A MASS MURDERER REPENTS:
The Case of Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz
John Jay Hughes
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, March 25, 1998
The visitor to the Auschwitz concentration camp who follows the
prescribed route comes, at the end of the tour, to a square mound marked
with a sign identifying it as the place where the camp's builder and
Commandant, Rudolf Hoess1, was hanged on April 16, 1947. Visible from
the site is the spacious villa, two hundred yards distant, in which
Hoess lived throughout the war with his wife and five children.
Among the many top Nazi war criminals who were executed following
Germany's defeat in May 1945 the case of Rudolf Hoess is unique. In
testimony before the war crimes tribunal in Nürnberg in April 1946 he
surprised the court by giving a full and frank account of his crimes,
including a contradiction of Hermann Göring's claim that there was never
any order for mass destruction of Jews.
Though his story has been known to Holocaust scholars at least since
19512 , it has received little attention. This neglect, and the
publication in 1997 of a new book on Hoess by a German scholar, with
much new material3 , make the case of Rudolf Hoess worth revisiting.
Hoess was born on November 25, 1901 in the German town of Baden-Baden,
the eldest of three children and only son of devout Catholic parents. He
was baptized on December 11, 1901 with the Christian names Rudolf Franz
Ferdinand. His parents, solid middle-class burghers, had a tea and
coffee business inherited from Hoess's maternal grandparents. Rudolf's
father came from a military family and had been a German army officer
himself in East Africa. He left the army because of multiple wounds. In
the prison memoirs which Hoess wrote in January-February 1947 he
describes the family atmosphere thus:
A warm relationship existed between my parents, full of love ... and
yet, I never saw them being affectionate to one another. My two younger
sisters ... were around my mother a great deal and loved to cuddle with
her, but I refused any open show of affection... A handshake and a few
brief words of thanks were the most that one could expect from me.
Although both of my parents cared for me very much, I could never find a
way to confide in them. ... The only one I confided in was my Hans [his
pony].4
Prof. Batawia, the Polish psychiatrist who interviewed Hoess in Cracow,
wrote that Hoess's childhood was
stamped with principles of military discipline and religious fanaticism,
accompanied by constant emphasis of sin and guilt and the need to do
penance. Hoess grew up in a family atmosphere in which expressions of
love, freedom from worry, spontaneity, and humor were paralyzed; where
everything the child did was judged by strict moral standards, where the
word "duty" had almost mystical significance and disobedience in trifles
was almost a crime. 5
During his imprisonment at Nürnberg Hoess told the American psychiatrist
Martin Gilbert that his "fanatically Catholic" father punished his son's
many youthful transgressions by making him say prayers.6
Following the birth of the couple's second daughter Rudolf's father took
a vow of celibacy, promising to live with his wife henceforth as brother
and sister, and dedicated his son to God as a priest. To cultivate this
vocation Hoess senior took his son on pilgrimage to numerous shrines,
including that at Lourdes. Priests were frequent visitors in the Hoess
family home. Rudolf listened, he wrote, "in radiant rapture" to the
tales of bearded missionaries who had known his father during the
latter's service in Africa. He "believed deeply", took his religious
duties seriously, and "was zealous as an altar boy."7
The first break in this atmosphere of hothouse piety came when Rudolf
was thirteen. As he hurried downstairs at school with his classmates on
a Saturday morning he accidently pushed another boy, causing him to
break his ankle. Rudolf was punished with two hours' detention.
Conscientious as always, he mentioned his transgression in his weekly
confession the same day. He did not report the incident at home,
however, not wishing "to spoil Sunday for my parents", as he wrote,
adding: "They would learn about it soon enough during the coming week."
The same evening his confessor, a good friend of his father, visited the
family. The following morning Rudolf's father scolded and punished him
for not reporting the pushing incident right away. Since the family
telephone was out of order, there had been no other visitors, and none
of his classmates lived in their neighborhood, Rudolf concluded that the
priest must have broken the seal of the confessional. "My faith in the
holy profession of priesthood was smashed and doubts began to stir ithin
me," Hoess wrote. "After this incident I could no longer trust any
priest."8 He changed confessors and soon stopped going to confession
altogether.
