Rudolf Hoss

Rudolf Hoss was the commandant of Auschwitz for three and a half years, wrote a detailed memoir in a Polish cell, and was hanged beside the camp. He had served in the First World War as a teenager, was imprisoned in the 1920s for a political murder, joined the SS, and learned the camp system at Dachau and Sachsenhausen before being sent in 1940 to build a new camp at Oswiecim. He introduced Zyklon B there, having looked for a method faster than shooting, and oversaw the construction of the killing installations at Birkenau. He estimated at Nuremberg that two and a half million people had been killed at Auschwitz and a further half million had died of disease; later scholarship puts the total nearer 1.1 million and the figure he gave was probably inflated by Eichmann's boasting. He lived with his wife and five children in a house on the perimeter, and the ordinariness of that domestic arrangement is the subject of a novel and a film seventy years later. He was captured in 1946 by British field security after his wife was told her son would be sent to the Soviet Union, tried in Warsaw, and hanged on a gallows built beside the camp crematorium in April 1947. His memoir is read as a primary source and as evidence of what a bureaucrat's self-account looks like. He wrote the memoir at the request of a Polish prosecutor, and it is unusual in that he does not deny the killing and does not appear to understand what he is describing. He asks to be seen as a man who obeyed. Primo Levi wrote a preface to an Italian edition arguing that it should be read precisely because it is not the confession of a monster.

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