Background
Rudolf Hoess was born in Baden-Baden on 25 November 1900, the son of pious Catholic parents. His father, a shopkeeper who wanted his son to become a Roman Catholic priest, was a dogmatic, overpowering influence in his early life.
Commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp
Rudolf Hoess was born in Baden-Baden on 25 November 1900, the son of pious Catholic parents. His father, a shopkeeper who wanted his son to become a Roman Catholic priest, was a dogmatic, overpowering influence in his early life.
After his father's death, the fifteen-year-old Rudolf Hoess secretly joined the army, serving on the Turkish front and becoming at seventeen the youngest NCO in the German forces.
In 1919 he joined the East Prussian Volunteer Corps for Protection of the Frontier and became a member of the Rossbach Freikorps, taking part in battles in the Baltic region, the Ruhr and Upper Silesia. In 1923 he was involved in a brutal political murder - one of his accomplices was Martin Bormann who subsequently protected him at a later stage in his career - for w hich he w as sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
He was released under the Amnesty Law' of 14 July 1928, having served less than half his sentence, and for the next six years worked on the land in Brandenburg and Pomerania in various service groups. In 1934 Himmler invited him to join the active SS and, in June of the same year, he was posted to the protective custody camp at Dachau as a block overseer. Transferred to Sachsenhausen in 1938 and promoted to SS Captain two years later, Hoess was appointed Commandant at Auschwitz on 1 May 1940, a position he held until 1 December 1943.
Hoess found it difficult to uproot himself from his ‘work’ at Auschwitz, but in November 1943 he was made head of No. 1 branch of Amtsgruppe D of the WVHA (SS Economic and Administrative Main Office), later becoming the deputy of SS General Richard Gluecks, Inspector-General of Concentration Camps.
Hoess was arrested by military police near Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, on 2 March 1946 and handed over to the Polish authorities just over two months later. At the end of March 1947, Hoess was sentenced to death by a Polish military tribunal. The execution was carried out on 7 April 1947, next to the house inside the Auschwitz camp where he had lived with his wife and five children and where he had sent millions of innocent men, women and children to their deaths.
In his autobiography, Kommandant in Auschwitz, Hoess recalled that from his earliest youth he was brought up ‘with a strong awareness of duty’. In his parents' home ‘it was insisted that every task be exactly and conscientiously carried out. Every member of the family had his own special duties to perform.' He regarded this compulsion to obey orders and to surrender all personal independence as a hallmark of his own morality and bourgeois decency.
Quotations:
'I am completely normal. Even while I was carrying out the task of extermination I lived a normal life and so on.’
Kommandant in Auschwitz, 1958
During his three and a half years at Auschwitz, Hoess proved himself the ideal type of the passionless, disinterested mass murderer, the quiet bureaucrat who never personally attended selections for the gas chambers or mass executions.
To all appearances a kindly, unselfish, introverted family man and animal-lover, Hoess took a perfectionist pride in his ‘work’, noting in his memoirs that ‘by the will of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time’. It was Hoess, the perfect example of the conscientious, self-disciplined, petty-bourgeois automaton whose golden rule was ‘Only one thing is valid: orders!’, who ensured the smooth functioning of the extermination system at Auschwitz, treating mass murder as a purely administrative procedure.
What concerned Hoess was not the indescribable suffering of his victims but rather the practical difficulties of carrying out his assignment with maximum efficiency - questions involving the precise adherence to timetables, the size of transports, the types of oven and methods of gassing. He took pride in being the first to utilize successfully ‘Zyklon B’ - the squeamish Hoess, who could not bear shootings and bloodshed, found gas to be infinitely more rational, bloodless and hygienic. Hoess’s sense of duty, his absolute submission to authority, his conscientious adherence to the SS motto ‘Believe! Obey! Fight!' immunized him to any emotion except that of self-pity.
So efficiently did Hoess carry out his ‘duties' at Auschwitz that approximately two-and-a-half million inmates were liquidated .
Quotes from others about the person
‘A true pioneer in this field, thanks to new' ideas and new methods of education'.
1944