The death of Rudolf's father the year following, and the outbreak of
World War I changed the course of young Rudolf's life. Volunteering in a
military hospital, the teenager found himself as fascinated by the
soldiers' tales of military life as he had previously been by the talk
of African missionaries at home. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to
join the army himself, he finally succeeded before his fifteenth
birthday in 1916, with the help of an officer in his father's and
grandfather's old cavalry regiment. Serving on the Turkish front, he was
three times wounded, receiving several decorations and becoming at age
seventeen the youngest sergeant in the German army. Following the
armistice Hoess, now only eighteen, led his cavalry platoon, all men
over thirty, on a marathon trek from Syria to Germany. Seventeen years
later Hoess remained proud of this achievement "As far as I know, no
complete unit ever returned home from that theater of war."9
Hoess's wartime experiences affected him deeply. The commercialism he
observed at pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land, where he recuperated from
his wounds, further eroded what remained of his youthful piety.
Especially significant is the concept of leadership he learned on the
battlefield:
It was then I learned that leadership does not depend on rank, but on
better knowledge. The ice-cold, unshakeable calm of the leader is
decisive in difficult situations. I learned too how hard it is to remain
an example to others, and preserve outward calm, when one is filled with
fears and doubts within. 10
That the cause for which he fought was just, was taken for granted. This
same combination of unshakeable confidence in the rightness of the
cause, and an ice-cold exterior despite inner doubts, would characterize
Hoess's later career as concentration camp officer and commandant.
Discharged from the army in 1919, Hoess found himself without a home.
His mother had died in 1917, his two sisters were in convent schools.
Relatives had divided the family property. When the uncle who was his
legal guardian told Rudolf he would pay for seminary studies but none
other, the young man declared angrily that he no longer wished to be a
priest and formally renounced his inheritance in favor of his sisters.
The next day he traveled to East Prussia where he volunteered for
service with one of the private militias which flourished in the chaos
of post-war Germany. During the next three years Hoess was involved in
battles which he described as "more brutal and vicious that anything I
had experienced before."11 In 1922 he formally left the church. Shortly
thereafter, Hoess joined the Nazi party after hearing a speech by Adolf
Hitler in Munich. These years also brought meetings with his future
commander and hero Heinrich Himmler, and with Martin Bormann, whom Hoess
recruited for the Nazi party.
In 1923 Hoess was involved in the brutal gang murder of a supposed
traitor, an act of vigilante justice of the kind still practiced in
Northern Ireland today. Hoess was tried and sentenced to ten years'
imprisonment. In the third year of this term he suffered a severe mental
and physical breakdown.
With all my power I tried to pull myself together, but I just couldn't
fight it. I wanted to pray, but all I could manage was a sad, fearful
mumbling. I had forgotten how to pray; I could no longer find the way to
God.... I believed that God didn't want to help me any more because I
had left him. My official withdrawal from the church in 1922 tortured
me.12
Hoess would draw on his experiences of prison life in his later
concentration camp work.
Released from prison through a general amnesty in 1928, Hoess joined an
organization called the Artaman League.13 This was a nationalistic
back-to-the-land movement: youthful idealists who wished to escape
decadent and corrupting urban life through farming and healthy living.
Here he met his wife, whom he married in 1929.
In June 1934 Heinrich Himmler, by now Commander of the elite military
SS, invited Hoess to join its ranks. Hoess would come to revere Himmler
so much that he considered whatever he said "gospel" and to hang his
picture rather than Hitler's in his office.14 At this early stage,
however, Hoess hesitated to abandon farming, his first love, for
military service. When he decided to do so, he continued to hope that he
could return to farming later.
