The Nazi Hunters (11 page)

After World War I, Poland reemerged as an independent state. Most of the Sehn family remained in the southeastern rural region, continuing to make a decent living out of farming. But Jan left for Kraków to study law at the Jagiellonian University from 1929 to 1933, which launched him on his legal career. In 1937, he started working in the investigation branch of the Kraków court. As former colleagues recalled, he immediately demonstrated his “
passion for criminal science.” But the German invasion of Poland that marked the outbreak of World War II two years later meant that he had to put everything on hold.

Sehn stayed in Kraków during the war and found a job working as the “secretary” of an association of restaurants. There is no evidence he was involved with the underground Polish resistance movements or collaborated in any way with the German authorities; he was simply trying to survive the six long years of German occupation. But the other members of his family, who had continued to farm in southeastern Poland, had a very different experience.

Living in a village called Bobrowa, also in southeastern Poland, Jan’s brother Józef made a fateful decision early during the occupation. One of the first actions of the German overlords was to encourage
Volksdeutsche
—Poles of German descent—to register as ethnic Germans. His grandson Arthur, the family historian, discovered the records
that show that Józef promptly registered his whole family: his wife, three sons, and father. By siding with the victors, Józef almost certainly calculated that he was opting to protect himself and his family. Soon, as a
Volksdeutsche
, he was appointed mayor of his village.

When it was evident that Germany was losing the war and its army was in retreat, Józef vanished from the village. Even his three sons did not know what happened to him then. “
The children were not allowed to know,” recalls one of them, who is also named Józef. Two of the boys were sent to Kraków, staying with their uncle Jan and his wife for several months. Their father, as they would only learn years later, had fled to northwestern Poland, changed his name, and worked as a forester in an isolated community—“as far from civilization as possible,” as Arthur Sehn puts it—until his death in 1958. He was even buried under his assumed name. For the rest of his life, he had feared that Poland’s new rulers would punish him as a collaborator.

Although Józef and Jan Sehn had taken different paths in life at an early age, Jan clearly knew about his brother’s role during the occupation. His willingness to take in two of his sons near the end of the war indicated as much. They also had a sister who appears to have had indirect contacts with her fugitive brother, and she probably kept Jan updated about him.

Jan and his wife were childless, but that didn’t make them easy surrogate parents. “He was very stern,” his nephew Józef recalls. When Jan was informed by his wife about some alleged misbehavior, he didn’t hesitate to administer old-fashioned punishment—with his belt. But he also helped his nephew get a temporary job in one of Kraków’s restaurants and provided him shelter when he and his brother needed it most.

Even before the war was completely over, Jan began his quest for incriminating evidence against the Germans. Maria Kozłowska, a younger neighbor of his in Kraków who later worked at the Institute of Forensic Research, which he headed from 1949 until his death, recalls that in Wrocław—or Breslau, as the city was called before it was incorporated into Poland— “
he looked for documents among the smoldering ruins. He traveled all over Poland looking for evidence.”

Kozłowska and others who later worked with Sehn always assumed that it was his passion for law and justice that spurred him to gather the evidence of Nazi crimes with such determination and persistence, constructing the cases that would send many of the perpetrators to the gallows.
He was fully dedicated to helping the new Poland recover from the devastation of the occupation and the loss of roughly six million people, representing a staggering 18 percent of its prewar population; of those who perished, about three million were Polish Jews, nearly 90 percent of the total of that group.

All of those were good reasons why he was so dedicated to his mission, but not the full explanation. While Sehn’s colleagues knew that his family had distant German roots—the last name itself was a clear indication of that—they had no reason to consider this to be a motivating factor. The ancestry of many Poles was similarly mixed, which made his family situation look like nothing unusual—so long as the recent family history went unnoticed. Kozłowska knew he had a sister in Wrocław, but didn’t know anything about the brother who had disappeared. She certainly did not know about his personal odyssey during the occupation and after Germany’s defeat.

