Born on November 25, 1901, a World War I soldier and fanatical Nazi, Rudolf Höss built and ran with ruthless efficiency the extermination complex where more than a million people were executed in the gas chambers. He lived with his wife and five children in a bucolic environment, a short distance from the place where he ordered the killings, a contrast masterfully captured by director Jonathan Glazer in his film “The Zone of Interest.”
“Technically it wasn't that difficult, it wouldn't have been difficult to exterminate even larger numbers (of prisoners). Killing them itself took the least amount of time. You could get rid of two thousand heads in half an hour, but It was the burning (of the corpses) that took place all the time. Killing them was easy.; you didn't even need guards to take them to the chambers; they would just come in expecting to take showers, and instead of water we would put in poison gas. It was all very fast." This is how Rudolf Höss described the Auschwitz extermination system during one of the hearings at the Nuremberg trials, as if to explain the cold workings of a machine.
When giving his testimony, the commander of the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp preferred detailed descriptions over any other discourse. For him, death was a simple question of numbers, an equation to be solved, which even led him to “correct” the president of the court when he stated that three million people had died in the gas chambers.There were only two and a half million, the rest died of hunger, exhaustion or disease.", he retorted.
Both the presiding judge and the Nazi leader were wrong, because more precise calculations later determined that during the almost five years of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex's existence, 1.300.000 million people passed through it, of whom 1.100.000 million were killed in various ways: in the gas chambers, by starvation, by extreme punishment, by bullets or in sinister medical experiments. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, 960.000 Jews, 74.000 Poles, 21.000 Gypsies, 15.000 Soviet prisoners of war and between 10.000 and 15.000 detainees of other nationalities died.
That initial miscalculation would have consequences, because it was exploited by Holocaust deniers to question the existence of the Holocaust, as if the difference between one figure and another could dilute a genocide. What is undeniable is that Höss was proud of his role in the massacre, perhaps not so much for having been responsible for the death of more than a million people but for the efficiency with which he had perpetrated them.
If Auschwitz was the idea of Heinrich Himmler and the “architect of the final solution”, Adolf Eichmann, there is no doubt that it was work of Rudolf HössHe was in charge of its construction and operation, was its first and last commander, and the architect of the gas chamber system for the elimination of prisoners.
The efficient Nazi
When Himmler selected Höss to build and command Auschwitz, he knew what he was doing: he was a convinced Nazi who had joined the movement almost at its origins and also an obedient and efficient soldier, who not only knew how to follow orders to the letter but also how to apply his own creativity to carry them out.
Born in Baden-Baden on November 25, 1901, he was raised and educated to obey. Son of practicing Catholic parents, In the family project he had to fulfill a destiny as a priest, but the First World War made him change that future in a cassock for an urgent present in a military uniform.
Behind his mother's back, he joined the army at the age of 15, for which he had to lie about his age, since the minimum age was 16. He was thus the youngest non-commissioned officer in the ranks and was awarded the Iron Cross after being wounded several times on the battlefield. Like Corporal Adolf Hitler and many other Prussian soldiers, he found the defeat humiliating, and he looked for someone to blame and soon found them among the Jews and the leftists. To give free rein to his revenge, he joined the Freikorps, a nationalist and anti-communist paramilitary group, where he was forced to leave the army. He participated in several attacks against “traitors to the country”.
One thing led to another, and in 1922 he joined the ranks of the nascent Nazi Party after hearing the fiery speeches of its leader, in which he immediately felt represented. On 31 May 1923, he participated, together with Martin Bormann, in the murder of the populist militant Walter Kadow, suspected of having handed over to the French occupation troops the nationalist activist Albert Leo Schlageter, whom he had met in the Freikorps. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was released in 1928, included in an amnesty for political prisoners.
After Hitler came to power, he joined the SS and was assigned to the sinister Death's Head Units, which were in charge of administering and guarding the emerging concentration camps. His first destination was Dachau, in Bavaria, at that time a place where hundreds of political prisoners were crammed together. For his effective performance, he was promoted to captain and adjutant to Herman Baranowski at the Sachsenhausen camp in Brandenburg.
