. Rudolf Höss was appointed as Commandant of
the new camp a few days later on the 1st of May. Over the next three and a half years Auschwitz
would expand to become the largest and most horrific concentration camp in Nazi Europe,
but much of that would lay ahead in 1942 and later. In 1940, Höss began to develop Auschwitz
into a medium-sized concentration camp modelled on Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where he had
served previously. Höss oversaw the conversion of the old army
barracks and also established an agricultural farm to make the camp self-supporting. In line with the situation at many of the
concentration camps being established throughout Eastern Europe, structures were also put in
place, in order to establish factories at Auschwitz, ones which would be run by the
SS, to produce war material, and which would effectively be powered by the slave labour
of the inmates of the camp. When Himmler visited at the beginning of March
1941, he was impressed with the manner in which Höss had developed the main camp at
Auschwitz. As a result, he ordered Höss to expand the
camp so that it could hold 30,000 prisoners, as the concentration camp system was expected
to come under pressure once Germany invaded Russia in the late summer and autumn of 1941. And most ominously, Himmler, with Höss eager
to undertake the task, ordered the construction of a second camp nearby, for a further 100,000
POWs. Camp 2 or Auschwitz II would become known
as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz might have remained a typical concentration
camp, one of many established by the Nazis throughout Europe, where POWs and political
dissidents were held in poor conditions, had it not been for the events of late 1941 and
early 1942. Having conquered most of Western Europe, Hitler
turned his attentions east towards the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. A massive invasion of Russia was commenced
with, in June 1941. Initially, it met with striking success and
the Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, was considering negotiating peace terms with Germany, whereby
huge tracts of land would be ceded to the Nazi state. And this was the climate in which Hitler and
the Nazi hierarchy began to consider brutal ideas, about how to solve what they termed,
the ‘Jewish Question’. For years the Nazis had used coercion and
persecution to try to force the Jewish community of Germany and later in occupied lands, to
immigrate to either the British mandated territory in Palestine or else to America and Britain. And there was even a bizarre plan to deport
Europe’s Jews to the East African island of Madagascar. All of this though, changed in the winter
of 1941 to 1942, in ways which would make Höss and the camp he ran at Auschwitz, into
something far different to the concentration camp which was originally established in 1940. In January 1942, a conference was held at
Wannsee outside Berlin, where some of the highest-ranking officials of the Third Reich
met to discuss the ‘Jewish Question’. The Nazis had begun to entertain truly horrific
policy proposals at the time. One, for instance, had imagined, that in order
to create Lebensraum or living space for German settlers, approximately thirty million Eastern
Europeans would be starved to death. And in approaching the question of Europe’s
Jews at the Wannsee Conference, it was decided to engage in mass murder and genocide. Europe’s Jews would effectively be detained
and transported to the many concentration camps, that had been established throughout
Central and Eastern Europe, where they would be gassed to death. This was known euphemistically as ‘the Final
Solution’ and the goal of it, was to eradicate the Jewish population of the Third Reich. With its large facilities, its relative obscurity
and distance from any major cities and towns and its location on the main route-ways and
train routes of Eastern Europe, Auschwitz and specifically Auschwitz-Birkenau, would
become the epicentre of the genocidal policy, which was now to be enacted and Rudolf Höss,
more than any other individual, would become the overseer of the Holocaust. It should be noted that the Wannsee Conference
was just the event at which the ‘Final Solution’ was rubber-stamped and at which, the senior
echelons of the Nazi state were alerted to what had been decided upon. However, the decision to commence a genocidal
policy had been taken by Hitler and other senior officials such as Joseph Goebbels and
Himmler, months earlier. Additionally, Höss appears to have been one
of the first to learn about it and he later claimed that he had been told as early as
the summer of 1941, to begin adapting the second camp which was being developed at Auschwitz,
the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, to serve as an extermination camp or death camp, rather than
as a holding camp for prisoners. It was also at Auschwitz on the 3rd of September
1941, that an experiment with far reaching consequences was conducted. That day, in the cellars of Block 11, over
800 POWs, most of them Soviet prisoners, were gassed to death using the gas prussic or hydrocyanic
