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Commandant of Auschwitz : The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess

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Worth reading if you're interested in what goes on inside a person engaged in socially-sanctioned mass murder. Full of details about the actual operation of Auschwitz that only he would have known. Balancing this preoccupation with the details of running the camp is ... nothing. No inner life, no emotional depth, no soul. A man who seems to have died long before his victims.

The autobiography of Rudolf Hoess is the story of a man who would ultimately be in charge of the huge extermination camp at Auschwitz where millions of Jews were systematically murdered.

In its pages you will find an accurate account of the means that were used to isolate those victims, of the political principle that was used to justify the victims' elimination from public life, and of the mental state needed to carry out the order for their deaths. Consequently "this book," as Primo Levi states in his introduction, "is filled with evil."

Even so, the book ought to be read--and read carefully--because an understanding of the ideas that drove Rudolf Hoess to do what he did are a major step towards ensuring that the horrors of Nazi Germany will never happen again.

This book was very disturbing on so many levels. Yet it was also fascinating to see the progression of this semi-average person, into a person who was responsible for the deaths of millions. Read the intro by Primo Levi first to get yourself in the right frame of mind.

I first read this book in the 7th grade, many years ago. It started for me a lifetime interest in history, autobiographies and WW2. This autobiography is frightening in its normalcy...in the matter-of-fact manner in which he describes the construction and operation of the gas chambers, his family relationships, and his mindless acceptance of even the most barbaric orders all in the same paragraphs. Hoess wrote this book between his arrest and his hanging, and under those circumstances you would expect some element of contrition. Instead, the reader is given Hoess's classic cry of innocense..."I was just taking orders". Nevertheless, the book does offer a peek behind the characters of Nazi history, with hints at some of their motivations.

Commandant Of Auschwitz is a look into a man without a conscience. Hoess tries to portray himself as just another S.S. officer following orders. This is a look into a shameful time in our history and the self suiting story told by one of it's monsters. Expect nothing from this book other than a man who gives details of concentration camps under his command without feelings or remorse.

Of note, royalties of the English translation of this book go to a group named Comite International d'Auschwitz which is a charitable organization for Auschwitz survivors.

This book by Hoess is revealing and a reminder that stupid people can rise to power and thus influence greatly the lives of innocent people.

Commandant Hoess' testimonial work is a poignant example of an utterly
sociopathic personality, shrouded in a veil of narcissistically based
denial. The "family man" who spends his work day conjuring-up new and
inovative means in the pursuit of the mass-murder of over a million human
souls. The "good soldier" who will blindly follow the fascist doctrine of
his Hitlerian superiors and take pride in his ability to impress them with the butcher's bill of his murder machine. Truly, his story is a good insight into a worse case scenario of "the nobody" who ascends to a position of power within the parameters of a police State that will allow any excess and rationalize any atrocity in its never-ending pursuit of self justification. It could happen here, it could happen anywhere.

This is book comes from a man who, as commander of Oswiecim and later inspector of camps, can truly lay claim to have been one of "Hitler's Willing Executioners". In my judgement Hoess has written with great (though -- obviously -- not complete) honesty and in detail about his life, from his religious youth, the quarrels with his family, his life as a WWI and Freikorps soldier, to being a long - term prison inmate, his dreams of leading a farming life, until we finally find him standing in a cellar in Oswiecim concentration camp, personally supervising the gassing of civilians. His -- as I see it -- unsettling message is that despite of his deeds he was not an incarnation of the devil, not even a completely heartless person or a psychopath. In fact, for most of his life he had been a victim himself, and he was certainly capable of courage and compassion. All this does not renege or dilute his guilt, but it curtails our desire to find simple answers to an unanswerable question; as Eli Wiesel has put it, we must try to remember the Holocaust but should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can ever fully understand it.

In his autobiography, Rudolf Hoess openly writes that he was personally responsible for the gassing murder of 2-1/2 million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He wrote the memoir just before his execution for crimes against humanity to save his family from consequences of his actions. Hoess took full responsibility for his crimes. It was a mea culpa -- complete with elaborate tables with a breakdown of which country various populations of his victims had come from.

Hoess concludes his memoir explaining that he wrote it so the world could see that he wasn't a monster -- rather, just a misled bureaucrat who hopes his family will not be made to suffer for his crimes. The book is well worth reading -- especially by those who either out of ignorance or wickedness take the position that the Holocaust never happened.

See: "Pope, Expressing Solidarity With Jews, Reacts to Uproar Over a Holocaust Denier" -- New York Times

[...]

This was the second book that I had read on Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and like the first book "Death Dealer"; it had my attention up to a point. The chronicle of his childhood and youth were interesting only from the viewpoint of the European mindset of Father and son relationships. His military career and rise in the ss organisation appears to be fueled by his own inner self, in other words; no one forced him to wear the black uniform. That he wanted to be a farmer and enjoy the workings of nature is one thing, becoming a soldier was something else. The experiences in Auschwitz at its inception and afterwards leave little room for sympathy or understanding. Can the dilemma of poor Rudolf having to scrounge his own barbed wire equate to you or I trying to buy something for our own homes? His pathetic laments over the types of "bottom of the barrel" people that he had to work with doesn't wash here. He neglected to mention the dozens of efficient, ruthless barbarians like Joseph Mengele, Otto Moll and Stefan Baretzki of whom Birkenau survivors have a different remembrance. Lastly, the worst omission that the book carries is that Rudolf makes no repentant statement concerning the murder of the Jewish people. His only regret is that the wholesale slaughter besmirched the concept of National Socialism as he saw it! Die-hard follower of Hitler to the end, it would have cost him little to apologize to the Jewish people, and at least show some humanity. I feel that the nazi machine had made Rudolf Hoess into the perfect unfeeling automaton, capable of love only to his own, yet looking on the "untermenschen" as vermin. I recommend this book for any serious student of the Holocaust who desires an insight into the psyche of one of mankind's most horrific murderer's and bureaucrats.