Hoess's first assignment was to the concentration camp at Dachau, just
north of Munich. His mentor there was the camp commander, SS-Colonel
Theodore Eicke,
a simpleminded, old-time Nazi from the street-fighting days. ... He
considered all prisoners enemies of the state, who must be kept locked
up at all times, must be treated harshly, and annihilated if they
resist. This is what he lectured about and how he educated his SS
officers and soldiers.15
In his prison memoirs Hoess describes how upset he was when he had to
witness the flogging of prisoners in Dachau - a punishment so brutal
that prisoners had been known to commit suicide in order to avoid it.16
"Hot and cold chills ran through me when the [prisoner's] screaming
started."17 When Hoess had to order corporal punishment himself as
commandant of Auschwitz, he was seldom present. Hoess's description of
his reaction makes it clear, however, that what most distressed him was
not the victim's suffering but rather the fear of being viewed by his
SS-colleagues as a weakling.18
In May 1938 Hoess was assigned to the concentration camp at
Sachsen-hausen, near Berlin, where he came into contact with the inner
circle around Hitler. He served at Sachsenhausen until April 1940, when
he was made Commandant of the newly established concentration camp at
Auschwitz in Poland. To understand his activity there one must know what
motivated him. Despite the unspeakable cruelties for which he was
responsible, Hoess was no sadist. He acted on the basis of an ideology
in which he believed as fanatically as his father had believed his own
twisted version of Catholicism.
In his prison memoirs Hoess wrote that there had been two driving
principles in his life: love of country and love of his family.
I believed that the National Socialist ideology [Weltanschauung] was the
only one suited to the German people. The farm was supposed to be our
[family] homestead. My wife and I saw in the children our purpose in
life. It was to be our life's task to enable them to get a good
education and create a stable home life for them.19
Martin Broszat, who edited the German edition of Hoess's memoirs, calls
Nazi ideology a "catch-all, a conglomeration, a hodge-podge."20 Its
racial component, however, was consistent and (in every sense of the
word) simple. This theory was rooted not in revelation, like the
Catholicism he learned from his father, but in nature. All of nature -
plants, animals, humanity - was engaged in perpetual struggle. Only the
strong survived. Humanity's strong races must dominate the weaker ones,
therefore, and keep themselves racially pure. Admixture of blood with
weaker races was fatal.
Aryans, the creators of culture, were at the top of the Nazi racial
pyramid. Beneath them were culture-bearers: Slavs and Asians. Their role
was to provide slave labor for the culturally creative Aryans. Beneath
both were the destroyers of culture, the Jews: humanity's parasites, who
dragged everyone down. History was the record not of class warfare (as
in Marxism) but of racial warfare. Germany had lost the first World War
because it had allowed Jews to become assimilated, thus committing the
cardinal sin of racial bastardization. The renewal of Germany's national
life proclaimed by Adolf Hitler could come about only through a return
to racial purity. If this meant enslavement of non-Germans and
eradication of Jews, so be it. Struggle was the law of life. Only the
strong survived. "The SS was, in my opinion, the most energetic defender
of this ideology," Hoess wrote in his prison memoirs, "and the only one
capable of leading the German people back to a life more in keeping with
its character."21 He added, however:
I want to emphasize that I personally never hated the Jews. I considered
them to be the enemy of our nation. However, that was precisely the
reason to treat them the same way as the other prisoners. ... Besides,
the feeling of hatred is not in me ...22
Consistent with this ideology, in which Hoess believed, "as firmly as a
Catholic believes the dogmas of the church"23 , was his desire to be
notorious for toughness. Any appearance of being soft would call into
question his membership in the Aryan master race. To what lengths this
desire led is shown by two incidents at Sachsenhausen.