acid. It is better known by its commercial name;
Zyklon B. Thus, by the early autumn of 1941, well in advance of the Wannsee Conference,
Höss was preparing Auschwitz-Birkenau to act as an extermination camp and the gas which
would murder millions of Europe’s Jews in the years that followed, had already been
trialled here. Shortly after the Wannsee Conference trains
began arriving to Auschwitz carrying the first Jews to Höss’s camps. The newly arrived prisoners were generally
killed with Zvklon B within hours of their arrival, in a specially designed charnel house
next to a crematorium in the camp. Before they were killed prisoners were stripped
of their few remaining possessions. Only those who were deemed physically fit
enough to be able to work for a long time at the labour camps, survived for very long. And soon the number of prisoners arriving
was so large that Höss had to repurpose several other buildings to act as gas chambers. Strikingly, though, the main cause of delays
at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the months that followed, was an inability to dispose of the bodies
of those who had been murdered quickly enough. In response Höss ordered the construction
of four large units, each one consisting of a specially designed gas chamber with an attached
crematorium. In the meantime, while these units were under
construction, in the late summer and early autumn of 1942, many of the bodies of the
deceased were simply piled up and incinerated on pyres outside in the open. Such was the scale of the murder machine at
Auschwitz and the number of prisoners who went through the camps there, that some people
have called into question whether or not the place could have operated on the scale which
it did. But there is no doubting this. In terms of its scale, the concentration camp
in its entirety was vast. When it was fully developed, Auschwitz consisted
of three camps, the original camp or Auschwitz I, the secondary camp or Auschwitz-Birkenau
where the bulk of the murders took place, and a small third camp, Auschwitz-Monowitz,
which was developed as a labour camp for the production of products such as synthetic rubber
for the German war machine. These three camps which made up Auschwitz,
and over which Höss presided as Commandant, covered a huge area of land measuring some
20,000 acres or 8,000 hectares. And to ensure secrecy, the entire area had
been cleared of any civilians, while a cordon sanitaire or empty zone was also established
all around the periphery. Moreover, the Nazis also made efforts to convince
civilians in the surrounding Polish countryside, that things were different to what they seemed. For instance, when prisoners from the worker
camp of Auschwitz-Monowitz were taken out of the camp, they were told to shave beforehand
and were made to sing when within earshot of others. Life in the camps for the minority who were
not murdered within hours of arriving, was brutal. Some were spared because they were healthy
and would make the best workers in the labour camps. Sometimes entire families avoided being sent
directly to the gas chamber, so that they could populate the family camp, a separate
camp which was maintained between September 1943 and July 1944, as a kind of propaganda
camp, designed to fool the outside world about what was occurring at Auschwitz. The family camp has been written about in
recent years, by one of the few individuals who survived its liquidation in the summer
of 1944, Otto Dov Kulka, whose memoir, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, presents a harrowing
account of his time at Auschwitz as a child. Additionally, for those who did survive for
weeks or months at Auschwitz, existence was essentially a process of dehumanisation. Inmates were tattooed with a serial number
on their left arm, while prisoners were forced to wear colour-coded uniforms, depending on
their race or alleged crime. For instance, Jewish inmates wore green and
white striped clothes with a Star of David. Jehovah’s Witnesses wore purple. Gay men, some 15,000 of whom were placed in
the camps by the Nazi state, wore pink and the Roma, vagrants and prostitutes wore black. Perhaps the most striking accounts of life
inside Auschwitz are found in the writings of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was incarcerated
at Auschwitz-Monowitz, from February 1944 until the camp was liberated nearly a year
later. In his first account of his time at Auschwitz,
entitled If this is a Man, Levi describes how even those prisoners who were spared the
gas chamber, generally died within three months from exhaustion and malnourishment. Levi’s account is one in which everything
else is effectively stripped away except raw survival. At Auschwitz inmates were woken at 4.30am. If they did not rise swiftly, they were beaten. Sanitation was appalling and clean water was
scarce for even drinking, let alone bathing. Breakfast consisted of tea and coffee, but
rarely food. And this was the preparation for an eleven
hour workday, although it was sometimes longer in summer. Lunch often consisted of little more than