“The animal of Auschwitz”
The start of the war with the German invasion of Poland also meant a huge boost to the career of Höss, whose reputation as an efficient officer had caught the attention of Himmler. It was Hitler's own henchman who commissioned him to take care of build and operate the Auschwitz campIt was the seventh concentration camp built by the Nazis, after Dachau (the first, built in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany), Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and the Ravensbrück women's camp.
The location had been chosen strategically. The town of Oświęcim was located in a Nazi-friendly railway enclave in the east, where the southern railway lines from Prague and Vienna intersected with those from Berlin, Warsaw and the industrial areas of northern Silesia.
With the years, Auschwitz was much more than just a concentration camp. It was built as a complex comprising three main camps: Auschwitz I, the original camp; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp; and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the German company IG Farben. It also had 3 other satellite camps. Almost all of this monumental work of death was the work of Höss, who commanded it for almost the entire war, except for a brief interregnum.
In mid-1941, Himmler summoned Höss to Berlin to give him his instructions personally. The extermination of the Jews was underway and Auschwitz was to play a central role in carrying it through to the final conclusion. “The Führer has decreed the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. We, the SS, have to carry out the plans. It is hard work, but if it is not carried out immediately, instead of us exterminating the Jews, the Jews will exterminate the Germans in the future,” Himmler told him.
In addition to the orders, Höss received another promotion, this time to Major General. To carry out his task, He installed gas chambers disguised as showers, where prisoners were supposedly taken to bathe, but instead of water on their bodies they received Zyklon-B gas.The commander did not simply follow instructions, but repeatedly improved the device to make it more deadly. An SS report from 1941 describes Höss as a “true pioneer in this area due to his new ideas and educational methods.”
Thousands of prisoners were killed in these fake showers every day, but the biggest logistical problem was getting rid of the bodies. To solve this problem, Höss ordered crematoria to be built to turn the bodies into ashes. When this was not enough, he had them burned in huge open-air mass pits.
When Himmler visited the camp, he was delighted by his commander's efficiency. In his memoirs, Höss wrote that he congratulated him at dinner, where he was “in excellent spirits, talking about all possible topics that came up during the conversation. He drank a few glasses of red wine and smoked, something he did not normally do. Everyone was delighted by his good humour and brilliant conversation.”
A bucolic family life
The dinner with which Himmler was entertained took place in the villa located a few kilometers from the concentration camp, where Höss lived with his wife, Hedwig, and their five children. There, The family lived in another world, almost oblivious to the massacres that were being committed in Auschwitz-Birkenau..
The film The area of interest, the film directed by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, based on a novel by Martin Amis, shows this reality: a pleasant home with gardens full of flowers on the other side of the walls that hid daily massacres. The house had ten rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, stables more comfortable than the prisoners' barracks in the camp and a huge garden that Mrs. Höss personally tended. "The will of my family was my law," wrote Höss in his memoirs, in which he also spoke of his wife's garden and his children's games.
Perhaps the only cloud that darkened the bucolic family life was the lack of sex, because once her husband told her exactly what was happening in the field, Mrs. Höss stopped having “carnal desires”. The children, however, were unaware of everything. Many years later, Bigritte Höss, who became a famous model, said of her life at that time: “There must have been two sides to my father, the one I knew and another. For me he was the best man in the world".
So pleasant was the villa for Mrs. Höss and her children that when Himmler decided to transfer him to Berlin in 1943 as supervisor of the entire concentration camp system, the family stayed there, as if it were their place in the world.
The massacre of the Hungarians
Rudolf Höss's promotion and transfer had other reasons that were kept secret: an internal SS investigation uncovered a huge system of corruption in the concentration camp, in which the commandant was involved. Another SS officer would have been sentenced to prison or perhaps execution, but Himmler appreciated the effectiveness of the "animal of Auschwitz" so much that he preferred to preserve him. So much so that when he decided to transfer and murder almost half a million Hungarians there, he reinstated him in order to ensure the success of the task.
It was a monumental operation that began on 15 May 1944 and went down in history as the Hungarian Holocaust: in less than two months, 427 Jews were transported in 1.500 trains to Auschwitz to be immediately exterminated. Only a few thousand survived.
A report by the Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz Briz, accredited in Budapest, gives an account of these transfers: “They claim that the number of deported Israelites is close to 500.000. There are alarming rumours about their fate in the capital. They insist that the majority of Jewish deportees (each freight car contains around 80 people) are headed to a concentration camp in Poland where they are killed with gas, using the corpses as fat for certain industrial products.”