Shortly after the outbreak of war Hoess had to command the firing squad
at the execution of a fellow SS-officer. The man had been ordered to
arrest a former Communist official. The arresting officer knew the man,
whom he had found always honorable. Out of kindness he allowed the
prisoner to take leave of his wife at home. While the officer and a
guard were talking to the wife in the apartment, her husband escaped
through another room. A hastily convened court martial immediately
sentenced the SS-officer to death. Hoess tells the story:
Just the day before we had sat in the mess hall and talked about the
executions [we had to carry out]. Now the same thing was going to happen
to him, and I had to carry out the order. Even my Commandant felt that
this was going too far. ... The condemned man was a decent person in his
middle thirties, married with three children, who had been conscientious
and loyal in his duties prior to this incident. ... To this day I still
cannot understand how I could have calmly given the order to fire. ... I
was so upset I could barely hold the pistol steady when I had to give
him the coup de grace.24
The second incident is described by a former inmate at Sachsenhausen who
witnessed it. On January 18, 1940, Hoess ordered more than eight hundred
prisoners who were unfit for work to remain standing all day outside in
thin prison clothing in a temperature of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
When many collapsed Hoess forbade subordinates to take them to the
prison hospital. Asked why this was necessary, he replied: "If the
others [who had left the camp in work details] must freeze, then these
malingerers can spend a day in the cold too." The prisoner who reports
the incident, a trusty with supervision over others, says that when he
finally told Hoess, "The men can't take any more," he received the curt
reply: "They aren't men, they are prisoners." Hoess's actions caused the
death of one hundred forty-five prisoners during the day and the night
following, in addition to those who died of the consequences of their
ordeal later.25 The account of this incident is consistent with that of
a former prisoner at Auschwitz who testified that "Hoess would watch the
beatings and hangings as if he were watching a movie, but with no
reaction showing in his face." 26
When Hoess was chosen to develop a concentration camp at Auschwitz in
late April 1940, he was ordered "to create a transition camp for ten
thousand prisoners from the existing complex of well-preserved
buildings." He found them teeming with "lice, fleas, and other bugs" and
devoid of sanitary facilities27 - a foretaste of the immense
difficulties ahead. At that time, Hoess says, a camp for ten thousand
prisoners was considered "tremendously large". By March 1941 Hoess had
received orders to increase the camp's capacity tenfold.28 When he
complained that this rate of expansion was impossible, given the
incompetence of his staff and the denial of his requests for needed
building material and supplies, Himmler told him he didn't want to hear
about difficulties. For an SS-officer difficulties did not exist. His
task was to overcome them by himself. "As to how? That's your headache,
not mine!"29
By November 1943, when Hoess was transferred to a staff position at
SS-headquarters in Berlin, Auschwitz had become so large that three
officers were assigned to replace him. What Hoess himself called "the
largest killing center in all of history"30 was the product of his
unremitting hard work and constant pressure on subordinates to meet his
exacting standards. Hoess went to Auschwitz determined "to do things
differently" and develop a camp better than those in which he had served
hitherto. His memoirs are full of complaints that his best intentions
were frustrated by the shortcomings and stubbornness of the officers and
men who were assigned to him.31
Repeatedly he says that he learned only after the war about many of the
worst abuses in the treatment of prisoners. He was so taken up with
administrative duties that he had to leave discipline and punishment to
subordinates, who constantly disobeyed his orders.32 The state
prosecutor at Hoess's post-war trial in Warsaw stated that, unlike other
SS-men, Hoess had never personally abused or struck a prisoner in
Auschwitz.33 Hoess's own claim, however, that he had done everything in
his power to prevent abuses, clearly goes too far. This would have
required him to close the camp entirely.34
Until the beginning of 1942 most of the prisoners in Auschwitz were
Polish. This changed when Himmler put Hoess in charge of the destruction
of all European Jews. He was ordered to keep this secret, even from his
superiors.35 Hoess admits in his memoirs that he was deeply affected by
the horrible scenes he witnessed at the gas chambers. Since everyone was
watching him, however, to see his reactions,
I had to appear cold and heartless during these events which tear the
heart apart in anyone who had any kind of human feelings. ... Coldly I
had to stand and watch as the mothers went into the gas chambers with
their laughing or crying children. ... I was never happy at Auschwitz
once the mass annihilation began.36
"Did you never have qualms of conscience?" the Polish prosecutor asked
Hoess at his trial.
Yes, later [he replied] when the mass transports arrived - especially
when we had to exterminate women daily. Everyone involved had the same
unspoken question: was this necessary? They came to me a number of times
and spoke about this. All I could do was tell them that we had to carry
out orders without permitting ourselves any human feelings.37
Hoess says that he had lengthy discussions about the mass extermination
of Jews with Adolf Eichmann, though "without ever letting him know what
was going on inside me."38 Eichmann discerned Hoess's doubts
nonetheless. During his post-war exile in Argentina Eichmann said that
Hoess had told him he had received reassurance from Heinrich Himmler.