That was no accident. Arthur, the family historian, is reluctant to make any definitive statement about his great-uncle’s motives, but he suspects that the secret he kept about his brother’s side of the family—which surely would have been known to the new communist rulers of Poland—was also a factor in his passionate quest for justice. “Maybe he was extra eager to be on the right side and point the finger,” he says. “It might be perceived as somewhat opportunistic, but maybe his motives were clear and pure.”

Whatever his motives, Jan Sehn soon produced dramatic results.

• • •

Rudolf Höss served as the commandant of Auschwitz from the time he oversaw its creation in 1940 until late 1943.
A former army barracks located near the town of Oświęcim, or Auschwitz in German, the main camp received its first transport of 728 Poles in June 1940. These were
Polish political prisoners, usually affiliated with resistance movements. In most cases, they were Catholics, since the deportation of Jews had not yet begun.

As former political prisoner Zygmunt Gaudasiński pointed out, “The camp was created to destroy the most valuable part of Polish society, and the Germans partly succeeded in this.” Some prisoners, like Gaudasiński’s father, were shot; torture was commonplace, and the early mortality rate was very high. For the early prisoners who did not quickly perish, their chances for survival began to improve once they latched on to jobs—in the kitchens, warehouses, and other places—that offered them shelter on a daily basis. Of the 150,000 Polish political prisoners who were sent to Auschwitz, about 75,000 died there.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet POWs were dispatched to Auschwitz. SS chief Heinrich Himmler envisaged the influx of a huge number of POWs and drew up plans for the camp’s expansion by building a second large complex at Birkenau, two miles away. The first POWs were put to work constructing the new facilities in conditions that horrified even the hardened Polish political prisoners. “They were treated worse than any other prisoners,” said Mieczysław Zawadzki, who served as a nurse in a sick bay for POWs. Fed only turnips and tiny rations of bread, they collapsed from hunger, exposure, and beatings. “The hunger was so bad that they cut off the buttocks from the corpses in the morgue and ate the flesh,” Zawadzki recalled. “Later, we locked the morgue so they couldn’t get in.”

With most Soviet POWs dying quickly and no subsequent influx, Himmler instructed Höss to prepare the camp to play a major role in the Final Solution for European Jews. Coordinated by Adolf Eichmann, transports of Jews from all over Europe transformed Auschwitz-Birkenau into the most international of the camps. And while it continued to be both a complex of labor camps and a death camp, it soon became the largest single death factory of the Holocaust, with Birkenau’s gas chambers and crematoriums working to full capacity. More than one million victims, about 90 percent of whom were Jews, perished there.

In late 1943, Höss was reassigned to the Concentration Camp Inspectorate,
which meant stepping down as commandant of Auschwitz. But soon he was sent back to Auschwitz to prepare for the arrival of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944.
He was so successful in carrying out this operation against the largest national group of Jews dispatched to Auschwitz (most Polish Jews had been killed in other death camps before Auschwitz-Birkenau became fully operational) that his superiors and colleagues dubbed the operation
Aktion Höss.

In April 1945 when the Red Army fought its way into Berlin and Hitler committed suicide, Höss would write later, he and his wife, Hedwig, thought about following in their leader’s footsteps. “
With the Führer gone, our world had gone,” he lamented. “Was there any point in going on living?” He had obtained poison, but then claimed that they decided against this course for the sake of their five children. Instead, they traveled to northern Germany, separating there to avoid detection.
Taking the name and papers of Franz Lang, a junior seaman who had died, Höss reported to the Naval Intelligence School on the island of Sylt.

When British forces captured the school, they moved the staff to an improvised camp north of Hamburg. As they singled out the senior officers who were then dispatched to prison, the victors paid little attention to the man they believed was Franz Lang. Höss was soon released, and started working on a farm in the village of Gottrupel near the Danish border. For eight months he lived in a barn there, working diligently and arousing no suspicion among the locals. Since Hedwig and the children were living in St. Michaelisdonn, about seventy miles away, he was able to maintain sporadic indirect contact with them.