Around ten thousand executions were carried out in the gas chambers every day, and for his efficiency the commandant of Auschwitz was awarded the War Merit Cross, first and second class. “I must admit that the gassing process had a calming effect on me. I always had a horror of shooting, thinking of the number of people, women and children. I was relieved that we had been spared these bloodbaths."Höss declared at the Nuremberg trial.
Capture, trial and death
Rudolf Höss was on the verge of not paying for his crimes. In the final days of the war, when all was lost, Himmler suggested that he hide among the camp staff to avoid arrest. Disguised as a gardener and using the false name Franz Lang, Höss was arrested after being betrayed by his own wife who wanted to protect their son Klaus, a prisoner of the British.
Upon being arrested, He tried to bite a cyanide pill, and he denied at all times being the commander of Auschwitz. He was identified by his wedding ring, on which his name was engraved alongside that of his wife.
After that, he no longer tried to hide anything. “I was in charge at Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and I estimate that at least 2.500.000 people were killed and disposed of there by gas and burning; at least half a million more died of hunger and disease, making a total of 3.000.000 dead. The number represents about 70 or 80 percent of all people who were sent to Auschwitz as prisoners. Very young children, incapable of work, were killed as a matter of principle,” he declared coldly.
He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on 16 April 1947. The place chosen to hang him was symbolic: the scaffold was erected next to the oldest crematorium that Höss had built in the concentration camp. When asked if he wanted to say his last words before dying, “the Animal of Auschwitz” preferred to remain silent.
It is almost impossible to think that there are such evil people who can do what that heartless man did. At the very least, he is jumping in hell from the burns that will never end. He was as bad as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the other Hezbollahs of Iraq and the tyrannical Ayatollahs of Iran. It is impossible that a true God can be so evil and love to shed so much blood of the elderly, women and children. Jesus Christ said who is behind so much destruction, according to the gospel of John 10:10a, describing him as a thief, I quote: “The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy…” That is why I prefer to believe in Jehovah God.
THE GERMAN PEOPLE ALMOST ENTIRELY SUPPORTED THIS SINISTER ENTERPRISE. THE DAUGHTER WHO FLATTERED HER FATHER WAS A MODEL FOR BALENCIAGA BETWEEN THE 50S AND 60S
Neo-Nazis continue to deny the Holocaust to this day and spread the word that it is all a big fabrication, naturally part of the Jewish conspiracy. Now with the rise of the far right and, incidentally, of fascists and Nazis around the world, there are again quite a few believers in these nonsense or Jewish conspiracies, even though they are neither fascists nor Nazis, and the worst example of all is perhaps Spain. There is no country in the world with more conspiracies and hoaxes per square meter that many Spaniards swallow, manipulated like puppets by very mediocre characters who become famous on social networks, just by telling nonsense without stopping, most of them far right or fascist, even one of these, Alvise Pérez, perhaps one of the most crazy, has managed to become a Euro MP in the recent European elections, all because he has become famous on Spanish social networks by inventing a new hoax or conspiracy every few days. Another of the most famous is Iker Jiménez, the presenter of the very famous television program Cuarto Milenio about paranormal phenomena and the many other occult sciences that supposedly exist according to these crazy Spaniards and their many Spanish believers who follow them.
A repentant ex-neo-Nazi from Spain, David Saavedra, who became famous in Spain a few months ago, said that in this neo-Nazi world they swallow anything that their leaders or any of them with a bit of a lip service tell them, no matter how absurd the theory or conspiracy is, even if it has no scientific basis like the theory of the hollow Earth where beings of another race live hidden or perhaps they are Nazis, or the German Nazis still live on the Moon and have UFOs. The neo-Nazis do not believe anything that the big media says, nor the history books, nor in general anything that is official, because they consider that everything is manipulated, fundamentally by the Jews. They call the Holocaust the Holocuento, the neo-Nazis, or the majority, admit that there were many Jewish victims, but for normal reasons in a war or because of the many prisoners crammed in. Others blame Nazis like Himmler for the higher number of deaths, while most Nazis, like Hitler himself, are said to be little more than saints, they knew nothing of what others were doing behind their backs. Apparently, the neo-Nazis are trying to sell something like an image of Nazi Germany as being decent Christian or complying with international military laws or rules.