After personally viewing the gassing of "our enemies" at Auschwitz and
the burning of their bodies, Himmler had told Hoess and his fellow
SS-officers: "These are battles which the generations that come after us
won't have to fight."39
"I will never forget the last meeting and farewell from Himmler," Hoess
wrote in his memoirs. It was the first week of May 1945. Hitler had
committed suicide in Berlin on April 30. When they heard this news,
Hoess and his wife wanted to take poison.
Our world had perished with the Führer. Was there any sense for us to
continue living? We were going to be pursued and hunted everywhere. ...
For our children's sake we did not do it. ... I have since regretted it
many times.40
Following Hitler's death Heinrich Himmler set up a provisional
government in Flensburg, on the German-Danish border. When Hoess
reported to him there he was shocked to find the commander he had so
revered
beaming and in a great mood; yet the world, our world, had perished. If
he had said, "Well gentlemen, now it's over, you know what to do," I
would have understood - this would have corresponded with what he had
preached year in and year out, "Self-sacrifice for the ideology." But
instead, he gave us his last order: "Hide yourself in the army!" That
was the goodbye from the man I respected so highly, in whom I had placed
such tremendous confidence, whose orders and sayings were gospel to
me.41
Hoess's disillusionment would have important consequences two years
later. At the time, however, his only thought was to disappear. Hoess
was able to avoid capture for ten months. His luck ran out on March 11,
1946, when British military police arrested him on the farm where he was
working near Flensburg. After three weeks he was taken to Nürnberg where
his sober and detailed account of Nazi crimes differed dramatically from
the evasions and lies of those on trial there. Since Hoess's own crimes
had been committed in Poland, he was handed over to the authorities in
that country on May 25. Upon arrival in the Warsaw prison where he was
kept in solitary confinement for nine weeks, "several prison officials
approached me and showed me their Auschwitz tattoo numbers."42 At the
end of July he was transferred to another prison in Cracow. After
initial rough treatment, which Hoess says, "almost had me at the
breaking point ... and I can stand quite a bit"43 , the Polish
prosecutor's office intervened on his behalf. Of his treatment
thereafter Hoess wrote: "I have to confess that I never would have
expected to be treated so decently and so kindly in a Polish prison."44
Hoess's trial began in Warsaw on March 5, 1947. Many Polish lawyers had
been killed in Auschwitz, part of the Nazis' campaign to destroy the
country's intelligentsia. Despite this, the authorities made every
effort to conduct a fair trial. The opening statement of the Polish
judge merits citation:
Mindful of our great responsibility towards the dead and the living, we
must not lose sight of what was at stake for all those who fought for
freedom. Their guiding principle was respect for human dignity. Let us
extend this respect to the accused as well, for the man who stands
before this court is a human being.45
During the three-week trial Hoess answered the questions put to him
concisely and without visible emotion. At the trial's conclusion he
acknowledged his "full responsibility as camp commandant" for everything
that had happened in Auschwitz. Unlike his SS-subordinates, he said, he
had never stolen prisoners' valuables. He had never personally abused or
killed any prisoners. He had acted always under orders. He concluded:
"In making these statements I am not trying in any way, however, to
evade my responsibility."46
On April 2, 1947, the court issued a 64-page finding of the defendant's
guilt and condemned him to death. Still showing no emotion, Hoess
thanked the lawyers who had defended him and declined his right to
appeal for clemency. Pending execution of the court's sentence Hoess was
transferred to the prison in Wadowice, some 30 kilometers from
Auschwitz. In one of history's ironies, the birthplace of Karol Wojty_a,
now Pope John Paul II, would become the setting for the brief but
dramatic final chapter in the life of the builder and commandant of "the
largest killing center in all of history."47
In February, in conversation with the Polish prison psychiatrist,
Professor Batawia, Hoess confessed to having felt, all during his
concentration camp activity that "something was not right". This
remained a feeling only. He did not reflect on the matter but simply
obeyed, as he had been trained to do.
