Auschwitz In Retrospect: The Self-Portrait Of Rudolf Hoess, Commander Of Auschwitz

Joseph Tenenbaum

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786257949
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Jüdische Geschichte

Joseph Tenenbaum sketches a portrait of the infamous "Commandant of Auschwitz", Rudolf Hoess."Rudolf Hoess has killed more people than any man in history, and Auschwitz was the greatest charnel house of all times. There has been no dearth of publications about the place or the person. […] It seems that after a period of repudiation of the crimes and apologia for them, we are entering an era of memoirs by boastful generals and complacent Nazi small fry, eager to bask in the sun of regained self-confidence and unregenerate Nazi mentality.The Hoess memoirs are an exception to both trends. His revelations are neither apologetic nor an attempt at vindication. The memoirs are indeed a unique literary document, in which the author is trying to explain, first and foremost himself to himself, Hoess to Hoess, and incidentally also to shed light on the most hidden mainsprings of a mind gone criminal."—From Author's Preface

AUSCHWITZ IN RETROSPECT:

THE SELF-PORTRAIT OF RUDOLF HOESS, COMMANDER OF AUSCHWITZ

BY JOSEPH TENENBAUM

Rudolf Hoess has killed more people than any man in history, and Auschwitz (Oświęcim) was the greatest charnel house of all times. There has been no dearth of publications about the place or the person. The multitude of witnesses that have clogged the road to Nuremberg to attest or confess at the International Trial of War Criminals has been prodigious and the output of printed matter well-nigh staggering. As time goes on, the Nazi criminals themselves have been emboldened to make certain admissions and take credit for some of the very things for which they have been condemned. It seems that after a period of repudiation of the crimes and apologia for them, we are entering an era of memoirs by boastful generals and complacent Nazi small fry, eager to bask in the sun of regained self-confidence and unregenerate Nazi mentality.

The Hoess memoirs are an exception to both trends. His revelations are neither apologetic nor an attempt at vindication. The memoirs are indeed a unique literary document, in which the author is trying to explain, first and foremost himself to himself, Hoess to Hoess, and incidentally also to shed light on the most hidden mainsprings of a mind gone criminal. Hoess was no literary craftsman. He put down in writing all he had to say in unembellished, colorless prose. He wrote his confessions and self-analysis in 1946, in a prison cell in Cracow, in the shadow of a trial before a Polish Tribunal, without any illusions concerning its outcome. It is, therefore, literally, a confessional before death.

Most of these writings on the subject of the Catastrophe have been concerned with the victims. In contrast, few investigators have tried to penetrate into the psychological web of the executioners, the SS guards. Fewer yet have succeeded in unravelling the mental processes and reactions of men turned mass murderers. It is for this reason that the Hoess revelations assume added significance.

It is customary in modern biography to peer into the cradle to see the man. One looks into the family background and probes into the nursery for the various complexes which mold the fate and character of the future heroes or scoundrels. And even our literary simpleton, Rudolf Hoess, followed this fashion, as seen in the pretentious subtitle of the first chapter of his autobiography, namely, The Background—My Soul, Its Mold, Life and Experience.{1}

Family Background

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess was born on November 25, 1900, in Baden-Baden, a picturesque town in the Rhineland. His family combined German military tradition, on his father’s side, with commercial wealth on his mother’s.{2} His home was strictly German middle-class. His father was a morose, bigoted Catholic who dreamed of making his son a God-fearing priest. His mother, Pauline Speck, was a kind-hearted, congenial, yielding German Hausfrau.

Under the influence of his father, Rudolf grew up full of piety and devotion to Church and authority. “What father told me was sacred with me and so were the priest and teacher.”{3} Although his father was a strict disciplinarian, Rudolf was treated with consideration at home; he was never beaten or even severely scolded. The standard punishment was father’s insistence that he pray for “God’s forgiveness.” It does not seem, however, that he was too severely restricted, despite his animosity against his father that appears in his biography, for he would wander away from home to his “beloved animals” whenever he liked. He was very fond of horses and spent much of his time in a neighboring peasant’s stable.{4} He felt also a great attraction to brooks and rivers and could never bathe or wash himself enough (p. 62). Freudians will see here a clue to a severe guilt complex.