some watery soup, while the evening meal was bread, generally stale, with some cheese and
meat. Prisoners had the option of rationing this
latter allocation, in order to have something to eat for breakfast. Sunday was a day off and the time for a weekly
shower. Some inmates were allowed to receive mail,
but even this small dignity was denied the Jewish occupants of what Dov Kulka called
‘the Auschwitz Hades’. The staff of the camp, which was virtually
all under the jurisdiction of the SS, numbered just over 6,000 people, nearly all of them
men. It is a surprisingly small number, when one
considers the scale of the mass murder which was carried out at Auschwitz. There was a paradoxical element to life there. For instance, Höss resided there with his
wife and young children in a two-storey villa near the Commandant’s office and the administration
building in Camp I. This highlights the fact that for all the
horrors that could be witnessed in certain parts of the camps, in other areas there was
an atmosphere of seeming normality. And this transferred further down the hierarchy. Within Auschwitz I, the main camp, there was
a cinema and a theatre for the staff. Former guards have described it as a ‘small
town’, one with a sports club and where dances were also occasionally held. Other administrators and guards describe how
the initial revulsion at what was occurring at Auschwitz-Birkenau soon gave way to a situation
where they ignored what they were doing and seeing and simply considered themselves to
be cogs in a machine whilst other guards noted, that there was a culture of heavy drinking
amongst the SS stationed there. The wider hierarchy of the Nazi state were
well aware of what was occurring in western Poland. It is relatively clear that Höss had been
given directives, to run the camp in the manner which he did, as early as the summer of 1941
and that these orders evidently came down from Hitler and Himmler as head of the SS. Public attestations to what was occurring
at Auschwitz are plentiful. One of the most famous is surely the so-called
Posen Speeches, two speeches which Himmler made on the 4th and the 6th of October 1943,
in the town hall of Posen or Poznan in Poland. Throughout 1943, Himmler had been conducting
a tour of Central and Eastern Europe to give speeches before regional groups of SS members,
in an effort to raise flagging morale as the German war effort had been hit by severe setbacks. Some of these speeches were recorded and transcribed. And during the Posen Speeches, Himmler quite
clearly states, that the Nazi state is actively conducting a genocidal mass murder of Europe’s
Jews at camps such as Auschwitz. Additionally, knowledge of this extended even
to the less Anti-Semitic and ideological members of the Nazi regime, such as the armaments
minister and architect, Albert Speer, for whom correspondence has recently been unearthed,
which shows that he was fully aware of what Himmler had said in Posen. There is no denying the brutality of life
at Auschwitz and that what was occurring at the death-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was a
poorly kept secret in Nazi Germany. The end results of it, constitute one of the
foremost crimes ever committed by human beings. In total approximately 1.3 million people
were sent to Auschwitz, between 1940 and 1944. Of these, it is estimated that about 1.1 million
were killed, a large proportion within just hours of arriving at the camp. And of the 1.1 million souls who perished
within the sprawling death camp, the overwhelming majority, as many as 960,000 were Jewish. Ethnic Poles who were political dissenters
of some kind, were the second biggest cohort of victims, making up in the region of 75,000
fatalities, while the rest were a mix of Roma, Gypsies and political prisoners from across
Nazi-occupied Europe. And it was not just the deaths which occurred
here which are so abhorrent, but the cold, clinical nature of the way mass murder was
carried out. People were brought to Auschwitz, processed,
gassed to death and then their bodies were dispensed with, all within a matter of hours,
as though it were an administrative exercise in efficiency. Others were experimented on by the crazed
Dr Josef Mengele, while the camp guards engaged in petty acts of sadism, against the small
number of inmates who survived more than a few hours. Throughout all of this, Höss maintained a
clinical efficiency. Individuals who had survived the camps and
were still alive after the war to testify against him, affirmed that when he was seen,
Höss would typically be wearing a stony, emotionless expression. Chillingly, when he was once asked about the
gassing procedure and the use of Zyklon B, Höss is said to have remarked, that they
knew when those inside the gas chamber were dead, a process which took up to 15 minutes,
as they were no longer alive when they stopped screaming. And yet for all his cold, clinical efficiency,
Höss was briefly replaced as Commandant of Auschwitz. Perversely, this was due to two developments,
one being an extra-marital affair he engaged in, with a political prisoner at the camp,