And even today, when I think so much about everything I have
experienced, I cannot say with certainty that the ideology of National
Socialism was wrong. ... I do recognize with certainty, however, that
the abandonment of morality was wrong, and also the crimes, the terror,
the spreading of hatred. I always felt that. Now it is not just a
feeling, I understand where the ideology went wrong.48
In his prison memoirs, written the same month, Hoess stays, however:
I am now as I was then, as far as my philosophy of life is concerned ...
still a National Socialist. A person who has believed in an ideology, a
philosophy, for almost twenty-five years and who was bound up with it
body and soul cannot simply throw it away just because ... the National
Socialist state and its leaders acted wrongly. In fact, criminally and
through their failure our world collapsed and the entire German people
have been plunged into unspeakable misery for decades into the future.49
Evidence of Hoess's continued attachment to Nazi ideas was his further
statement:
Today I realize that the extermination of the Jews was wrong, absolutely
wrong. ... The cause of anti-Semitism was not served by this act at all,
in fact, just the opposite. The Jews have come much closer to their
final goal.50
What did Hoess really think? Was the ideology itself wrong, or only the
methods used to achieve its goals? The statements just quoted show him
still uncertain, even as he moved away from the political faith in which
he had believed so fanatically. Hoess's farewell letters to his wife and
children, written nine days after being sentenced to death, show a
significant further change in his thinking. To his wife Hoess wrote on
April 11:
Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and
bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I
believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong
premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in
the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I
faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that
strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief
in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle.
But I have again found my faith in my God.51
In a letter to his children Hoess told his eldest son:
Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided
primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself,
responsibly. Don't accept everything without criticism and as absolutely
true... The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything
faithfully which came from the top, and I didn't dare to have the least
bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me. ... In
all your undertakings, don't just let your mind speak, but listen above
all to the voice in your heart.52
The SS had trained Hoess to ignore the voice in his heart. In the same
letter he reiterated his conviction that this training was radically
false when he told his daughters: "retain your soft and feeling
hearts."53 Responsible for Hoess's dramatic reversal was something that
had happened the day before these letters were written.
On April 4, the day he was transferred to the prison in Wadowice and two
days after the sentence of death in Warsaw, Hoess asked to see a priest.
When none appeared, he repeated his request in writing. Any suspicion
that he might have been trying to curry favor with his jailers is
excluded by the fact that Poland was then ruled by atheistic Communists.
Moreover, Hoess had accepted his fate by declining to file the appeal
for clemency to which he was legally entitled.
It took almost a week to find a priest who understood enough German to
minister to Hoess, who spoke no Polish. On April 10 Hoess was visited by
the Jesuit Provincial from Cracow, Fr. W_adys_aw Lohn SJ. Fr. Lohn had
taught at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1928 until 1934, had
served as Provincial of the south Polish province of the Society of
Jesus since 1935, and spoke fluent German. During the war twenty-seven
of Lohn's Jesuit brethren had been imprisoned in Auschwitz. Twelve of
them perished.
Fr. Lohn spent several hours with Hoess on April 10. At the end of this
conversation Hoess made a formal profession of Catholic faith, thus
returning to the church he had left a quarter-century before, and made
his confession. The day following Fr. Lohn returned, with the sacristan
of the local parish church, and gave Holy Communion to Hoess, who knelt
in the middle of his cell, weeping.54
Eleven years later, in a sermon at the first Mass of a fellow Jesuit,
Lohn would tell the story of his death-cell visit to the murderer of his
brethren as an example of how radical the demands of the ministry of
reconciliation can be.55
On the same day Hoess wrote the farewell letters quoted above. One day
later Hoess sent to the state prosecutor a final statement.
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the
solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I
have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz I was
responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the "Third
Reich" for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible
wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people
in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God
forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for
forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what
human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced
humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply
shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible
crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts
impossible for all time.56
Four days later, on April 16, 1947, Hoess was hanged in the camp he had
built and commanded. The official report states that he remained
"completely calm right up to the end, and expressed no final wishes."57
Noteworthy in Hoess's final declaration is the absence of any reference
to Jews. Repentance, especially for crimes as grave as those of Rudolf
Hoess, is a process, seldom a single act. Hoess started on the road of
repentance. He did not finish the journey. Those who would withhold
recognition because his repentance was incomplete would do well to
reflect that few, if any, of Hoess's colleagues expressed any regret for
their crimes at all.
