Our Dark Side (15 page)

In order to lend his self-image some credibility, Hoess describes his peaceful Catholic childhood in the countryside, where he was brought up by a grotesque and terrifyingly strict father and an incredibly stupid mother.
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He contrasts what he sees as the corrupt urban world with the natural beauty of the Black Forest until the day when, as he was playing on the edge of the forest, he was kidnapped by a band of gypsies. He then de-idealized nature to such a degree that he felt persecuted by its presence. And when his mother becomes worried that he loved his pony too much, he retreats into reading stories about animals to fuel his desire to be a righter of wrongs: ‘My sole confidant was my pony, and I was certain that he understood me. … But love, the kind of love that other children have for their parents … I was never able to give … If I were a victim of injustice, I would not rest until I considered it avenged. In such matters, I was implacable, and was held in terror by my class-mates' (Hoess 2000: 33).

At the age of thirteen, and with his father's encouragement, he thought of taking up the ministry and could already see himself as a missionary in Africa, so anxious was he to destroy idols and to bring the benefits of civilization to the natives. He was then betrayed by his confessor, who broke the secret of the confessional by telling his parents about a minor incident that had occurred at school: he had unintentionally thrown one of his class-mates down the stairs. That was all it took to make him lose his faith and to resolve that he would never again confess his sins to another human being: he would establish a secret, privileged relationship with a higher God. ‘And I … believed that God had heard my prayer, and had approved of what I had done … the deep, genuine faith of a child had been shattered' (Hoess 2000: 35).

In 1915, he joined the army, intent upon making his career as an officer, like his father and grandfather before him. Like many Germans of his generation, who were convinced that they belonged to an elite caste, he saw his country's defeat as a humiliation, and resented the Treaty of Versailles because it had debased the values in which he believed. Now an orphan and driven by a powerful urge to kill, he longed to come face-to-face with ‘the enemy'. It was on the Turkish front in Palestine that be killed, in cold blood and at point-blank range, a Hindu soldier from the Indian Army. As he put it (Hoess 2000: 37): ‘My first dead man! The spell was broken.' And just as he had become a soldier because he hated humanity and felt that he had been betrayed by the Black Forest, his family, religion, and therefore the Christian God, he would, for the rest of his life, love only warriors who identified themselves with gods and who were trained to obey orders.

Already decorated with the Iron Cross, he joined the Freikorps Rossbach and went to fight in the Baltic States. He discovered that ‘the enemy was everywhere' (Hoess 2000: 42) and that the Letts showed the Germans no mercy: ‘On innumerable occasions I came across this terrible spectacle of burned-out cottages containing the charred corpses of women and children. When I saw it the first time, I was dumbfounded. I believed then that I was witnessing the height of man's destructive madness' (Hoess 2000: 42–3).

And yet his life would take him to even greater ‘heights'. He admired the Freikorps above all else. These were Hitler's future battalions. In a Germany that had been bled white and that was ravaged by anti-Semitism, they recruited the dregs of the Kaiser's old army, the unemployed, men seeking adventure and revenge, the destitute and the mediocre, or in other words a whole people that was trying to bring about an inversion of the Law that would give them the coherence of a new normative order based upon murder, death and abjection.

In 1922, Hoess joined the National-Socialist Party. A year later, he committed his first political murder by killing a Communist primary schoolteacher called Walter Kadow, who was suspected of having betrayed a German patriot to the French. He was sentenced to ten years in prison but denied that his own country's courts had the right to judge him. After all, the courts were packed with foreigners, Jews and Communists. In prison, Hoess therefore saw himself as a victim, and took advantage of his time in the Brandenburg prison to prepare, without any scruples and in all innocence, for his future career in genocide.