Eleonore Hodys, and the second being an investigation into financial corruption amongst some of
the senior SS officers at Auschwitz. Although Höss was not implicated himself,
the simultaneous scandals ensured that he needed to be briefly replaced. Accordingly between November 1943 and May
1944, he was absent from Auschwitz serving as Chief of Department DI, within the SS Economic-Administrative
Central Office. Through this position, Höss was effectively
placed in one of the senior oversight positions of the entire concentration camp system throughout
Europe. Höss’s move to become the Chief of Department
DI, was theoretically a promotion, but he was soon taking steps to return to Auschwitz,
to oversee perhaps the most disturbing period of the camp’s entire history. In March 1944, in response to efforts by the
Hungarian government to negotiate their surrender with the Allies, Hitler ordered the invasion
of Hungary. And shortly thereafter, Adolf Eichmann, one
of the main orchestrators of the ‘Final Solution’, was sent to the region, to oversee
the murder of the approximately 750,000 Jews living in Hungary. As a result, Höss now arranged for himself
to return to Auschwitz as camp Commandant, to oversee the carnage. Then, during a six month period between the
late spring and the autumn of 1944, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis,
most of them at Auschwitz, with train loads of 3,000 Jews arriving per day during the
summer. Höss was central to the entire operation
and it was even given the codename ‘Aktion Höss’. Eighty-percent of those who arrived at Auschwitz
during these months, were killed the same day that they arrived. Then, in the autumn of 1944, when this process
was drawing to a conclusion, Höss had himself reposted to Ravensburg concentration camp
near Berlin, as the Russians closed in on Auschwitz. The horror of what was occurring at Auschwitz
and Höss’s centrality to it, was not going to remain unknown to the wider world for much
longer. Even as the scale of the murders at the camp
was accelerating, the course of the war was shifting dramatically against Nazi Germany. While the first three years of the conflict
had seen a succession of victories for Hitler and his allies, the decision to invade Russia
in 1941 changed all of this. That winter, the German advance stalled outside
Moscow and several other Russian cities, just as the United States was entering the war
on the side of the Allies, after an unprovoked attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour
by the Empire of Japan. In tandem, the Axis were largely defeated
in North Africa during the course of 1942, laying the way for the US and Britain to open
a southern front in Sicily, in the summer of 1943. A final cataclysmic conflict between the Russians
and the Germans played out around the city of Stalingrad in the autumn and winter of
1942. When the snows melted there, early in 1943,
the German Sixth Army had been destroyed and the Russians were on their way west towards
Berlin. It was now only a matter of when, not if,
they would push into Poland and reach Auschwitz and with the opening of a new front by the
western Allies in France in the summer of 1944, the Russian advance in the east accelerated. The Allies had information about what Höss
and his underlings had perpetrated in western Poland. Throughout the camp’s history, there had
been several escape attempts. One of these on the 10th of April 1944 by
two Slovak Jews, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, was successful, and after a two week odyssey
across Poland, the pair made it to Slovakia where they made contact with the Slovakian
resistance movement. And there, they were able to give a complete
report of what was occurring at Auschwitz, including the schematics of the camp, information
which was subsequently passed on to the Western Allies. It was also proposed at this time, that Auschwitz
should be bombed by the Allies and it remains a source of some controversy, that the United
States failed to do so, the American military high command having considered it and deemed
the concentration camps there, a target which would divert too many resources away from
the bombing campaign in Western and Southern Europe. Had the Allies bombed the camps, it might
have prevented or at least slowed, the mass murder of nearly half a million Hungarian
Jews who were annihilated in a six month campaign after the Germans occupied the country in
March 1944. The Allies knew what they would find at Auschwitz
when they reached there in 1945. Auschwitz was finally liberated on the 27th
of January 1945. As the Soviet armies rampaged westwards across
Poland in the late autumn and early winter of 1944, Höss and the other camp commanders
had gradually began abandoning the camp, Höss electing to take up a position in another
camp close to Berlin. Death was the creed of the place until the
very end. One of the last acts undertaken by the camp
authorities, was to lead 60,000 prisoners on a death march, on the 18th of January 1945,
to Wodzisław Śląski. And roughly a quarter of these, some 15,000