That proved to be Höss’s undoing.
In March 1946, Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who escaped to London before the war and then served in the British Army as a war crimes investigator, had picked up the family’s trail and was convinced that they knew where the former commandant was hiding. Local British forces had been monitoring the family already, and they had seen a letter from Höss to his wife, prompting them to bring her to a local prison. Alexander grilled Hedwig about her husband, but she refused to tell him anything. Keeping the mother in custody, he went to see the children. They, too, refused to say where their
father was hiding, even when the frustrated Alexander threatened to kill their mother if one of them didn’t volunteer the information.

Alexander had enlisted in the British Army as soon as the war broke out, eager to help in the fight against the country of his birth. As a Nazi hunter representing his new country after the fighting was over, he was not about to give up so easily. He decided to take Klaus, the twelve-year-old son, who was the most visibly shaken by Alexander’s threats, back to the same prison where his mother was being held, keeping them in separate cells.

At first, Hedwig remained defiant, claiming that her husband had died. But Alexander played a final card to break her. As a train was driven near the prison so that she would clearly hear it, he told her that Klaus was about to be loaded aboard and sent to Siberia—and she would never see him again. Within a few minutes, Hedwig gave up her husband’s location and the name he was using. Alexander then led the raiding party that captured him in the barn late in the evening of March 11. If there were any doubts about Höss’s true identity, his wedding ring banished them. After Alexander threatened to cut off his finger if he did not give up the ring, the former commandant handed it over. The inscription read “Rudolf” and “Hedwig.”

Alexander, like so many of the early Nazi hunters, wasn’t quite ready to let the system of military justice take over. He deliberately stepped away from his men, telling them that he would be back in ten minutes and needed Höss in the car “undamaged” at that point. The soldiers knew they had the green light for some payback, which they quickly delivered, pummeling him with ax handles. By the time it was over, Höss was stripped of his pajamas and beaten.
Wrapped in a blanket without any shoes or socks, he was loaded into a truck and transported back to town. There, he was made to wait while Alexander and his men celebrated their success in a bar. As a final indignity, Alexander took off Höss’s blanket and ordered him to walk naked across the square, which was still covered with snow, to the prison.

After his initial interrogations by the British, the Allies decided that Höss should be sent south to Nuremberg, where the main trial had been
under way for four months. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who was among those who was allowed to question the new arrival in early April, was struck by what he saw when he entered his isolation cell. “
He sat with both feet in a tub of cold water, his hands clasped in his lap, rubbing them together,” he noted. “He said he had frostbite for two weeks and that soaking his feet in the cold water relieved the aching.”

This somewhat pathetic forty-six-year-old man was suddenly finding himself much in demand as the trial of the more senior Nazi officials continued. Even in a facility that now housed some of the greatest criminals of all time, the former commandant of Auschwitz attracted special attention, particularly among those charged with examining the mental state of Hitler’s executioners.

• • •

Whitney Harris, a member of the American prosecution team, elicited Höss’s confession without any difficulty. According to Harris, Höss was “
quiet, unprepossessing and fully co-operative.” Right at the start of that confession, he dropped a bombshell, estimating “
that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there [at Auschwitz] by gassing, and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000.”

Höss later told Goldensohn that Eichmann had reported those figures to Himmler, but they could be “too high.”
In fact, those numbers would prove to be inflated, although of course the real totals of Auschwitz’s victims—now generally believed to be between 1.1 million and 1.3 million—were horrific enough. In any case, when Höss testified before the International Military Tribunal, repeating the numbers he had provided in his confession to Harris, he stunned everyone in attendance, even the top Nazis in the dock. Hans Frank, Hitler’s former governor general of occupied Poland, told the American psychiatrist G.M. Gilbert: “
That was the low point of the entire trial—to hear a man say out of his own mouth that he had exterminated 2
¹
/
₂
million in cold blood. That is something that people will talk about for a thousand years.”