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The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz

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The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz DEATH DEALER The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz by Rudolph Hoss Edited by Steven Paskuly Translated by Andrew Pollinger Foreword by Primo Levi DA CAPO" PRESS Death Dealer The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz ''A valuable addition to Holocaust studies, a chilling self-portrait of an all­ too-typical servant of totalitarianism." -Library Journal "[Ross's autobiography] combines a considerable amount of accurate in­ formation [with] some genuine insights into his past." -New York Review of Books "Must reading in light of the growing activities of Holocaust deniers." -Jewish Post & Opinion Praise for the 1960 Expurgated Edition "[A] gruesomely fascinating book." -Phoebe Adams, The Atlantic "This is a book of concentrated horror looked at in a cold, detached way . The reader can look at this important document from various angles. He can regard the book as a unique historical description of the acting out of man's barbaric horror fantasies in a so-called civilized world. Or he can take a psychological view and ask: what went on in the minds of men who,coldly committed these perfidious crimes? ... This autobiography of a deluded multi-million murderer belongs in the hands of many readers." -New Thrk Times Book Review "Ross's story reads like one of those trick problems in logic, in which at some point a carefully concealed false deduction has been made and the whole train of reasoning has been thrown hopelessly awry." --Commonweal "To get anywhere near a true assessment of this nightmare character, you have to picture [Hoss] as an unctuous little man who might, in more normal times, be one of thousands waiting daily and indistinguishably with their attache cases on the suburban station platforms for the 7:45." -New Statesman "This appalling book holds a compulsive fascination by reason of its very coldbloodedness; one of the most historically valuable documents to emerge from the war, it should be enforced reading for all Nazi and Fascist apolo­ gists." -Kirkus "This is a great if grisly historical document, which not only includes the unforgettable self-portrait by Hoss but candid pictures of some of his more spectacular and abominable fellow criminals. It is not for the squeamish, this book, but it is for the thoughtful." -Quentin Reynolds, Saturday Review "This autobiography is of quite extraordinary interest. It shows with exact­ itude how ordinary little men were bewitched by the evil genius of Hitler which transformed them into mechanical instruments for a monstrous mass­ murderer, robots with nothing human left but a certain pride in their deg­ radation. It might well be claimed that this book is the best answer to the question so often asked of how the whole phenomenon of National Social­ ism was possible." -Times Literary Supplement "[Death Dealer] is a reminder, never to be forgotten, of the appalling and disastrous effects of totalitarianism in men's minds." -Chicago Sunday Tribune "This is a curious and horrifying volume, and by all odds its most horrifying feature is the way in which the author manages to describe the most ghastly details in a manner which is free of emotion and, one gathers, almost en­ tirely free of any feeling of shame or guilt. The details are not for the squeamish. Yet they should be read." -New York Herald Tribune Book Review "[Hoss's autobiography is) not only a revealing document on the system and practice of the Third Reich's machinery of destruction, but also an impressive record of the seduction of an average man by the pseudo-moral claims of a totalitarian ideology." -Joachim C. Fest, author of The Face of the Third Reich "Reading this book is a grisly experience ... But such books need to be read. [Death Dealer] is valuable because it gives a remarkably candid portrait of the type of mentality and the kind of environment which can add up to atrocities like the Nazi murder camps." -Springfield Republican ISBN-10: 0-306-80698-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-306-80698-8 To my wife Carol, whose love and support has made this book possible SJP Contents Foreword by Primo Levi 3 Preface 11 Acknowledgments 15 Translator's Note 17 Introduction 19 Part 1: Memoirs The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Concentration Camp Auschwitz 27 2 Early Years 48 3 An Early Traumatic Experience 52 4 World War I 54 5 Battles of the Free Corps 60 6 On Trial for Murder 62 7 In Prison 64 8 Insights into the Criminal Mind 67 9 Prison Psychosis 72 