people, died during the journey, either from starvation and the winter cold, or by simply
being executed by their captors. Then, those who survived the journey, were
placed on freight trains to be ferried westwards to other concentration camps, further back
from the front lines. When the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz on the
27th,, they found just 7,650 prisoners, virtually all of whom were sick, malnourished or starving. Unsurprisingly, the reaction of the Soviet
troops was one of being startled. Primo Levi would later write, that their faces
spoke of “the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have
been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist.” Those who were still alive, were held for
medical treatment for days thereafter. As we have seen, Höss had relocated close
to Berlin in the autumn of 1944, long before the Russians reached Auschwitz. Here, in addition to oversight of the Ravensburg
concentration camp near Berlin, he had some responsibility for the wider camp system,
throughout those portions of Central Europe which were still under Nazi control. Yet when the final order came from Himmler,
to initiate the murder of the remaining inmates of Europe’s camps, Höss lacked the resources
to be able to implement the order, although there is no doubt, that he would have done
so, had he been able to. Meanwhile, the Third Reich was entering its
final stages. In the early spring of 1945, the Russians
had begun to penetrate into eastern Germany and surrounded Berlin, while the western Allies
barrelled into the Rhineland and headed towards Munich and Berlin themselves. Eventually on the 30th of April 1945, with
Berlin surrounded, Hitler killed himself in his bunker in the Reich Chancellery, in the
centre of the capital. Just over a week later, on the 8th of May,
Germany surrendered in what became known as Victory in Europe, or VE Day. Now the war was over in Europe. It remained, to apprehend those who had been
responsible for it and for the terrible crimes which were committed during it. In the final days of the conflict, Höss met
with his superior within the SS, Himmler. The pair had become close acquaintances during
the course of the war, but Höss later testified that the meeting had left him feeling disheartened. Himmler proposed that all members of the SS
should disguise themselves as standard members of the German army, the Wehrmacht, and await
the outbreak of a Third World War, which Himmler believed would follow soon after the end of
the Second. Höss was indignant at the suggestion, but
treated it as an order from his superior. Consequently, he quickly acquired the official
papers of a member of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, and went into hiding on Sylt
Island, off the coast of north-western Germany, near the border with Denmark. He was captured here some time afterwards,
by some British soldiers, but they failed to accurately identify him and Höss, who
claimed that he was a farmer who had been forced to join the German navy, was allowed
to go free. Thereafter, he managed to escape detection
by assuming the identity of ‘Fritz Lang’ a German farmer and gardener in the region. And he was not alone. All over Germany, high and mid-ranking members
of the Nazi Party and the SS, were adopting disguises and aliases in an effort to escape
capture and prosecution by the Allies. Many of these individuals were able to escape
detection for months or even years, and then many of them, such as the notorious participants
in the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, were able to migrate overseas to
South America, where these Nazi war criminals, often managed to escape prosecution for years
or even forever. But this was not the case with Höss. In early 1946, Rudolf’s wife Hedwig was
apprehended by British soldiers, along with some of their children. She was eventually coerced into providing
information as to her husband’s whereabouts, when the soldiers assaulted the Höss’s
son Klaus. As a result of this information, the British
Field Security Police were able to apprehend Höss, on the 11th of March 1946, at Gottrupel
near the German-Danish border, ten months after the conclusion of the war. He initially tried to bite into a cyanide
pill to kill himself before he was captured, but after this failed, he tried to deny his
identity. In this instance, he was betrayed by his wedding
ring, which he was still wearing and which had his name inscribed on the inside. In a fitting development, the team of British
Police which apprehended Höss, was led by Hanns Alexander, a German Jew whose family
had relocated to Britain in 1936 to escape persecution by the Nazis. Following his arrest, Höss was initially
imprisoned in a former army barracks at Heide, in the northern province of Schleswig-Holstein. From there, he was taken south to the main
British centre for the interrogation of German war criminals in the town of Minden. He was quickly subpoenaed to appear as a witness
for the defence of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Central Security Office
