The Nazi Hunters (13 page)

Not a word about this sordid episode appears in Höss’s memoirs, of course. Looking back at his life as he awaited execution, he clung to the notion that his coming-of-age story demonstrated that he was a man of principle—and, yes, a bit of an old-fashioned romantic. He proudly pointed out that he had commanded men in their thirties when he was only eighteen at the end of World War I, and he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. “I had reached my manhood, both physically and mentally, long before my years,” he proclaimed.

His mother had died while he was fighting, and he promptly quarreled with his remaining relatives, including the uncle who had become
his guardian and still wanted him to become a priest. Renouncing whatever inheritance he had from his parents, Höss was “full of rage” when he left his relatives and decided to join one of the Freikorps (Free Corps) units—as the paramilitary bands of former soldiers claiming to defend the defeated country’s honor were called—in the Baltic states. “I would battle my way through the world alone,” he wrote. His new comrades were, like him, “misfits in civilian life,” as he put it. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1922, pointing out that he was “in firm agreement” with its goals.

He was ready to do anything to administer the Freikorps version of justice. “Treachery was punished with death, and there were many traitors to be punished,” he noted. Despite the general lawlessness of that period when countless political murders went unpunished, the authorities convicted Höss for his role in one such killing in 1923, sentencing him to ten years hard labor. Höss was unrepentant, “completely convinced that this traitor deserved to be put to death.”

He wrote with evident self-pity that “serving a sentence in a Prussian prison in those days was no rest-cure.” He complained about the strict rules and punishment for any violation of them. Even after running Auschwitz and serving in other Nazi camps, it never occurred to him that those conditions were infinitely better than anything his prisoners had to endure.

The other notable aspect of his account is his indignation—and sense of moral superiority—when it came to his fellow prisoners. He claimed that he overheard a prisoner describe how he had killed a pregnant woman and servant girl with an axe, and then silenced four screaming children by bashing their heads against the wall. “This appalling crime made me long to fly at his throat,” Höss insisted, presenting himself as a humanitarian at heart. As for the general prison population, “their souls lacked ballast,” he maintained. He was equally contemptuous of his jailers “whose delight in the power they wielded increased in proportion to the lowness of their mentality.”

Still nurturing that combination of self-pity and sense of moral superiority, Höss was released from prison in 1928 as part of a general amnesty. The Nazis would soon capitalize on the economic desperation of
most Germans in the aftermath of Wall Street’s collapse in 1929. A year after Hitler took power in 1933, Höss joined the SS troops assigned to the newly created Dachau concentration camp for political prisoners and started training other young men for duty there. He had thought about turning to farming earlier, he wrote, but then decided that he wanted to remain in the military. “I gave no thought to the reference to concentration camps,” he claimed. “To me it was just a question of being an active soldier again, of resuming my military career . . . the soldier’s life held me in thrall.”

That SS soldier’s life—even in the earliest version of a Nazi concentration camp—included ever-new heights of brutality. There were no battles to fight with armed enemies; instead, the task was to terrorize and, in many cases, kill helpless prisoners. Höss repeatedly insisted in his writings for Sehn that he was more sensitive than other SS guards. When he attended his first flogging of a prisoner, the man’s screams made him feel “hot and cold all over.” While other SS men viewed such infliction of pain “as an excellent spectacle, a kind of peasant merry-making,” he declared: “I was certainly not one of these.”

But he also warned of the dangers of “showing too much kindness and goodwill towards the prisoners” who were capable of deviously outsmarting their jailers. By 1938, he was promoted to the job of adjutant at Sachsenhausen, another concentration camp. Soon, he was marching almost every day with his execution squad, giving them the order to fire once the prisoner was positioned by the post, and he would then administer the coup de grâce. He claimed the victims were “saboteurs” or war resisters who were undermining Hitler’s efforts. Whether the prisoners were communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, or homosexuals, they all were considered internal enemies.

Höss had no problem with that. He claimed he was “not suited for this kind of service,” which meant that he had to work doubly hard not “to reveal my weakness.” What weakness? “I never grew indifferent to human suffering.” But, he insisted, Hitler’s early successes demonstrated that “the means and the ends” of the Nazis were right. In late 1939, he
was promoted to commandant of Sachsenhausen. The following year, he was given his assignment in Auschwitz.

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Jan Sehn argued that his famous prisoner was not completely disingenuous when he wrote about his lack of enthusiasm for carrying out some of his tasks—or at least that he did not share the enthusiasms of his most openly sadistic subordinates. “
The ideal commandants of concentration camps in the National Socialist sense were not the personally brutal, licentious and depraved creatures of the SS, but Höss and people like him,” he pointed out. In other words, they were technocrats fueled by their ambition to rise in the ranks by fulfilling their assignments, rather than primarily motivated by a burning desire to torture and murder their charges. But if torture and mass murder were part of their job, so be it.

In his writings for Sehn about his years at Auschwitz, Höss was far more expansive than in his testimony and conversations in Nuremberg. He was tasked with organizing the new camp out of the existing buildings and adding the whole new Birkenau complex, and he claimed that his original intention was to break with the precedent set by other camps, providing “better treatment” of the prisoners to get more work out of them by “both housing and feeding them better.”

By his reckoning, however, his good intentions were “dashed to pieces against the human inadequacy and sheer stupidity of most of the officers and men posted to me.” In other words, the brutality of his subordinates could not be contained—and, of course, it wasn’t his fault. As a result, he sought refuge in his obsessive dedication to his job. “I was determined that nothing should get me down,” he wrote. “My pride would not allow it. I lived only for my work.”