What moved Hoess to do so? Joseph Tennenbaum answers this question in
the categories of Freudian psychology and denies any real change in
Hoess. "His behavior was always peculiarly consistent, not logically but
psychologically."58 Steven Paskuly and Manfred Deselaers both accept
Hoess's change of heart at the end, while recognizing its limitations.
They agree also in ascribing it to two factors: the sudden and total
collapse of the ideological world in which Hoess had believed so
fanatically; and the kindness shown him in Polish prisons.
Professor Batawia, the Polish prison psychiatrist whom we have cited
several times already, noted the traumatic effect on Hoess of Germany's
collapse and the refusal of all responsibility by the two men most
responsible for it, Hitler and Himmler. Both committed suicide.
Profoundly shocked by Germany's military defeat, and deeply
disillusioned by its former leaders, [Hoess] was unable to join his
fellow Nazis in the tendency to deny what had happened.59
Hoess believed that the Nazi leaders had deceived not only the German
people but him personally. In his farewell letter to his wife Hoess
spoke also of betrayal by his subordinates.
Since I was Commandant of the extermination camp Auschwitz I was totally
responsible for everything that happened there, whether I knew about it
or not. Most of the terrible and horrible things that took place there I
learned only during this investigation and during the trial itself. I
cannot describe how I was deceived, how my directives were twisted, and
all the things they had carried out supposedly under my orders. I
certainly hope that the guilty will not escape justice. It is tragic
that, although I was by nature gentle, good-natured, and very helpful, I
became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every
order to exterminate people no matter what.60
The tone of self-pity in this passage shows, once again, the limitations
of Hoess's repentance.
The trauma of Germany's defeat and the feeling of betrayal by its
leaders destroyed Hoess's fanatical belief in the Nazi ideology. This
factor cannot explain, however, his expressions of regret for the crimes
that ideology inspired. This was clearly the result of the humane
treatment he received in Polish prisons. Hoess himself mentioned this,
as we have seen, in his final declaration asking forgiveness of the
Polish people. Three days before he had said the same in his farewell
letter to his wife.
My misspent life places on you, dearest, the sacred obligation to
educate our children so that they have, in their deepest heart, a true
humanity. ... Make them sensitive to all human sorrow. What humanity is,
I have only come to know since I have been in Polish prisons. Although I
have inflicted so much destruction and sorrow upon the Polish people as
Commandant of Auschwitz, even though I did not do it personally, or by
my own free will, they still showed such human understanding, not only
the high officials, but also the common guards, that it often puts me to
shame. Many of them were former prisoners in Auschwitz or other camps.
Especially now, during my last days, I am experiencing such humane
treatment [as] I could never have expected. In spite of everything that
happened, they still treat me as a human being.61
Why? Evidence which might allow us to answer this question is lacking.
One would like to think that the Catholicism so deeply entwined with the
history and national consciousness of Poland, a country in this respect
much like Ireland, was responsible. That remains speculation, however.
If indulged in, it could easily lead to an all too familiar kind of
Catholic triumphalism. A glance at Hoess's youth forbids such
complacency. The Catholicism which he learned from his father was, for
all practical purposes, devoid of good news - a religion not of love,
but of law.
Living today in a church in which many Catholics seem to regard law as a
somewhat quaint relic of the times of ignorance that God winked at, we
would do well to recall that within still living memory law was regarded
as so important that obedience, and not love, was thought to be the
supreme Christian virtue.
If the tragedy of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess affords Catholics any
reason for thanksgiving, therefore, it can only be this: that in the
final weeks of what he himself calls his "misspent life", Hoess finally
heard the good news - not in words but in the conduct of very ordinary
people: his jailers. Could there be a better example of the teaching of
the Second Vatican Council about the lay vocation?
The laity are called in a special way to make the church present and
operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can
she become the salt of the earth. 62
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1This is the anglicized version of his German name, "Höß". He must be
distinguished from the Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, who flew to
Scotland on May 10, 1941, to make peace overtures to the British
government. In 1946 the Nürnberg War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Hess
sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in Spandau prison, Berlin, in
1987.