between 1943 and 1945 and the successor to Reinhard Heydrich who had organised the Wannsee
Conference, at which the Final Solution was decided upon as Reich policy in January 1945. Kaltenbrunner was amongst the first group
of individuals to face charges at the war crimes tribunals, which the Allies were holding
in the city of Nuremburg. And Höss testified there in April 1946. He was entirely unapologetic for his crimes
and even appears to have inflated the numbers of those who passed through the gates of Auschwitz
and were murdered there during his time as Commandant of the camp. He gave precise answers to the questions put
to him and did not skirt the fact that well in excess of a million people had been killed
at Auschwitz. He also did not seek to protect anyone, including
Kaltenbrunner, on behalf of whose defence he had been called, nor did he try to evade
responsibility himself. The only evasion he attempted, was when he
stated that he had been following Himmler’s express orders as head of the SS. No sooner had Höss been captured, than the
Polish government petitioned to have him extradited to Poland, so that he could stand trial and
face justice in the country where Auschwitz stood and where Höss had overseen the murder
of, in excess of one million people, a huge number of them, Polish citizens. This request was granted and Höss was sent
to Poland on the 25th of May 1946. A Supreme National Tribunal had been established
in Poland, following the liberation of the country by the Russians, with the purpose
of trying major Nazi war criminals who had primarily operated in Poland between 1939
and 1945. The proceedings against Höss opened in Warsaw
on the 11th of March 1947, to widespread international interest. He faced two main charges: being a member
of a criminal organisation, as the Nazi regime and the SS were now branded, and acting as
the Commandant of Auschwitz, from the 1st of May 1940, through to October 1943 and again
between the early summer and late autumn of 1944. The second charge included attendant charges,
of having been complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, as well
as the moral and psychological abuse of many others as well as the profaning of the bodies
of the dead. The trial lasted for just under three weeks. During it, experts on the Holocaust and Nazi
and SS policy, as well as former prisoners from Auschwitz, and even some staff members
from the camp, were summoned to take the stand and testify against Höss. The Commandant of Auschwitz behaved much as
he had the previous year at the trial at Nuremburg. He provided precise, unemotional answers to
the accusations made against him and displayed no remorse for his critical role in the murder
of over a million people. He did try to depict himself at times, as
someone who was simply obeying orders in a hierarchy of officers, but he seemed resigned
to facing the maximum sentence possible for his crimes. He also made a wholly illusory distinction,
between those who had been gassed and cremated at Auschwitz and those who had died from starvation
or disease, as though, those who had run the camp were somehow not responsible for the
deaths of those who starved to death or became seriously ill within the camps. The trial lasted for less than three weeks
and concluded on the 29th of March 1947. Four days later, on the 2nd of April, Rudolf
Höss was sentenced to death by hanging. Höss’s final days were spent preparing
his autobiography, which he had first been instructed to begin writing by the British,
after he was captured in Germany. Autobiographies are usually written by individuals
who wish to extol their achievements in life and are typically intended to be read by individuals,
who might feel some modicum of admiration for the author. This one is very different in this respect,
presenting an account of Höss’s own life and also extensive details of other senior
members of the SS, whom Höss knew and worked with, notably Himmler and Theodor Eicke, whom
he had first worked under at Sachsenhausen. Yet despite what we may make of the man himself,
the autobiography has a utility for the historian, as it is a relatively accurate document. Much as he had done when questioned at trial,
at both Nuremburg and in Warsaw, Höss made no effort to disguise the truth of what had
occurred at Auschwitz and his role in it. As such, we have in his autobiography a first-hand
account of how the Holocaust was carried out at its very epicentre and by one of its leading
protagonists. Having first been published in Polish, it
was soon translated into German and English and has been re-printed in numerous editions
since. Höss would not have to wait long, between
the announcement of his sentence on the 2nd of April and the execution of it; just two
weeks to be precise. And shortly before his death, on the 10th
of April, the man who had once been viewed as a potential priest by members of his religious
family returned to the Roman Catholic Church and received the Sacrament of Penance. He also asked for permission to send a farewell
letter to his family and to return his wedding ring to his wife. Additionally, he was psychologically evaluated,
