DEATH DEALER: THE MEMOIRS OF THE SS KOMMANDANT AT AUSCHWITZ by Rudolph Hoss (written 1946-1947) [1: See endnote #1]

As SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners (Jews and non-Jews). [2]

After the Nazis fell, Hoss went into hiding, adopted a false identity, and farmed. He was captured about a year after World War II ended. He was tried in Poland, convicted, and sentenced to die on gallows constructed at Auschwitz, just a few feet away from Auschwitz Crematorium I.

While Hoss was on trial, Jan Sehn, the attorney who was prosecuting Hoss at the trial at the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, asked Hoss to write his memoirs.

These memoirs were written between October 1946 and April 1947 while Hoss was in jail and on trial. Early parts were written to help Hoss remember details of the events, for the sake of the trial. But as time went on and Hoss and Sehn developed a more cordial relationship, Sehn asked Hoss to write about some of the major SS officials and to re-create some of the important documents to the best of Hoss’s memory. Hoss, who marveled at how well he was treated by the court authorities and prison guards, obliged, and kept writing almost to the very day of his hanging, April 16^th, 1947.

Hoss is not a gifted writer; but his memoirs are invaluable as Holocaust literature. In the preface to “Death Dealer”, Steven J. Paskuly writes:

Rudolph Hoss’s memoirs are perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because they are the only candid, detailed, and essentially honest [factually if not emotionally –rjs] description of the plan of mass annihilation from a high-ranking SS officer….

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The overwhelming impression that the reader gets of Hoss is that he is a man who largely does not express—or perhaps has learned over the years to not even feel—emotion.

Here Hoss clinically describes the gassing process at Auschwitz. Bear in mind that the largest gas chambers at Auschwitz could and often did kill 2,000 people in a single gassing:

The extermination process in Auschwitz took place as follows: Jews selected for gassing were taken as quietly as possible to the crematories. The men were already separated from the women [and usually the woman and children were together]. In the undressing chamber, prisoners of the Sonderkommandos [4] … would tell them in their own language that they were going to be bathed and deloused, and that they must leave their clothing neatly together, and, above all, remember where they put them, so that they would be able to find them again quickly after the delousing. The Sonderkommando [5] had the greatest interest in seeing that the operation proceeded smoothly and quickly. After undressing, the Jews went into the gas chamber, which was furnished with showers and water pipes and gave a realistic impression of a bathhouse.

The women went in first with their children, followed by the men, who were always fewer in number. This part of the operation nearly always went smoothly since the Sonderkommando would always calm those who showed any anxiety or perhaps even had some clue as to their fate. As an additional precaution, the Sonderkommando and an SS soldier always stayed in the chamber until the very last moment.

The door would be screwed shut and the waiting disinfection squads would immediately pour the gas [crystals] into the vents in the ceiling of the gas chamber down an air shaft which went to the floor. This ensured the rapid distribution of the gas. The process could be observed through the peep hole in the door. Those who were standing next to the air shaft were killed immediately. I can state that about one-third died immediately. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to gasping and in a few moments everyone lay still. After twenty minutes at the most no movement could be detected….

The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in…. Work was immediately started [by the Sonderkommando] to remove the corpses….

The Sonderkommando now set about removing the gold teeth and cutting the hair from the women [this hair would be used to manufacture socks and other clothing for German troops]. After this, the bodies were taken up by an elevator and laid in front of the ovens, which had meanwhile been fired up. …Crematories II and III could cremate two thousand bodies in twenty-four hours….

I think it is worth noting here that in this two-step process (the murdering in the gas chambers, followed by the cremation in the crematoria), it was the crematoria that were the limiting factor: It took 30 minutes for a large gas chamber to kill 2,000 people; it took the crematoria 24 hours to cremate those same 2,000 people.

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At times Hoss displays a possibly sociopathic lack of appreciation of what his victims were facing, by his own hands:

In Auschwitz escape was not difficult. Since there were many possibilities, it was easy to set up a situation to escape. The guards were easily fooled. With a little daring, and a little luck, it could be done.

And more of this phenomenon is evident when Hoss makes statements such as

The Jews [in Auschwitz] did damage to each other whenever

they could.

…and even worse…

…the Jews…lack a feeling of solidarity. In their situation you would assume that they would protect each other. But no, it was just the opposite.

In making these types of statements, Hoss never acknowledges that (1) He and his cohorts were the ones who put the Jews into this situation, in which desperate animal-like behavior was practically inevitable; and (2) He too might likely have behaved as the doomed Jews did if he had been in their position; and (3) There were also many instances of Jews helping one another in the concentration camps. [6]

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And here, Hoss takes it a step further and actually feels sorry for himself for what he went through:

            Hour upon hour I had to witness all that happened. I had to watch day and night, whether it was the dragging and burning of the bodies, the teeth being ripped out, the cutting of the hair; I had to watch all this horror. For hours I had to stand in the horrible, haunting stench while the mass graves were dug open, and the bodies were dragged out and burned. I also had to watch the process of death itself through the peephole of the gas chambers because the doctors called my attention to it.

Incredibly, he does not even consider here what his victims went through during these same events.

While reading Death dealer, I was also reading William Styron’s novel Sophie’s choice, and in it Styron quotes the German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt as follows. This statement seems a convincing explanation for Hoss’s self-pitying in the passage above. Arendt writes:

The problem [that the Nazis faced] was to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used … was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning those instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

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The gist of many Nazis’ self-defense after the fact was “Orders are orders.” And Hoss was no different:

According to Himmler’s orders, Auschwitz became the largest human killing center in all of history. When he gave me the order personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings and then carry it out, I could never have imagined the scale, or what the consequences would be. Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed correct to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out.

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Historians agree that Hoss’s memoir is essentially honest even though there are unintentional errors in dates, numbers, and so on. And Hoss does not hold back on some poignant moments, such as this one:

I also watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and to talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly [on their way to the gas chambers]. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, “How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?”

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Hoss’s final letters to his wife and children, written when he knew he was about to be hanged within a few days, are included in this memoir. And, I almost hate to admit it but I must be honest: I found these letters heartbreaking.

Even this monster, the greatest mass murderer in history, had a family that he clearly loved. He writes to his soon-to-be widow:

On you, my poor unfortunate wife, destiny has put the heaviest burden on us through our sad fate. For in addition to our unlimited pain of being torn apart, there is the burdensome worry about your future life and the worry about the children.

And in a letter to his children:

Your daddy has to leave you now. For you, poor ones, there remains only your dear, good Mommy. The love and care of a mother is the most beautiful and valuable thing that exists on this earth.

One would think that, as he faced his impending exit from the earth, maybe Hoss would finally face up to some sense of the human tragedy that he had caused. After all, what the courts were now imposing on him and his family, he had imposed exponentially more horrifically on hundreds of thousands of people who had done him no wrong. Yet still, in these very last of his writings, he expresses no insight that would tie in his own death-tragedy with the death-tragedies that he caused en masse.

Death dealer sometimes makes you want to reach across the decades and continents and strangle its author. However, the book is of singular importance—a unique and invaluable contribution to the Holocaust literature.