Commandant of Auschwitz: the Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, introduced by Primo Levi, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000 (original English publication 1959, original publication in Polish 1951) ISBN 9781842120248
What to make of this book. Hard to read, this self serving testament from a mostly unrepentant Hoess is a strange catalogue of the events that led him to the gallows in 1947: in fact he completed the text two months before he was executed by the Poles for the crimes he committed at Auschwitz. Along with the description of his activities, this edition includes nine appendices, in which Hoess describes exactly how the Final Solution worked at Auschwitz, and his impressions of many of the key players in the SS with which he had personal dealings.
Hoess was a committed National Socialist: he was jailed for his part in a political murder in the 1920s and spent several years in prison. Like many young men, his life had been brutalised by service in the First World War, and his thoughts of becoming a priest died with his youth. He joined one of the Freikorps that had formed in Germany after the end of the war, and it is this that led him to murder, and the Nazis. His writing about that time is instructive: he had no doubts that murdering someone whom he thought was an informant was the correct thing to do, and was at ease with having to go to prison for the crime. He writes an interesting chapter on prison life, and the character types that are to be found amongst the prisoners and the guards, and how, in some ways, that same milieu existed in the concentration camps.
After being amnestied from prison after nearly five years, Hoess joined an agricultural commune society, where he first came into contact with Himmler. Hoess had married and was settling down to become a farmer when Himmler contacted him and asked him to join the SS and work in concentration camps. He began working at Dachau, then Sachsenhausen, before being moved to Auschwitz to run what was - at the beginning of his tenure - the biggest concentration camp, but not yet an extermination camp.
The change came in 1942, when Hitler decided to rid Europe of the Jews by killing them all. Auschwitz was chosen as one of the sites where this was to take place. It was the place where the Nazis discovered the effectiveness of Zyklon B as a method of killing people, firstly on Russian prisoners, and then on well over one million Jews.
What does Hoess have to say about this? Surprisingly little really. His autobiography is more concerned with logistical problems to do with building the camps, his constant battle with his superiors about hygiene, sanitation and food supplies, and his contant problems with the low calibre of the guards and other staff at the camps. He describes the two competing forces at work at Auschwitz: the Security Section's wish that all Jews be exterminated as soon as possible, and the commercial arm of the SS wanting as many workers as possible for the armaments factories that were set up around the camp. Hoess writes that he tried to convince his superiors that there was no point getting huge numbers of "workers" who were too debilitated to work, and kept requesting material and food to allow for a better life within the camp. This turned out to be impossible, and as Germany began to collapse, so did the camps.
While Hoess is very forthcoming with organisational facts and issues, the morality of what he was doing is barely mentioned. He notes that to disobey orders was not feasible in the SS, but he fails to note that people could and did ask for transfers. As I stated earlier, he was a committed National Socialist, and saw the Jewish race as the enemy of his people: while he states he didn't agree with mass extermination, he "saw the necessity" of it in the quest for final German victory. His worries were more to do with the how, rather than the why, of the Final Solution. He had little to no concerns with each individual human life that was taken under his command, only with trying to meet the conflicting needs of his superiors.
This in the end is what makes reading this book so chilling. That Hoess could divorce himself from the outcome of his efforts is scary, especially knowing that he was not the only one. Yes, there were psychopaths in the SS, and running Germany, but Hoess does not come across as one, yet he was a key figure in the mass murder of millions of people, and could justify his actions to himself, if not to the reader. His evidence, both given at trials where he was a witness, and in this autobiography, are a crucial document illustrating the depravity to which humans can sink when driven by extreme ideology, and how an evil system can continue to exist even when it goes completely against human nature.
Hoess comes across as a man who has lost touch with his humanity: certainly his early life-experiences started him along that path, but it was his commitment to an anti-human ideology that dragged him completely into the mire of immorality and evil. It seems, from his last few paragraphs that while he had come to terms with the fact that he must die, it was only - in his view - because the Nazis had lost.
A vital document from Nazi Germany, Commandant of Auschwitz is, if you can handle it, an insight into the workings of the Nazi mind.
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