although his examiner, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert, could only conclude
that Höss was somebody who could appear socially normal but who was almost totally lacking
in any capacity for empathy towards others. Four days before his sentence was carried
out, Höss sent a message to the state prosecutor, in which he claimed to have realised that
his actions were wrong. Similar thoughts suffuse his final letters
to his family. His execution was carried out on the morning
of the 16th of April 1947. Perhaps fittingly, Höss was hung just a few
dozen yards from the villa where he and his family had lived for several years in Camp
1 at Auschwitz, near the first crematorium that was built there. At 8.10am he was pronounced dead by the court
doctor. And what of Auschwitz itself, the place at
which Höss oversaw so much death? Surprisingly, the liberation of the camp in
January 1945, did not generate much international media attention that spring. And it was only with the liberation of camps
such as Dachau by the western Allies, that the camp system became known to the wider
world. But in the years that followed, Auschwitz
became the primary symbol of the Holocaust, a result of the camp’s high death toll and
also due to the survival of many witnesses, who could attest to what had happened there. In particular the writings of figures such
as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel in the post-war years, provided first-hand accounts of what
had occurred in the Polish camp between 1942 and 1944. A museum was quickly opened there in the aftermath
of the war, while in 1979, the camp was added to the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. The gates to the camp have become one of the
most ubiquitous images associated with the concentration camp system and the Holocaust
which was carried out within them. In 2005, the UN General Assembly designated
the 27th of January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This day was selected, as it was the date
on which Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. Today the camp is visited by roughly two million
individuals every year. Rudolf Höss is one of several members of
the Nazi regime, who is perhaps less well known to the public, than figures such as
Hitler, Goring, Goebbels and Himmler, but who was nonetheless absolutely central to
the Holocaust. As Commandant of the camp at Auschwitz for
most of the period that it served as a concentration camp, between 1940 and January 1945, he oversaw
the murder of over one million people, most of them Jewish people from Eastern and Central
Europe, but also over 100,000 Polish political prisoners, Soviet Prisoners of War and others
such as Gypsies and the Roma people. Auschwitz became the centre of the Holocaust,
the place where approximately 1.1 million people were killed in gas chambers and then
quickly had their bodies burned in the crematoria. It was here, that over half of the 750,000
Jews of Hungary were killed, in just a few short months in the summer and autumn of 1944. Only the concentration camps of Treblinka
and Belzec in eastern Poland saw comparable levels of mass murder, with approximately
800,000 and 600,000 people killed here, though over a shorter time period than at Auschwitz. Moreover, the killing at Auschwitz was widely
known about within the Nazi regime, from Hitler and Himmler down to the regional officers
who ran the SS. Today its horror is vividly attested to, by
writers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Höss himself is an enigmatic character. He was certainly committed ideologically to
the Nazi regime and its Anti-Semitism. He grew up in a military family and became
a soldier in the First World War, when he was little more than a teenager. Thereafter he was almost always surrounded
by violence, from the Freikorps of the early 1920s, through the Nazi Party in its early
days, prison and then the SS. Having been assigned to Dachau in the mid-1930s
he would spend the rest of his life, administering concentration camps, first Dachau, then Sachsenhausen,
and then Auschwitz. Perhaps he is the personification of what
Hannah Arendt would later call ‘the banality of evil’, an individual who could run a
machine of mass murder such as Auschwitz as though it were an exercise in efficiency. He seems to have been capable of doing so,
in the end, not because of any discernible sense of hatred, such as Hitler displayed
towards Europe’s Jews, but because he rarely displayed any emotion of any kind, a trait
which was on display in the matter of fact way he conducted himself and answered questions
at Nuremburg and at his own trial in Warsaw. Perhaps that is the most chilling aspect to
Höss, the idea that someone could engage in such mass murder, almost unthinkingly and
without any emotion. What do you think of Rudolf Höss? How much responsibility does he bear for the
Holocaust overall and to what extent was he personally responsible for turning Auschwitz
into the hellish place which it became, during the Second World War? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
