Commandant of Auschwitz

by Rudolf Hoess

  The first organized act was the boycott of Jewish enterprises as early as April 1933, and thereafter a series of laws was passed which in effect removed the Jews from every department of public life, from the civil service, from the professions, from education, and from the services.

  The spearhead of this anti-Semitic attack was “Jew-baiter Number One,” as Julius Streicher styled himself, whose duty it was to fan the Germans’ postwar dislike of Jews into a burning hatred and to incite them to the persecution and extermination of the Jewish race. He published a scurrilous pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper called Der Stürmer in which the most incredible nonsense about the Jews was printed. It might be wondered how anyone could even read such absurdities, but they did; and the poison spread, as it was meant to, throughout the whole nation until they were willing and ready to support their leaders in the policy of mass extermination upon which they had embarked. By 1938 pogroms were commonplace, synagogues were burned down, Jewish shops were looted, collective fines were levied, Jewish assets were seized by the State, and even the movement of Jews was subjected to regulations. Ghettos were established and Jews were forced to wear a yellow star on their clothing.

  A few months before the outbreak of war this menacing German Foreign Office circular must have clearly pointed out the course of future events to all but those who did not wish to see it. “It is certainly no coincidence that the fateful year of 1938 has brought nearer the solution of the Jewish question simultaneously with the realization of the idea of Greater Germany… The advance made by Jewish influence and the destructive Jewish spirit in politics, economy, and culture, paralyzed the power and the will of the German people to rise again. The healing of this sickness among the people was, therefore, certainly one of the most important requirements for exerting the force which, in the year 1938, resulted in the joining together of Greater Germany in defiance of the world.”[10]

  The persecution of the Jews in the countries invaded by Germany far transcended anything that had come before, for the Nazis’ plan of extermination was not to be confined to the Reich. Its only boundary was the limit of opportunity, and as the flood of German conquest rushed ever forward into other lands, so more and more Jews became engulfed in its cruel waters.

  Steps were taken immediately the Germans had successfully completed the invasion of a foreign country, or had occupied a considerable part of it, to put into force the requirements and restrictions which weise already applicable to Jews in the Reich. The official organ of the SS which was called Das Schwarze Korps, so named after their black uniforms, wrote in 1940, “just as the Jewish question will be solved in Germany only when the last Jew has gone: so the rest of Europe must realize that the German peace which awaits it must be a peace without Jews.” The question now brooked no delay and was regarded by all Gauleiters as of the utmost priority. Indeed, Hans Frank, then Governor General of Poland, made this apologetic note in his diary: “I could not, of course, eliminate all lice nor all Jews in only a year, but in the course of time this end will be attained.”

  When Hoess went to Berlin to receive Himmler’s instructions regarding the speeding up of the “final solution” he was told to go first and inspect the extermination arrangements at Treblinka. This he did two months later and found the methods in use there somewhat primitive. It was accordingly decided that Auschwitz was the most suitable camp for the purpose as it was situated near a railway junction of four lines, and the surrounding country not being thickly populated the camp area could be completely cut off from the outside world.

  Hoess was given four weeks to prepare his plan and told to get in touch with SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann, an official of some importance in Amt 4 of the Reich Security Head Office, known by the initials RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptawt).

  He experienced many administrative difficulties before everything was ready, and it is clear from the account which he has given in this book that red tape has no national boundaries. Meanwhile the numbers of convoys began to increase and as the extra crematoriums would not be completed before the end of the year the new arrivals had to be gassed in temporarily erected gas chambers and then burned in pits at Birkenau, and, as Hoess has himself stated, the smell of burning flesh was noticeable in Auschwitz camp, a mile away, even when the wind was blowing away from it.

  This raises the much debated question, what did the German people know of these things. It has often been suggested that they knew nothing. That probability is as unlikely as its converse, that they knew everything.

  It has been said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” and there is an abundance of evidence that a large number of the Germans knew a great deal about what went on in the concentration camps. There were still more who had grave suspicions and perhaps even misgivings but who preferred to lull their consciences by remaining in ignorance.

  As the shortage of labor grew more acute it became the policy to free German women criminals and asocial elements from the concentration camps to work in German factories. It is difficult to believe that such women told no one of their experiences. In these factories the forewomen were German civilians in contact with the internees and able to speak to them. Forewomen from Auschwitz who subsequently went to the Siemens subfactory at Ravensbrück had formerly been workers at Siemens in Berlin. They met women they had known in Berlin and told them what they had seen in Auschwitz. Is it reasonable to suppose that these stories were never repeated? Germans who during the war indulged in careless talk used to be told: “You had better be careful or you’ll go up the chimney.” To what could that refer but to the concentration camp crematoriums?