When he was six years old, Rudolf’s family moved to Mannheim, where there were neither stables nor horses in the neighborhood. The wound was soon healed by the gift of “Hans,” a black pony. The pony became his fondest companion. He even “brought it into the room,” during his parents’ absence. Evidently, his parents gave him much freedom of movement. His father, who had vowed that Rudolf’s life would be dedicated to the “work of God,” spent much time with him talking about the miracles, and took him to the shrines of Germany, Switzerland and even to Lourdes.

Rudolf was a sensitive, self-righteous child. He hated bullies and despised evil-doers. He shunned liars. He could not tolerate any injustice against himself or anybody else, and felt a raging desire to seek revenge. He was easily disillusioned, and an explosive touchiness made him a poor playmate and further intensified his inclination towards solitude and introversion. His delicate trait of sensitiveness manifested itself in yet another direction. The future SS torturer could not see anybody enduring pain, bodily discomfort or humiliation. He winced inwardly at the twinge of an anguished expression. This went with his confessed benumbed feeling of filial sentiment. Even the untimely death of his father in Rudolf’s fourteenth year failed to ruffle his cold equilibrium. Yet, while it is true that his whole demeanor betrayed not only a heavy layer of static discipline, but also a low point of emotional exuberance, including depressed sexual ardor, one cannot deny him the faculty of love. This was proved by his tender attachment to his wife and three children later on in life.

No one who has so far followed Rudolf’s childhood could, in all honesty, venture the conclusion that this was a “patch where thistles grow.” The authoritarian, guilt-ridden father who sought escape in religious bigotry, had undoubtedly exerted a direct influence on the formation of this sensitive child’s character. But this was not an American but a typically German patriarchal home, and Rudolf was a typical German youth, with a somewhat schizoid introverted strain. It was also his misfortune that the normally turbulent years of his early adolescence fell in a period of uncommon turbulence on a world-wide scale.

His First Taste of Blood

In 1914, when the First World War broke out in all its fury, Rudolf, like every German youth of his age, wanted to enlist. After several futile attempts, he succeeded in his sixteenth year in breaking through the age barrier, following completion of the fifth class in the gymnasium. He joined the regiment in which his father and grandfather had served, the latter as colonel. Following training, he was assigned to a cavalry detachment, en route to the Middle East. He saw battle in Iraq—where he killed his first Hindu soldier and “almost collapsed with terror.” In 1917, wounded in battle on the Jerusalem front, he was sent for treatment to the German-Palestinian Kaiser Wilhelm Hospital.

It is a curious coincidence that the two most notorious Jew-killers, Rudolf Hoess and Adolf Eichmann, had both been in Palestine before their graduation to the top positions of chief hangmen of the Reich. Eichmann, the Hebrew-speaking chief of Jewish annihilation, came to Palestine to study the Jewish question as part of his Nazi education. Hoess, not quite eighteen, was too young and too deeply in love with a nurse in the Kaiser Wilhelm Hospital to worry much about the Jewish question. Yet the Holy Land exerted a powerful influence on his youthful imagination. His Catholic heart was stirred deeply by the living legends of the Scriptures in Jerusalem. But here too, in the cradle of faith, he lost faith in his religion, while witnessing the sale of a red-spotted Transjordanian moss to devout pilgrims as Golgotha relics tinged with the blood of Jesus, a deed of which the German colonists boasted openly (p. 73). He found the same hocus-pocus in Nazareth. This was his second great disappointment—the first occurred when his father confessor, whose solace he sought because of a childish prank that had caused an injury to one of his playmates, had betrayed his sacred trust and revealed the incident to his father. So died his faith in clerics and with it his vow to become a priest.

Of the three great pillars of authority, two had crumbled to dust. Father and priest were in default. There remained only one pillar to which he could anchor his life’s ambition—the teacher. He was in search of a teacher, the embodiment of all authority. It was an adventurous search.

