Commandant of Auschwitz

INTRODUCTION by Lord Russell of Liverpool

The concentration camp system was in full swing within the Third Reich long before the outbreak of the Second World War, and under Himmler its organization had been perfected, and its methods tried out and practiced upon his fellow countrymen in time of peace.

Within a few weeks of his coming to power in 1933, Hitler introduced what was called Schutzhaft, or protective custody, into the legal system. Under it anyone who showed any signs of active opposition to the new regime could be kept under restraint and supervision, and during the next six years thousands of Germans were thrown into concentration camps for what was euphemistically called “treatment.” Many of them never regained their freedom.

To the Gestapo was entrusted the task of “eliminating all enemies of the Party and National State,” and it was the activities of that organization that supplied the concentration camps with their inmates, and the SS staffed them.

At the outbreak of war there were six concentration camps in Germany containing about 20,000 prisoners. During the next two years many more were set up, some of which are now household names: Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Flossenberg, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravens-brück, and Sachsenhausen.

During the war probably not less than twelve million men, women, and children from the invaded and occupied territories were done to death by the Germans. At a conservative estimate, eight million of them perished in concentration camps. Of these, not less than five million were Jews. The estimated number given by the Prosecution at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals was six million. Of subsequent estimates, one was as low as 4,372,000 made by Professor Frumkin, an expert on “population changes.” Professor Frumkin, however, has publicly stated that this estimate did not include Russia within its present boundaries, and did not take into account some twenty-three million of the population of the Baltic countries, Lithuania, East Prussia, Sub-Carpathia, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the Polish Eastern Provinces. It would not, therefore, necessarily be an exaggeration to say, wrote Professor Frumkin, that over five million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The real number, however, will never be known.

Speaking of this terrible holocaust, Sir Hartley Shawcross, now Lord Shawcross, the chief prosecutor for the United Kingdom at the trial of major war criminals in Nuremberg, said in his closing speech, “Twelve million murders! Two-thirds of the Jews in Europe exterminated, more than six million of them on the killer’s own figures. Murder conducted like some mass-production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Maidanek and Oranienburg.”

To these camps were brought millions from the occupied territories; some merely because they were Jews. Some had been deported as slave labor and were no longer considered fit for work. Had the Germans successfully invaded and occupied the British Isles many thousands of British would have been included in this category. Many of the inmates were Russian prisoners of war, some were victims of the “Bullet Decree,” many were Nacht und Nebel prisoners.[8]

There they were herded together in conditions of filth and degradation, bullied, beaten, tortured, and starved, and finally exterminated through work or “eliminated,” as the Germans called it, by mass execution in the gas chambers.

The deterrent effect of the concentration camp upon the public in Germany before the war was considerable and had been carefully planned.

Originally the veil of secrecy and officially inspired rumors were both employed to deepen the mystery and heighten the dread. There were many who did not know all that went on behind those barbed-wire fences but few who could not guess. It was not intended that this veil of secrecy should ever be wholly lifted. A privileged few were allowed an occasional peep, and the many civilians who were employed in concentration and labor camps must have passed on to their relatives and friends some account of what they saw within.

But Germany’s enemies were never to have real evidence of the crimes committed there, and plans had been made for the destruction of all the camp sites and the “liquidation” of their surviving inmates which only the rapid Allied advance and the sudden collapse of Germany circumvented.

The world has since learned the full tragedy of the story. The survivors have told of their experiences, and the camps themselves have given testimony of the horrors of which their very walls were silent witnesses. Those who were the first to enter these camps will be forever haunted by the horror of what they saw.

One of the worst of these camps was situated just outside the little Polish town of Auschwitz (Oswiecim), about 160 miles southwest of Warsaw and before the war quite unknown outside Poland. Before the end of the war not less than three million men, women, and children had met their death there by gassing and other means. This book is the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess who was commandant of the camp from May 1940 until December 1943.

In the late afternoon of March 16, 1946, two officers of the War Crimes Investigation Unit of the British Army of the Rhine left Headquarters to interview a German war criminal who had been on the wanted list for over eight months. His name was Rudolf Hoess. After his arrest near Flensburg, on the frontier between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, he had been taken to the War Crimes Investigation Center in the historic old town of Minden. The building in which the Center was situated had previously been a German Army detention barracks and was generally known by its odd code name, “Tomato.”

Hoess had previously been in British custody. He had been taken prisoner in May 1945 with hundreds of thousands of other Germans, but as his real identity was not then known he was soon released to go and work on a farm. There he had remained for eight months until at last justice caught up with him.