10 Model Prisoner 75 11 Freedom 77 12 The Artamans 79 13 Again a Soldier 81 14 The Early Concentration Camps 85 15 The Types of Guards 88 16 Experiences in Sachsenhausen 97 17 Kommandant of Auschwitz 118 18 The Russian Prisoners of War 132 19 The Gypsies 135 20 The Jews 139 21 The Women's Camp 145 22 The Gassings 155 viii CONTENTS 23 Chief of the Department of Inspections of Concentration Camps 165 24 1945-47 178 25 Some Final Thoughts 182 Part II: Final Letters 26 Fmall.etters to His Wife and Children 189 27 Epilogue 196 Part Ill: Profiles of the Camps 28 Rules and Regulations for Concentration Camps 209 Purpose of the Camps 209 Organization of the Concentration Camps 209 I Kommandant's Office 210 II Political Department 212 III Protective Custody Camp 213 IV Administration 215 V Camp Doctor 216 VI Guard Troops 217 Camp Punishments 218 Work Deployment 219 The Non-Medical Activities of the SS Doctors in Auschwitz 223 Part IV: Profiles of the SS 29 Organization Schmelt 229 Aumeier 230 Baer 233 Bischoff 235 Burger 236 Caesar 237 Eichmann 240 Eicke 243 Fritzsch 250 Globocnik 253 Glilcks 257 Grabner 260 Gravits 263 Hartjenstein 266 Rimmler 268 Kammler 293 Liebehenschel 296 CONTENTS ix Lolling 300 Maurer 301 Mackel 304 Milller 305 Palitzsch 308 Pohl 312 Schwarz 318 Sell 320 Thomsen 322 Wirths 323 30 Night and Fog-Meerschaum 326 31 Lebensbom 327 32 Explanation of the Three Concurrent SS Ranks 330 33 SS Tattoos 332 Appendix I Incident at Budy 333 Appendix II Chronology of the Important Events at Auschwitz-Birkenau 336 Appendix III Wannsee Conference Minutes 371 Bibliography 383 Index 387 Foreword Usually when you agree to write a foreword, you do so because you truly care about the book: it's readable, the literary quality is high, you like or at least admire the author. This book, however, is the extreme opposite. It's filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony. Furthermore, despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies. Yet this autobiography of the Kommandant of Auschwitz is one of the most instructive books ever published because it very accurately describes the course of a human life that was exemplary in its way. In a climate different from the one he happened to grow up in, Rudolph Hoss would quite likely have wound up as some sort of drab functionary, com­ mitted to discipline and dedicated to order-at most a careerist with modest ambitions. Instead, he evolved, step by step, into one of the greatest crimi­ nals in history. We survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are often asked a symp­ tomatic question, especially by young people: who were the people "on the other side" and what were they like? Is it possible that all of them were wicked, that no glint of humanity ever shone in their eyes? These questions are thoroughly answered by Ross's book, which shows how readily evil can replace good, besieging it and finally submerging it-yet allowing it to per­ sist in tiny, grotesque islets: an orderly family life, love of nature, Victorian morality. Precisely because the author is uneducated, he cannot be suspected of deliberately perpetrating a colossal falsification of history: he would have been incapable of that. His pages teem with mechanical rehashes of Nazi rhetoric, white lies and black lies, attempts at self-justification, at embel­ lishment. Yet these are all so ingenuous and transparent that the most un­ prepared reader will have no trouble seeing through all these things-they stick out from the texture of the narrative like flies in milk. This book is substantially truthful: it is the autobiography of a man who was not a monster and who never became one, even at the height of his career in Auschwitz, when at his orders thousands of innocent people 4 FOREWORD were murdered daily. What I mean is that we can believe him when he claims that he never enjoyed inflicting pain or killing: he was no sadist, he had nothing of the satanist. By contrast, satanic features can be found in Ross's portrait of his peer and friend, Adolf Eichmann; however, Eichmann was far more intelligent than Hoss, and we are left with the impression that Hoss took some of Eichmann's bragging at face value, even though it doesn't hold up under serious analysis. Rudolph Hoss may have been one of the worst criminals of all time, but his makeup was not dissimilar from that of any citizen of any country. His guilt, which was not inscribed in his genes or in his German birth, lay entirely in the fact that he was unable to resist the pressure exerted on him by a violent environment, even before Hitler's takeover. To be fair, we have to admit that the young boy got off to a bad start.
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