The Searching Years

Following the armistice, Hoess, barely eighteen, led his platoon all the way from Damascus and Anatolia, through the Black Sea, over Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary and Austria, back to the defeated fatherland. His mother was dead and his greedy relatives were heartily disliked by him. Hoess decided to remain a soldier. He left his home town and enlisted in the Baltic Free Corps organized by Lieutenant Rossbach in 1919.{5} He fought in Latvia and other Baltic provinces. It was guerilla fighting at its worst, with no quarter given or asked. Hoess reminisces:

“The battles in the Baltic States exceeded everything in fury and stubbornness. There was no continuous front. The enemy was everywhere. And when it came to an encounter, it degenerated into a slaughter down to complete annihilation. They burned homes, with the inhabitants inside roasted alive. I witnessed innumerable times the terrifying picture of gutted huts and charred bodies of women and children. The first time I saw it all, I was petrified with horror....This was at the time when I could still pray and I prayed....(p. 78).”

These volunteer units were employed whenever and wherever needed, and were in turn demobilized under the pressure of the outraged Allies. This happened several times. The Free Corps volunteers succeeded in smashing the revolt of the workers in the Ruhr. They fought the Polish coup in Silesia. They were “finally” and formally disbanded in 1922. Driven underground, the bands became a menace to the, lawful authorities as well as to prominent Germans accused of violating the sacred code of reactionary nationalism.{6}

This was the beginning of the notorious Feme, an imitation of the medieval German Vehmgerichte with their kangaroo courts and the “holy bands” of vigilantes sworn to secrecy and unquestioned obedience. The Feme was a lawless gangster-like fraternity which specialized in murder and terror, and it almost seemed as if a second secret government had taken over the rule in Germany. The authorities struck back, but the more these thugs felt themselves persecuted, the stronger grew the bonds of their comradeship. No one was permitted to quit the secret ranks. Traitors to the code or violators of the esprit de corps were executed. This was Hoess’ school of life.

In 1922, he attended a lecture delivered by Hitler to the men of the Free Corps and, like many of his comrades, he enlisted in the Nazi Party. His membership certificate bore number 3240. (The Nazi nobility ranked according to the lowest number of membership).

In 1923, the members of the former Free Corps were active in a sabotage campaign against the French occupation forces in the Ruhr. Hoess was in the thick of it and finally became embroiled in the murder of his former comrade Walter Kadow, who had betrayed the leader of the sabotage activities, Leo Schlageter, to the French authorities{7} Though he merely shielded the real murderer, he was arrested, tried and, contrary to his expectation, sentenced to a ten year prison term.

Hoess was a model prisoner; he worked and read much and even learned to speak English. After two years of incarceration, he experienced a short spell of a manic-depressive psychosis which was remedied following psychiatric treatment. After six years of imprisonment, Hoess was released by a general government amnesty, at the age of 29. His jail experiences convinced him that there was no future in raucous demonstrations and irresponsible thuggery. The attempts of his former comrades to induce him to enter the Nazi party’s services were of no avail, as Hoess dreamed of a more fruitful and peaceful life. Already in prison he heard about the Artamannenbund, a communitarian organization of young people that advocated a return to the soil, viewing peasant life as the original source of national resurgence. Hoess joined an Artamannenbund settlement in Mecklenburg. There he met the girl whom he married after a whirlwind courtship. Life was hard but hopeful. He soon left to work on an estate in Pomerania. He dreamed of accumulating enough savings to buy his own land.

However, this bucolic bliss was short-lived. In 1933, Hitler became chancellor and Himmler was busy organizing the first SS cavalry units.{8} Hoess was urged by the administrator of the estate to organize such a unit in his region. In 1934, Himmler, on a review tour of the SS cavalry, proposed to Hoess that he enter active SS service. This flattering offer was too difficult to refuse, even in the face of his beloved wife’s reservations. Therefore, his plans of becoming a gentleman-farmer had to be postponed—not indefinitely, he hoped.

The Making of an SS Martinet

An SS-man was not born but made by training and indoctrination. Certainly, Hoess’ criminality was not “the product of heredity, atavism and degeneracy, to cite the Lombrosian triad explaining that construction of the “criminal type.” Himmler did not rely solely on the molding powers of heredity, despite his insistence on racial purity of the SS Elite. The real SS mentor was Theodor Eicke,{9} commander of the Dachau Concentration Camp and head of the training school of the future SS officers and camp leaders. Under his relentless pounding and bullying discipline, Dachau became the forge in which the SS character was cleansed of every tinge of human compassion or consideration, and the conditioned r...