Rudolf
Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the
architect and SS Commandant of the largest killing center
ever created, the death camp Auschwitz, whose name has
come to symbolize humanity's ultimate descent into evil.
Responsible for exterminating 2,5 million people in World
War II, he was a mild-mannered, happily married Catholic
who enjoyed normal family life with his five children
despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his
bedroom window.
At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get
rid of ten thousand people in 24 hours,' as Rudolf
Hoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after
WW2. Witness after witness, document after document
produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and
no witness was more shocking than Rudolf Hoess, who calmly
explained how he had come to exterminate 2,5 million
people.
Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined the SS in
1933. In 1934 he was attached to the SS at Dachau, on
August 1, 1938, he was adjutant of the Sachsenhausen KZ
camp until his appointment as Commandant of the
newly-built camp at Auschwitz early 1940, located nearby
the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia.
May 1941 the SS commander Heinrich Himmler said to Hoess,
that Adolf
Hitler had given orders 'for the final solution of the
Jewish question. I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this
purpose'.
Hoess converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp
and installed gas chambers and crematoria. Auschwitz
became the killing centre where the largest numbers of
European Jews were killed. After an experimental gassing
there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill
prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine.
By
mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at
Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an
industrial scale with 2,5 million persons eventually
killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and
burning ...
At Auschwitz so called camp doctors - German physicians
and scientists - performed vile and potentially lethal
medical experiments on concentration camps inmates, and
tortured Jewish children, Gypsy children and many others.
"Patients" were put into pressure chambers,
tested with drugs, castrated, frozen to death, and exposed
to various other traumas.
In late 1943 Rudolf Hoess was appointed chief inspector of
the concentration camps and worked hard to improve the
efficiency of the other extermination camps. He performed
his job so well that he was commended in a 1944 SS report
that called him 'a true pioneer in this area because of
his new ideas and educational methods.'
Hoess fled at the approach of the Red Army and went into
hiding in Germany under the name Franz Lang. He was
arrested by Allied military police in 1946 and handed over
to the Polish authorities, who tried him in 1947. He was
sentenced to death, and returned to Auschwitz to be hanged
on the one-person gallows outside the entrance to the gas
chamber.
Rudolf Hoess related before his execution how he often
felt weak-kneed at having to push hundreds of screaming,
pleading children into the gas chambers: "I did,
however, always feel ashamed of this weakness of mine
after I talked to Adolf Eichmann. He explained to me that
it was especially the children who have to be killed
first, because where was the logic in killing a generation
of older people and leaving alive a generation of young
people who can be possible avengers of their parents and
can constitute a new biological cell for the reemerging of
this people."
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