When the two officers reached “Tomato,” Hoess was brought to them. They did not, however, ask him any questions except to make sure of his identity. The senior of the two had been working on the Auschwitz Camp and other concentration camp cases for many months and had accumulated a great deal of evidence. They needed little, if anything, to complete the picture. Before leaving the Investigation Center, however, to return to Rhine Army Headquarters the officer in charge of the investigation told the former Commandant of Auschwitz exactly what the British already knew about the wholesale exterminations carried out there and of the part he played in them. He then told Hoess in dignified but unmistakable language exactly what he thought about him and those like him, and warned him that in due course he would stand trial by a military court.

Before the interview ended, however, Hoess was asked for one piece of information: how many people had he been responsible for putting to death by gassing during the time when he was the Commandant of Auschwitz? After some thought he finally admitted to two million and signed a statement to that effect. On being asked whether the number was not larger he agreed that the total number of gassings was higher than that, but stated that he had left the camp in December 1943 to take up an SS administrative appointment and was not, therefore, responsible for what happened subsequently.

Hoess’s statement, which was made quite voluntarily, read as follows:

By the time the statement was written and signed it was getting late, and as Hoess was noticeably in need of a bath, a shave, and a change of clothes the Warrant Officer in charge of the Center was instructed to take him away, see that he got all three, and, in addition, that he was given a good meal and some cigarettes. On the following day the two investigation officers returned and a detailed interrogation of Hoess took place. He was extremely co-operative and gave a very full account of his stewardship and displayed an amazing memory for detail. At the end of three or four hours his statement was condensed to eight typewritten pages which he read through and signed. It is noteworthy that this document differs little, and in no material details, from what Hoess later stated in evidence at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals and wrote in his autobiography in Cracow nearly twelve months later. He certainly never sought to hide anything that he had done, and was more prone to exaggerate than understate, for he regarded it as a compliment to his zeal, capacity for work, and devotion to duty to have carried out his gruesome orders with such dispatch and efficiency.

It was on May 1, 1940, that SS Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess was promoted and transferred to Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen where he had held the appointment of Adjutant to the Commandant since 1938. Auschwitz was to be an important camp, principally for the suppression of opposition to the Nazi occupation of Poland, to which the inhabitants of that unhappy country were not taking too kindly. So an efficient commandant had to be found.

Hoess possessed the necessary qualifications. After service in the First World War he had joined the Freiwillige Korps in 1919. This force was raised in that year by a number of desperadoes from the German Army who refused to be bound by the Versailles Treaty and regarded Philip Scheide-mann, who signed it, as a traitor. Their activities were confined to Eastern Germany, principally Silesia and the Baltic Provinces which they called Das Baltikum. The members of this organization committed many acts of sabotage and murder against the lives and property of those whom they considered collaborators with the Allied Commission and the Government of Friedrich Ebert.

It was while he was serving with the Freikorps that Hoess became involved in a brutal political murder and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment by the State Court for the Defense of the Republic, all of which is described by Hoess in this book. He was released five years later and pardoned, and in 1932 joined the NSDAP in Munich. While in command of an SS mounted squadron in Pomerania in 1933 he was noticed during an inspection by Himmler, who thought that his experience and bearing fitted him for an administrative appointment in a concentration camp. From then onward his future was assured. He went in 1934 to Dachau where he started as a Blockführer in the Schutzhaftlager (protective custody camp) and remained there until posted to Sachsenhausen in 1938. In 1941, Himmler inspected Auschwitz and gave instructions that it was to be enlarged and the surrounding swamps drained. At the same time a new camp was established nearby at Birkenau for 100,000 Russian prisoners.

From this time the number of prisoners grew daily although the accommodation for them was unsatisfactory. Medical provisions were inadequate and epidemic diseases became common. In 1941, also, the first intake of Jews arrived from Slovakia and Upper Silesia, and from the first those unfit for work were gassed in a room in the crematorium building.

Later the same year Hoess was summoned to Berlin by Himmler and told that Hitler had ordered the “final solution of the Jewish question” to be put into operation. This was the Nazi term for the Führer’s plan for the total extermination of European Jewry. Persecution of the Jews in the countries which the Nazis invaded and occupied since 1939 had already been on a stupendous scale, but it cannot have taken by surprise anyone who had followed the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 or their Party program. Point four of the program declared: “Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.” This masterpiece of German logic was preached throughout the length and breadth of Germany from the moment of Hitler’s accession to power. The Jews were to be regarded as foreigners and have no rights of German citizenship. It was used by the Nazis as one of the means of implementing their master-race policy.

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 the 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.