2That year saw the first publication (in a Polish translation) of
Hoess's memoirs, which he wrote in January/February 1947 during his
imprisonment in Cracow: see Biuletyn Glównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni
Niemieckich w Polsce (Bulletin of the Main Commission for the
Investigation of German Crimes in Poland) vol. vii (Warsaw 1951).
3Manfred Deselaers, "Und Sie hatten nie Gewissensbisse?" Die Biographie
von Rudolf Höß, Kommandant von Auschwitz, und die Frage nach seiner
Verantwortung vor Gott und den Menschen (Leipzig: Benno-Verlag, 1997).
Cited hereafter as "Deselaers."
4Cited from Steven Paskuly (ed.),. Death Dealer: the Memoirs of the SS
Commandant at Auschwitz (Buffalo/NY: Prometheus, 1992); cited hereafter
as "Paskuly." Following his arrest in 1946 Hoess was interviewed at
length by psychiatrists, both in Germany and Poland, who found him
remarkably candid and truthful. Tom Segev, the author of "The Commanders
of Nazi Concentration Camps" calls Hoess's memoirs "probably the most
open account ever written by any of the war criminals" (PhD
Dissertation, Boston University 1977, p. 295).
5Deselaers, 39
6Martin Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship (New York: Ronald Press,
1950), 241.
7Paskuly, 50.
8Paskuly 52f.
9Paskuly, 59.
10My translation of the German original in Deselaers, 45; cf. Paskuly,
58.
11Paskuly, 60.
12Paskuly, 72.
13Cf. Michael H. Kater, "Die Artamanen - Völkische Jugend in der
Weimarer Republik", in: Historische Zeitschrift 213 (1971), 577-638.
14Deselaers, 70.
15Paskuly, 243.
16Deselaers, 104.
17Paskuly, 82.
18cf. Paskuly, 82f and Deselaers, 103f.
19Paskuly, 185. I translate Weltanschauung as "ideology"; Paskuly
renders it "world philosophy."
20Cited from D.K.Buse and J.C.Doerr (eds.) Modern Germany: an
Encyclopedia of History, People, and Culture, 1871-1990 (New York &
London: Garland, 1998) vol. 2,.686, col. 2.
21Paskuly, 185.
22Paskuly, 142.
23Hoess's statement to Martin Gilbert, the American prison psychiatrist
at Nürnberg; cited from Deselaers, 86.
24Paskuly, 100.
25Deselaers, 110ff.
26Paskuly, 100 n.1.
27Paskuly, 118.
28Paskuly, 125.
29Paskuly, 287.
30Paskuly, 153 and 286.
31e.g. Paskuly, 119.
32Asked at his trial in Warsaw about the case of Fr. Maximilian Kolbe,
who volunteered to replace a prisoner condemned to death as a hostage,
Hoess denied that such a thing had ever happened. Given his verifiable
truthfulness in other matters, it is entirely credible that Hoess never
heard about Kolbe. The Commandant was simply too busy to know about many
things that went on in the camp. Cf. Deselaers, 91 n. 322.
33Cf. Deselaers, 153.
34Cf. Deselaers, 155.
35Cf. Deselaers, 172s.
36Paskuly, 162.
37Deselaers, 184; cf. Paskuly, 161.
38Paskuly, 163.
39Cited from Deselaers, 185.
40Paskuly, 176f.
41Paskuly, 178.
42Paskuly, 180.
43Paskuly, 181.
44ibid.
45Deselaers, 218.
46Deselaers, 220.
47Cf. n. 30 above.
48Deselaers, 221f.
49Paskuly, 182.
50Paskuly, 183.
511Paskuly, 192.
52Paskuly, 194.
53ibid.
54This account is based on that in Deselaers, 224ff..
55Cf. Deselaers, 225 including n. 1003.
56Translated from Deselaers, 228f. Another English translation appears
in Joseph Tennenbaum, "Auschwitz in Retrospect; the Self-Portrait of
Rudolf Hoess", in: Jewish Social Studies 15 (1953) 203-36, at 235.
57Deselaers, 230.
58Article cited in n. 56 above, 231.
59Cited from Deselaers, 208.
60Paskuly, 189.
61Paskuly, 190.
62Lumen gentium, 33; emphasis supplied.