With infinite pleasure, he learned over the next four years, to classify the prison population and to organize it into a hierarchy. When he came into contact with the ‘elite' of the criminal fraternity of Berlin, he learned the ‘real meaning of life': submit to the most stupid rules, never accept any favourable treatment, never show weakness and hold any attempt to improve conditions in prison to public obloquy. Released as a result of an amnesty, and unable to live except under the yoke of a disciplinary community, he joined the Artamanen. The sect has set itself the task of establishing model farms in the heart of the German countryside. Here, humans of the master race could at last learn to live with their animal friends and have no contact with impure men. It was here that Hoess met the woman who was to become his wife, and who would give him five children without ever understanding precisely what her husband was doing in Auschwitz. Once more, we see the stupidity that was so convincingly denounced by Flaubert.

In 1934, and with Himmler's support, Hoess began to rise through the ranks of the SS. He joined the Waffen SS and then became a member of the
Totenkoptverband
(Death's Head Unit). He eventually became a
Blockführer
in Dachau, which was commanded by the sinister Theodor Eicke, and remained there until 1938. He learned the torturer's trade with enthusiasm, convinced that, having been interned himself and feeling immense compassion for the prisoners, he owed it to himself to look like the most ferocious of men to them.

And in order to prove that he was up to his task, he scrupulously observed the behaviour of the guards, identifying the perverse who felt no pity and were capable of the worst of crimes, the indifferent who obeyed orders, and the kindly who allowed themselves to be taken in by the detainees. He deduced that the best way to improve conditions in the camps was to ensure that the most perverse guards should be given rapid promotion; this would lead to a tenfold improvement in the efficiency of the executions, punishments and tortures.

While he defended the most perverse guards, Hoess developed a particular hatred for other perverts, carefully observed their behaviour and arranged them into a hierarchy. This made it easier to send them to their death. One day, he had dealings with a Rumanian prince who was obsessed with sex. He was always masturbating and was both a fetishist and an invert. His body was covered in tattoos. Hoess took special pleasure in humiliating and observing him. The man was reluctant to get undressed because he did not want anyone to see that the whole of his body was tattooed with obscene pictures. And when Hoess, who was himself a voyeur, asked him about the origins of this ‘picture-book', the Rumanian told him that ‘he had acquired these tattooings in every sort of seaport, both in the old world and the new' (Hoess 2000: 94).

In order to reduce him to even greater despair and to make him suffer even more, Hoess forced him to work in atrocious conditions. The man died a few weeks later. Convinced that the Rumanian had died from his sexual vice and not the abominable treatment that had been inflicted upon him Hoess asked the
Reichsführer
to summon his mother to her son's deathbed. He describes (Hoess 2000: 95) the relief she felt: ‘The mother said that his death was a blessing, both for himself and for her. She had consulted the most famous medical specialists throughout Europe, but without success … She had even, in her despair, suggested to him that he take his own life, but he lacked the courage to do so. Now at least he would be at peace with himself. It makes me shiver even now when I remember this case.'

Recounting this episode once more allows Hoess to describe himself as one of humanity's benefactors. He basically claims that, thanks to this redemptive murder, he had, acting on his superior's orders, succeeded not only in ridding the earth of a perverse creature but, in his mercy, in obeying the wishes of a mother who was so wretched that she wanted to get rid of a son who could not be cured. Hoess actually dared to claim that the humiliation he had undergone freed his victim from a fate that was unworthy of him. That is why he shivers at the idea that, without his vigilance, such a vile sub-human creature might have been able to pursue his wretched existence: he had to be exterminated because the desire for extermination came from him and not his killer.

Four years later, Hoess was transferred to Sachsenhausen and promoted to
Haptsturmführer
. Convinced that it was his duty to repress any qualms he may have felt, he deliberately hardened himself to his task. As he became more familiar with the logistics of the carceral world – he improved its efficiency, accounting procedures and productivity – and became more unspeakable, the more he felt that he had joined a chosen race, and the more he enjoyed obeying orders. He now had to deal with other internees who had been designated ‘enemies of Germany' because of their pacifism: Jehovah's Witnesses.