  The concentration camp system had been in existence in Germany for several years before the war and many Germans had had friends and relatives confined in the camps, some of whom were subsequently released. From Buchenwald prisoners went out daily to work in Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena. They left in the morning and came back at night. During the day they mixed with the civilian population while at work. Did they never converse, and if they did, was the subject of concentration camps always studiously avoided?

  In many factories where parties from concentration camps worked, the technicians were not members of the armed forces and the foremen were not SS men. They went home every night after supervising the work of the prisoners all day. Did they never discuss with their relatives or friends when they got home what they had seen and heard during the day? And what of the SS executives and guards? It is true that they had all signed statements binding themselves never to reveal to anyone outside the concentration camp service anything which they had seen inside their camp. But is it reasonable to believe that none of them was human enough to break that undertaking? The bully is ever a braggart.

  In August 1941 the Bishop of Limburg wrote to the Reich Ministries of the Interior, of Justice, and of Church Affairs as follows: “About 8 kilometers from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar… is an institute where euthanasia has been systematically practiced for months. Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. The local school children know the vehicle and say, ‘There comes the murder box again.’ The children call each other names and say, ‘You are crazy, you will be sent to the baking ovens in Hadamar.’ Those who do not want to marry say, ‘Marry? Never! Bring children into the world so that they can be put into the pressure steamer?’ You hear the old folks say, ‘Do not send me to a state hospital. After the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn it will be are the old people…’”

  If the local inhabitants knew so much in Hadamar is there any doubt that the inhabitants of Bergen, Dachau, Struthof, and Birkenau knew something of what was happening at their very doors in the Belsen, Dachau, Natzweiler, and Auschwitz concentration camps? Hoess himself said of Auschwitz, “the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all t
he people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at the concentration camps.”

  Day after day trainloads of victims traveled in cattle cars over the whole railway system of the Reich on their way to extermination centers. They were seen by hundreds of railway workers who knew whence they had come and whither they were going.

  Whatever horrors have remained hidden behind the camp walls, such things as these went on in broad daylight and all those Germans who had eyes to see and ears to hear can have been in little doubt of what crimes were being committed in their name throughout the land.

  So, as Hoess himself has written, “by the will of the Reichsführer SS, Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination center of all time.” He considered that Himmler’s order was “extraordinary and monstrous.” Nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to him to be right. He had been given an order, and had to carry it out. “Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not,” he writes, “was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.” Hoess felt that if the Führer himself had given the order for the cold calculated murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children then it was not for him to question its Tightness.

  What Hitler or Himmler ordered was always right. After all, he wrote, “Democratic England also has a basic national concept: ‘My country, right or wrong!’” and what is more, Hoess really considered that was a convincing explanation. Moreover he thought it strange that “outsiders simply cannot understand that there was not a single SS officer who could disobey an order from the Reichsführer SS.”… His basic orders, issued in the name of the Führer, were sacred. They brooked no consideration, no argument, no interpretation—it was not for nothing that during training the self-sacrifice of the Japanese for their country and their Emperor, who was also their god, was held up as a shining example to the SS.

  Nevertheless, despite his training, Hoess appears to have experienced some misgivings, for the first occasion on which he saw gassed bodies in the mass, he has confessed, made him “uncomfortable,” and he “shuddered,” but, on the whole, he and his subordinates preferred this method of extermination to killing by shooting and they were “relieved to be spared those blood baths.”

  In his autobiography the relative merits of these alternative methods of extermination are discussed by Hoess with the same detachment as a farmer might discuss whether it was better to use gassing or the gin trap to rid the countryside of destructive vermin. Nor is the analogy farfetched, for that is exactly how the Master Race regarded the Jews.

  Hoess’s own account of his misdeeds is not only remarkable for what he has described but also for the way in which he has written it. The Nazis, Hoess among them, were experts in the use of euphemisms and when it came to killing they never called a spade a spade. Special treatment, extermination, liquidation, elimination, resettlement, and final solution were all synonyms for murder, and Hoess has added another gem to the collection, “the removal of racial-biological foreign bodies.”

  The horrors described by Hoess are now well known. Many books have been written about them. No new facts of any importance are now disclosed for the first time. Nevertheless, I think that his story should be read for one very good reason. Hoess was a very ordinary little man. He would never have been heard of by the general public had not fate decreed that he was to be, perhaps, the greatest executioner of all time. Yet to read about it in his autobiography makes it all seem quite ordinary. He had a job to do and he carried it out efficiently.

  Although eventually he appears to have realized the enormity of what he did, he nevertheless took pride in doing it well.

