Rudolf Höss

Rudolf Höss commanded Auschwitz. He was in command from May 1940 to November 1943 and again briefly in May 1944 to oversee the Hungarian deportations. Around a million people were murdered at Auschwitz under his command, the great majority Jews. He was, more than any other camp commandant, the operational architect of the largest single Holocaust killing site. He was tried by a Polish court in 1947, sentenced to death, and hanged at the Auschwitz main camp on the gallows beside Crematorium I, on the spot where many of his victims had been killed.

The summer 1941 meeting with Himmler

Höss testified at Nuremberg in 1946 about a meeting with Himmler in Berlin in June or July 1941. Himmler, he said, had told him that Hitler had ordered the final solution of the Jewish question and that Auschwitz had been chosen as one of the principal killing sites because of its rail connections and its remote location. Höss was instructed to prepare for the work. The exact date of the meeting has been argued about by historians since, but the substance is not in dispute. Höss’s account places himself at the centre of the decision-making chain at the moment the killing programme was set in motion.

The Zyklon B experiment

Höss authorised the experimental gassing of around 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish political prisoners using Zyklon B in the basement of Block 11 in early September 1941. The experiment was the first systematic use of Zyklon B on human beings. It was conducted, on Höss’s order, to test whether the cyanide-based pesticide could replace the carbon monoxide methods that the regime had been using for the T4 killing of disabled patients. The experiment worked. Höss reported the results to Berlin. Within months Auschwitz was running its own gas chamber operation. The experiment was the engineering origin of the Birkenau gas chambers that would kill around a million people over the next three years.

The construction of Birkenau

Höss commissioned the construction of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) on Himmler’s authorisation in autumn 1941. He oversaw the design of the four gas chamber and crematorium complexes, Crematoria II, III, IV and V, which became operational in spring and summer 1943. He met repeatedly with Himmler at Auschwitz, with Heydrich (until June 1942), and with the contractors building the killing facilities. He met with the IG Farben representatives who had built the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz Monowitz, and with the Topf and Sons engineers who had designed the crematoria. He was personally involved in the technical decisions about the killing apparatus.

Selection on the ramp

Höss did not himself usually conduct the selections on the Birkenau ramp; that was done by a rotating duty roster of SS doctors. He was, however, present at the ramp during many of the major arrival operations. He toured the gas chamber operation regularly. He observed the Sonderkommando handling of the bodies. He met with Himmler at the camp in July 1942 when Himmler attended a gassing in person. The standard image of Höss as a remote administrator who did not see what was happening is wrong on the documentary record. He saw it, repeatedly, over four years.

The Hungarian operation

Höss had been rotated out of Auschwitz in November 1943 and was running the SS concentration camp inspectorate centrally. He was returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 specifically to oversee the Hungarian deportation operation, on the basis that no one else had his experience of running the killing apparatus at full capacity. The peak month of the killing at Auschwitz, June 1944, was conducted under his renewed personal command. Around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported during this period. The crematoria ran continuously through May, June and July, with bodies burned in open-air pyres in the surrounding fields when the ovens could not keep up.

The Nuremberg testimony

Höss was captured by British forces in March 1946 and gave evidence at the Nuremberg trial in April 1946. His testimony was the moment at which the operational scale of the Auschwitz killing entered the public record. He stated, calmly, that around 2.5 million people had been gassed at Auschwitz and another 500,000 had died of disease and starvation, figures that were later revised downward as the documentary record was reconstructed but that, even so, established the scale of the operation in court for the first time. He named the senior figures who had given him orders. He described the procedures. The judges and the prosecutors had not been prepared for a witness of his kind: a commandant who would describe what he had done in detail, without evasion.

The memoirs

Polish prosecutors gave Höss paper and pencil in his cell at Krakow while he was awaiting trial in 1946 and 1947. He wrote his memoirs over several months. The text, published after his death as Commandant of Auschwitz, is one of the central perpetrator documents of the Holocaust. He describes his work at Auschwitz in calm, professional, sometimes regretful prose. He never makes excuses. He also never suggests that he thought what he had done was wrong. He had been given a difficult duty by his Führer and his superior officers and had carried it out as well as he could.

The hanging

Höss was tried in Warsaw in March 1947, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was returned to Auschwitz for the execution. The gallows was erected beside Crematorium I, in the area where many of his early victims had been killed, on the spot still visible to visitors to the Auschwitz I main camp today. He was hanged on 16 April 1947. He was 46.

What he was

Höss was not a sadist, not an ideologue, not particularly intelligent, not particularly stupid. He was a man with a job, who did the job carefully and competently, and who understood himself, to the end, as a soldier who had carried out lawful orders for a country that had subsequently lost the war. The memoirs make clear that he could not, at the moment of his death, articulate any moral framework that would condemn what he had done, even though he was capable of describing it in detail. He is the case of the camp commandant as professional manager. The Holocaust required, and got, men like him in every camp.

See also

Sources

  • Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, World, 1959
  • Höss testimony at Nuremberg, 15 April 1946
  • Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Heinemann, 2013
  • Martin Broszat (ed), Kommandant in Auschwitz, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958
  • USHMM: Rudolf Höss