And as it was his job to massacre them by the thousand, he praised their qualities and described them as conscientious workers who loved punishment and prison. He enjoyed watching them sing as they faced the firing squad. This proved, he says (Hoess 2000: 89), that their desire to be exterminated was so great that they were willing to dehumanize themselves in order to be with their God:

On 4 May 1940, Hoess was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. He remained there until 11 November 1943, which gave him time to implement the Final Solution and, acting on Karl Fritzsch's suggestion, to invent a new form of extermination: gassing by putting tablets of crystals of prussic acid (Zyklon B) into the ventilation shafts of the gas chambers.
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In November 1943, he was appointed head of the political section of the Camps Inspectorate (WVHA). His family remained in Auschwitz until the summer of 1944. He subsequently supervised the organization of the Final Solution and then the evacuation of the prisoners before the Soviet troops reached the camp.
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As observant as ever, and despite the unpleasant nature of the enormous task he had to perform, he continued to classify the detainees on the basis of pre-defined categories corresponding, more or less, to those symbolized by the famous triangles: red for politicals, black for asocials, brown for gypsies, green for common criminals, pink for homosexuals and yellow for Jews.
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While he regarded Russians, Poles and Communists as sub-human, Hoess described the gypsies as the most stupid of his prisoners. The continuous murder of the gypsies was presumably a way of exorcizing the terror the gypsies of the Black Forest had once inspired in him. They did not understand, he claims, why they were there: ‘Although they were a great source of trouble to me at Auschwitz, they were nevertheless my best-loved prisoners – if I may put it that way … I would have taken great interest in observing their customs and habits if I had not been aware of the impending horror, namely the Extermination Order' (Hoess 2000: 128).

The worst of all Hoess's prisoners were of course the Jews, even though he claimed never to have felt any hostility towards them. He even went so far as to criticize Julius Streicher's pornographic anti-Semitism which, in his view, made a mockery of ‘serious' anti-Semitism.
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He describes the Jews as wretched creatures who could easily have fled Germany rather than cluttering up the camps and forcing the poor SS to exterminate them. Being the personification of evil and the most perverse of the perverse, the Jews were, according to Hoess's classification, responsible for the hatred they inspired, and therefore for the need to kill them. Horrified by such perversion, he describes (Hoess 2000: 129) how ‘a Jew had the nail drawn from his big toe by one of the prisoner nurses in exchange for a packet of cigarettes, so that he might get into the hospital'.

Not content with accusing victims who were living in an extreme situation of having sole responsibility for the tortures they inflicted upon themselves in order to survive, Hoess introduced sub-categories into his classification. Some Jews were even filthier than others: Jewish women, who were more depraved than the men, Jewish intellectuals, who were capable of corrupting other Jews in order to escape their common fate, and, finally, the
Sonderkommando
, who were the worst of all because they organized the extermination of their brothers and, especially because they had learned to outwit the vigilance of even the best-trained dogs, and to prevent them from acting as killers. For Hoess, the
Sonderkommando
were therefore the incarnation of pure evil. More perverse than the perverse – and therefore more Jewish than other Jews in the hierarchy of abjection – they were the real agents of their co-religionists' extermination and, worse still, the masters of the animal kingdom.

In his confession, Hoess describes his personal life, but carefully omits all mention of the sexual relationship he had with a woman wearing the green triangle and of how he tried to kill her when she became pregnant.
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Puritanical and virtuous, Hoess neither drank nor smoked and wore a modest tunic. He loved his wife, who was a great comfort to him in his moments of anguish, even though she did not understand what was happening outside the little house where they lived with their children. Overcome by sadness at night, he would seek refuge with the horses in the stables. Throughout his entire experience of the Final Solution, he was careful to give his children a good education and surrounded them with their favourite pets: ducks, grass snakes and cats. His domestic servants – a gardener and a cook – were prisoners. When his wife received guests, she procured food illegally and without paying for it. Narrow-minded and completely stupid, Hoess was, according to Eichmann himself, unable to understand the complexity of extermination: ‘He was not a ferocious, cruel and narrow-minded camp commandant. No, he was a man who was accustomed to judging himself, and who liked to account for what he was doing' (cited Poliakov 1964: 186).