  He was, like so many of his fellow fiends, a great family man. So many of these SS men appear to have had a schizophrenic capacity for sentiment and sadism, but that was, doubtless, because the latter was all just part of their job. The stoker, whose duty it was to look after the fires in the concentration camp crematorium, could gather round the Christmas tree with his young children after lunch on Christmas Day, and a few minutes later glance at his watch and hurry away to be in time for the evening shift.

  Hoess was also a lover of animals as were other Nazi villains. One of the officials in Ravensbrück concentration camp, known as “the women’s hell,” carried out the cruelest physical and mental tortures on the women inmates in his charge. When he was convicted by a War Crimes Tribunal in 1947, and sentenced to death by hanging, many of his relatives and friends wrote to say that “dear, kind Ludwig could do no harm to any animal,” and that when his mother-in-law’s canary died he “tenderly put the birdie in a small box, covered it with a rose, and buried it under a rosebush in the garden.” Hoess admits that the extermination of the Jews was “fundamentally wrong,” but that he should have refused to carry out such criminal orders never, for a moment, crossed his mind. Therein lies the warning which his story gives us. That a little bureaucrat like Hoess could, as he himself has written, have become “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich” is a reminder, never to be forgotten, of the appalling and disastrous effects of totalitarianism on men’s minds.

  London

  March 1959

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  In the following pages I want to try and tell the story of my innermost being. I shall attempt to reconstruct from memory a true account of all the important events and occurrences in my life and of the psychological heights and depths through which I have passed.

  In order to give as complete a picture as possible, it is essential that I first return to the earliest experiences of my childhood.

  Until I was six years old, we lived in the remoter outskirts of Baden, in a neighborhood consisting of scattered and isolated farmhouses. The children in the neighborhood were all much older than I and consequently I had no playmates, and was dependent for companionship on grown-up people. I derived little pleasure from this, and tried, whenever possible, to escape their supervision and go off on voyages of solitary exploration. I was fascinated by the immense woods with their tall, Black Forest pines that began near our house. I never ventured to go far into them, however, never beyond a point where I was able, from the mountain slopes, to keep our own valley in sight. Indeed, I was actually forbidden to go into the forest alone, since when I was younger some traveling gypsies had found me playing by myself and had taken me away with them. I was rescued by a neighboring peasant who happened by chance to meet us on the road and who brought me back home.

  A spot that I found particularly attractive was the large reservoir that supplied the town. For hours on end I would listen to the mysterious whisper of the water behind its thick walls, and could never, despite the explanations of my elders, understand what this was. But most of my time I spent in the farmers’ barns and stables, and when people wished to find me it was always there that they looked for me first. The horses particularly delighted me, and I never tired of stroking them and talking to them and giving them tidbits. If I could lay my hands on a brush or a currycomb, I would at once begin grooming them. In spite of the farmers’ anxiety, I would creep between the horses’ legs while I brushed them, and never to this day has an animal kicked or bitten me. Even a bad-tempered bull that belonged to one of the farmers was always most friendly toward me. Nor was I ever afraid of dogs and none has ever attacked me. I would immediately forsake even my favorite toy, if I saw a chance to steal away to the stables. My mother did everything possible to wean me of this love of animals, which seemed to her so dangerous, but in vain. I developed into a solitary child, and was never happier than when playing or working alone and unobserved. I could not bear being watched by anybody.

  Water, too, had an irresistible attraction for me, and I was perpetually washing and bathing. I used to wash all manner of things in the bath or in the stream that flowed through our garden, and many were the toys or clothes that I ruined in this way. This passion for w
ater remains with me to this day.

  When I was six years old we settled in the neighborhood of Mannheim. As before, we lived on the outskirts of the town. But to my great disappointment there were no stables and no cattle. My mother often told me how, for weeks on end, I was almost ill with homesickness for my animals and my hills and forest. My parents did everything in their power at that time to distract me from my exaggerated love of animals. They did not succeed: I found books containing pictures of animals and would hide myself away and dream of my cows and horses. On my seventh birthday I was given Hans, a coal-black pony with sparkling eyes and a long mane. I was almost beside myself with joy. I had a comrade at last. For Hans was the most confiding of creatures, and followed me wherever I went, like a dog. When my parents were away, I would even take him up to my bedroom. Since I was always on good terms with our servants, they accepted this weakness of mine and never gave me away. I had plenty of playmates of my own age where we now lived. We played the games that children play all over the world, and I took part in many a youthful prank. But my greatest joy was to take my Hans into the great Haardt Forest, where we could be entirely alone together, riding for hour after hour without meeting a soul.

  School, and the more serious business of life, had now begun. Nothing happened during these first school years that is of importance to my story. I was a keen student, and used to finish my homework as quickly as possible, so that I might have plenty of free time to wander about with Hans.