He paid a price for giving up his original intention of running a more efficient, less gratuitously violent camp, he insisted. “I became a different person in Auschwitz. . . . All human emotions were forced into the background.” The pressures of his superiors, coupled with the “passive resistance” of his subordinates to carry out his wishes, led him to drink heavily, he wrote. Hedwig, his wife, tried to arrange parties with friends
to lighten his mood, but they failed to do so. “Even people who hardly knew me felt sorry for me,” he added, once again indulging in the self-pity that permeates so much of his account.

When Himmler issued the order in 1941 to set up the gas chambers that would enable mass exterminations, Höss did not hesitate to begin implementing it. “It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order,” he wrote. “Nevertheless the extraordinary reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right.” It was just another order to be obeyed, he continued, signaling that he only recognized it was monstrous as he faced execution. “I did not reflect on it at the time. . . . I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

He personally observed the gassing of Soviet POWs, who were used to test the effectiveness of Zyklon B, the gas designed for the mass killings. “During the first experience of gassing people, I did not fully realize what was happening, perhaps because I was too impressed by the whole procedure,” he wrote. When a group of nine hundred POWs was gassed, he heard the desperate prisoners throwing themselves against the doors. When he viewed their bodies after the chamber was aired out, he added, “It made me feel uncomfortable and I shuddered, although I had imagined that death by gassing would be worse than it was.” He added that the gassings “set his mind at rest,” since he could see that it would be possible to carry out the mass extermination of the Jews next.

Soon, the camp’s machinery of death was working full-time and Höss was there to check on it regularly. While many of the doomed fell for the deception that they were going to the showers, others realized what was happening. The commandant noticed that mothers who did so “nevertheless found the courage to joke with their children to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes.” One woman on the way to the gas chamber walked up to Höss and pointed to her four children, whispering to him: “How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?” Another mother tried to throw her children out of the gas chamber as the door was closing. “At least let my precious children live,” she pleaded—of course, to no avail.

Höss claimed that he and the other guards were affected by “such
shattering scenes” and that they were tormented by “secret doubts.” But that was all the more reason to suppress them. “Everyone watched me,” he noted, which meant he could not afford to show any hesitation or mercy. He also claimed he never hated Jews since “the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature.” Nonetheless, he conceded: “It is true that I looked upon them as the enemies of our people.”

For all his talk of hidden doubts, his pride in the efficiency of the killing machinery he constructed is evident in his write-ups for Sehn. He even pointed out with regret that the selection process still left many sick prisoners alive who “cluttered up the camp,” and that his bosses should have followed his advice and kept a smaller, healthier workforce—in other words, sent even more Jews and others to their deaths.

While Höss nonchalantly wrote that he never could complain of boredom at Auschwitz, he insisted that he was “no longer happy” once the mass exterminations began. The reason he provided reveals more about his character than anything else in his memoirs. Everyone in Auschwitz believed he lived “a wonderful life,” he noted, and it was true that his wife had “a paradise of flowers” in their garden, his children were pampered, and they were all able to indulge their love of animals, keeping tortoises, cats, and lizards, visiting the stables and the kennels where the camp dogs were held. Even the prisoners who worked for them were eager to do them favors, he boasted, with no apparent recognition why that was the case. But, he added, “Today I deeply regret that I did not devote more time to my children. I always felt I had to be on duty all the time.”

Höss penned those lines right after his descriptions of the heart-wrenching pleas of mothers trying to save or at least calm their children as they were driven into the gas chambers. He clearly saw no connection between them. As Sehn wrote in his introduction to the Polish edition of his memoirs, “
All of his depictions of mass murder” appear to be written “by a totally disinterested observer.”

To Sehn and others earlier at Nuremberg, Höss formally said he took responsibility for his actions and understood why he would have to pay with his life for them, yet he kept shifting the real blame on Hitler and Himmler, who issued the orders. At the same time, he proudly explained
that even as the war was ending, “My heart clung to the Führer and his ideals, for those must not perish.”

Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor, provided an introduction to a later edition of Höss’s autobiography. “It’s
filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness,” he wrote. The author comes across as “a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies,” he added. But Levi also called the volume “one of the most instructive books ever published.” It demonstrates how a man who in other circumstances would probably have been “some sort of drab functionary, committed to discipline and dedicated to order” evolved “into one of the greatest criminals in history.”

The book shows, he continued, “how readily evil can replace good, besieging it and finally submerging it—yet allowing it to persist in tiny grotesque islets: an orderly family life, love of nature, Victorian morality.” Nonetheless, Levi acknowledged that Höss’s account was largely truthful, including his insistence that he was no sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain. In that sense, he was “a man who was not a monster and who never became one even at the height of his career in Auschwitz.”

Those were themes that would come up again in the other most famous case of another architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. Were the chief perpetrators monsters or seemingly ordinary human beings? In many ways, Höss provided more ammunition than Eichmann would at a later time for those espousing the second view. It was an interpretation that would later become known as “the banality of evil” thesis.

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As noted earlier, Höss, while providing evidence in both Nuremberg and Kraków, misled his interrogators about the number of Auschwitz’s victims. His initial estimate that the tally was two and a half to three million was buttressed by some of the testimonies of the camp’s surviving members of the
Sonderkommando
—the male Jewish prisoners who were formed into squads to herd the new arrivals to the gas chambers.
Most members of those special units were subsequently killed as well, but a few survived. Two of them testified right after the war that over four million people had been gassed at Auschwitz.
That became the official figure put
forward by the Soviet and Polish authorities, and the book Sehn wrote about the camp stuck with that number. In fact, the Polish communist government did not budge on that point right up until its downfall in 1989, despite mounting evidence that it was considerably inflated.