The sad confessions before being hanged of the greatest Nazi genocide: «I am not a monster!»

by time news

Rudolf Höss, the first commander of Auschwitz, was hanged in the same camp where his acolytes murdered hundreds of thousands of inmates. The warm rope hugged his neck on April 16, 1947, in front of the remains of a gas chamber. In sight of him was his office, the one from which he governed the fate of the deportees. Execution photographs of him are still extant, as well as memoirs of him,’I, commander of Auschwitz‘, reissued this summer by ‘Arzalia’. Its pages are a torpedo against the denialists, since the genocide admitted the mass gassings and the systematic incineration of the corpses to hide the barbarity. And, yet, the hierarch still maintained before leaving this world that he was not a monster…

Camino infernal

Höss’s golden retirement after World War II had an expiration date. Until then he spent his days as a professional farmer; another worker on a farm near Flensburg, on the border of Germany with Denmark. But the British Military Police were on the prowl… “On March 11, 1946, at eleven o’clock at night, they came to arrest me,” he explained in his memoir. Two days before, chance had wanted the bottle of poison that always accompanied him to break. He was unable to commit suicide and he was left at the mercy of the Allies. “I woke up startled. They had no difficulty in arresting me. The treatment I received was not particularly lenient.”

That was the beginning of his particular ordeal. The first stop was Heide, the same barracks from which he had been liberated by the English eight months earlier. Ironies of history. There an officer was waiting for him who subjected him to an intense interrogation. “It was forceful in the exact sense of the term. I signed the act, but I don’t know what it contained: the mix of alcohol and whip was too sensitive, even for me. He did not explain further, but hinted that they had beaten him to death with a whip. «The whip was mine; by chance it was in my wife’s luggage. I don’t think I’ve ever hit a horse with it and never, for sure, a prisoner.

Auschwitz concentration camp liberation

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And from there, to All, where he suffered “even worse treatment at the hands of an officer.” Complaints, complaints and more complaints. Höss distilled resentment against his captors in the closing pages of his memoir. Within three weeks they refused to remove the handcuffs, he confirmed. He also criticized until hoarse the treatment they earned him: “Representatives from all countries came almost every day to take a tour of our prison and always showed me as a very curious ‘fierce beast’.” His journey continued until Nuremberg. There they improved his conditions, but the interrogators, all Jews, made him pay for his outrages. “I was questioned by several prisoners who showed me their tattooed arms and their Auschwitz numbers.”

By then, the mass murders that had been carried out in the extermination camps had already become known. Wherever he was transferred, Höss was greeted with shouts and stones. In Krakow, for example, a mob was about to knock down the van that was transporting him. His arrival in prison offered her a certain security; although the revenge was of another type on the part of the jailers. “I assumed they wanted to kill me. They only gave me a crust of bread and a few spoonfuls of soup. They never offered me a second ration, although almost every day there was food left over that was distributed in neighboring cells». For Höss it was «a moral torture» to which those «satanic beings».

Trial of the Reich

Höss had his particular epiphany in the last pages of his memoirs. He wondered what judgment he would pass, years after the fall of the Nazi eagle, on the Third Reich. And the truth is that he did not stray one millimeter from his principles. “I remain faithful to the philosophy of the National Socialist Party. When an idea has been adopted 25 years ago, when you are attached to it body and soul, you don’t give up because those who were supposed to materialize it have made mistakes and criminal acts that have raised the whole world against them. Not even before he was hanged did he repent in this regard.

What he did do, like so many other thugs, was throw all the blame against the leaders who had already died. Namely: Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. The dead, after all, could not defend themselves. “I have understood that our leaders, making use of unprecedented propaganda and terror, managed to subjugate the entire people to their will, which, with rare exceptions, has followed them to the end without showing the slightest spirit of criticism or resistance.” He declared the war inevitable, although he admitted that the idea of ​​the German ‘living space’ that the ‘Führer’ defended could have been achieved by political treaties, and not by guns. More than surreal by the commander of Auschwitz.

Höss, during the trial that sentenced him to the gallows

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What cannot be denied is that Höss was outspoken. He did not deny the existence of concentration camps, nor of the Holocaust. Although she did not criticize them either. In his words, it was “a mistake to proceed with the extermination of a large part of the enemy nations”, but not because of the madness of murdering millions of people, but because it aroused the hatred of the entire world against Germany. “It was of no use to the anti-Semitic cause, on the contrary, it allowed Jewry to get closer to its ultimate goal.” In this sense, he again declared himself a mere servant of his superiors: “The direction of everything and of the concentration camps themselves were destined to satisfy Himmler’s will and Hitler’s intentions.”

The most shocking thing, if possible, was that he did not charge against the mass murders, but he did criticize the torture perpetrated by the SS men – whom he considered Himmler’s acolytes – in his concentration camp. “I have never approved of the horrors they did. I have never mistreated an inmate, nor killed any of them with my own hands, nor have I tolerated abuse by my subordinates. He wrote that he shuddered when he heard “about the appalling torture applied to the detainees in the camps” and maintained that he never knew what was going on inside Auschwitz. “Nothing can be done against the wickedness, perfidy and cruelty of some guards,” he added. Pure hypocrisy born in the heat of the gallows.

farewell

Before feeling the heat of the rope, the person hidden under all that evil boiled. The last pages of the diary reveal a Höss who – or so he said – did not care about dying, but he did care about seeing his family without a livelihood. “Family is sacred to me. I have always worried about his future: the farm would one day be our real home. For my wife and me, our children represented the goal of our lives. We wanted to give them a good education in a powerful homeland. Even today my thoughts go to them. What will become of them? The uncertainty I feel in this regard makes my detention very painful.

It was his greatest concern. Or so it seems, according to the texts. «I have definitely sacrificed myself, everything is in order, I no longer worry about anything. But what will my wife and children do now? He adored his family so much that he expressly asked that the specific passages that spoke about her not be used in the news that, he knew, would be published after he was executed: «If this exhibition is used, I would like it not to be given to publicize the passages that concern my wife, my family, my moments of tenderness and my secret doubts». She was not lucky, since they were published by active and passive in all the newspapers.

The last page was dedicated to lamenting his misfortune. He had survived accidents at work, combat with the Freikorps, aerial bombardments… «Time and time again, fate has freed me from death to make me suffer, now, a denigrating end. How I envy my fallen comrades as soldiers on the field of honor! And, as a finishing touch, as a last sentence before heading towards the scaffold, he wanted to clean up his terrible image somewhat: «Regarding the fact that the general public continues to consider me a ferocious beast, a cruel sadist, the murderer of millions of human beings: the masses do not they may have another image of the former commander of Auschwitz. They will never understand that I also had a heart…».

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