The concentration camp system had been in existence in Germany for several years before the war and many Germans had had friends and relatives confined in the camps, some of whom were subsequently released. From Buchenwald prisoners went out daily to work in Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena. They left in the morning and came back at night. During the day they mixed with the civilian population while at work. Did they never converse, and if they did, was the subject of concentration camps always studiously avoided?
In many factories where parties from concentration camps worked, the technicians were not members of the armed forces and the foremen were not SS men. They went home every night after supervising the work of the prisoners all day. Did they never discuss with their relatives or friends when they got home what they had seen and heard during the day? And what of the SS executives and guards? It is true that they had all signed statements binding themselves never to reveal to anyone outside the concentration camp service anything which they had seen inside their camp. But is it reasonable to believe that none of them was human enough to break that undertaking? The bully is ever a braggart.
In August 1941 the Bishop of Limburg wrote to the Reich Ministries of the Interior, of Justice, and of Church Affairs as follows: “About 8 kilometers from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar… is an institute where euthanasia has been systematically practiced for months. Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. The local school children know the vehicle and say, ‘There comes the murder box again.’ The children call each other names and say, ‘You are crazy, you will be sent to the baking ovens in Hadamar.’ Those who do not want to marry say, ‘Marry? Never! Bring children into the world so that they can be put into the pressure steamer?’ You hear the old folks say, ‘Do not send me to a state hospital. After the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn it will be are the old people…’”
If the local inhabitants knew so much in Hadamar is there any doubt that the inhabitants of Bergen, Dachau, Struthof, and Birkenau knew something of what was happening at their very doors in the Belsen, Dachau, Natzweiler, and Auschwitz concentration camps? Hoess himself said of Auschwitz, “the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at the concentration camps.”
Day after day trainloads of victims traveled in cattle cars over the whole railway system of the Reich on their way to extermination centers. They were seen by hundreds of railway workers who knew whence they had come and whither they were going.
Whatever horrors have remained hidden behind the camp walls, such things as these went on in broad daylight and all those Germans who had eyes to see and ears to hear can have been in little doubt of what crimes were being committed in their name throughout the land.
So, as Hoess himself has written, “by the will of the Reichsführer SS, Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination center of all time.” He considered that Himmler’s order was “extraordinary and monstrous.” Nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to him to be right. He had been given an order, and had to carry it out. “Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not,” he writes, “was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.” Hoess felt that if the Führer himself had given the order for the cold calculated murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children then it was not for him to question its Tightness.
What Hitler or Himmler ordered was always right. After all, he wrote, “Democratic England also has a basic national concept: ‘My country, right or wrong!’” and what is more, Hoess really considered that was a convincing explanation. Moreover he thought it strange that “outsiders simply cannot understand that there was not a single SS officer who could disobey an order from the Reichsführer SS.”… His basic orders, issued in the name of the Führer, were sacred. They brooked no consideration, no argument, no interpretation—it was not for nothing that during training the self-sacrifice of the Japanese for their country and their Emperor, who was also their god, was held up as a shining example to the SS.
Nevertheless, despite his training, Hoess appears to have experienced some misgivings, for the first occasion on which he saw gassed bodies in the mass, he has confessed, made him “uncomfortable,” and he “shuddered,” but, on the whole, he and his subordinates preferred this method of extermination to killing by shooting and they were “relieved to be spared those blood baths.”
In his autobiography the relative merits of these alternative methods of extermination are discussed by Hoess with the same detachment as a farmer might discuss whether it was better to use gassing or the gin trap to rid the countryside of destructive vermin. Nor is the analogy farfetched, for that is exactly how the Master Race regarded the Jews.
Hoess’s own account of his misdeeds is not only remarkable for what he has described but also for the way in which he has written it. The Nazis, Hoess among them, were experts in the use of euphemisms and when it came to killing they never called a spade a spade. Special treatment, extermination, liquidation, elimination, resettlement, and final solution were all synonyms for murder, and Hoess has added another gem to the collection, “the removal of racial-biological foreign bodies.”
The horrors described by Hoess are now well known. Many books have been written about them. No new facts of any importance are now disclosed for the first time. Nevertheless, I think that his story should be read for one very good reason. Hoess was a very ordinary little man. He would never have been heard of by the general public had not fate decreed that he was to be, perhaps, the greatest executioner of all time. Yet to read about it in his autobiography makes it all seem quite ordinary. He had a job to do and he carried it out efficiently.
Although eventually he appears to have realized the enormity of what he did, he nevertheless took pride in doing it well.
He was, like so many of his fellow fiends, a great family man. So many of these SS men appear to have had a schizophrenic capacity for sentiment and sadism, but that was, doubtless, because the latter was all just part of their job. The stoker, whose duty it was to look after the fires in the concentration camp crematorium, could gather round the Christmas tree with his young children after lunch on Christmas Day, and a few minutes later glance at his watch and hurry away to be in time for the evening shift.
Hoess was also a lover of animals as were other Nazi villains. One of the officials in Ravensbrück concentration camp, known as “the women’s hell,” carried out the cruelest physical and mental tortures on the women inmates in his charge. When he was convicted by a War Crimes Tribunal in 1947, and sentenced to death by hanging, many of his relatives and friends wrote to say that “dear, kind Ludwig could do no harm to any animal,” and that when his mother-in-law’s canary died he “tenderly put the birdie in a small box, covered it with a rose, and buried it under a rosebush in the garden.” Hoess admits that the extermination of the Jews was “fundamentally wrong,” but that he should have refused to carry out such criminal orders never, for a moment, crossed his mind. Therein lies the warning which his story gives us. That a little bureaucrat like Hoess could, as he himself has written, have become “a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich” is a reminder, never to be forgotten, of the appalling and disastrous effects of totalitarianism on men’s minds.