I was certainly severe and strict. Often perhaps, when I look at it now, too severe and too strict.
In my disgust at the errors and abuses that I discovered, I may have spoken many hard words that I should have kept to myself. But I was never cruel, and I have never maltreated anyone, even in a fit of temper. A great deal happened in Auschwitz that was done ostensibly in my name, under my authority and on my orders, which I neither knew about nor sanctioned. But all these things happened in Auschwitz and so I am responsible. For the camp regulations say: the camp commandant is fully responsible for everything that happens in his sphere.
My life is now nearly at its end. I have given an account here of everything that was important in that life, of all those things that impressed me most strongly and which affected me most deeply. It is the absolute truth, as I saw it and experienced it. I have omitted much that is irrelevant, and much I have forgotten, and much I can no longer remember very clearly.
I am no writer and I have never been particularly skilled with the pen. I am sure that I must have frequently repeated myself, and perhaps I have not always made myself sufficiently clear.
I have also lacked the calm and mental balance required for a task of this nature.
I have written down what came to my mind, often not in sequence, but nothing is invented.
I have described myself as I was and as I am.
I have led a full and varied life. I have followed my star wherever it led me. Life has given me some hard and rough knocks, but I have always managed to get along. I have never given in.
Since returning from the war to which I went as a youngster and from which I came back a man, I have had two lights to guide me: my fatherland and, later, my family. My unalterable love for my country brought me into the NSDAP and the SS.
I regarded the National Socialist attitude to the world as the only one suited to the German people. I believed that the SS was the most energetic champion of this attitude and that the SS alone was capable of gradually bringing the German people back to its proper way of life.
My second worship was my family. To them I was securely anchored. My thoughts were always with their future, and our farm was to become their permanent home. In our children both my wife and I saw our aim in life. To bring them up so that they could play their part in the world, and to give them all a stable home, was our one task in life.
So now my thoughts turn chiefly to my family. What will become of them?
It is this uncertainty concerning my family’s future that makes my imprisonment so hard to bear.
I gave myself up for lost from the beginning and I am concerned no longer about my personal fate, but only about that of my wife and children, for what will happen to them?
Fate has played strange tricks on me. How often have I escaped death by a hair’s breadth? During the First World War, or in the Freikorps, accidents at work, the car smash on the autobahn in 1941, when I ran into an unlighted truck and yet was able, in the fraction of a second left to me, to wrench my wheel around so that the impact came on the side and we all three escaped with cuts and bruises, although the front of the car looked like a concertina. Then there was the riding accident in 1942, when I was thrown onto a rock with the heavy stallion on top of me, and my ribs were broken. And there were the air raids too, when time and again my life did not seem worth a straw. Yet I always managed to survive. There was that other car accident too, shortly before the evacuation of Ravensbrück. Everyone thought I was dead, and it seemed impossible that I should recover, yet I did.
Then the vial of poison that broke just before my arrest.
On every occasion fate has intervened to save my life, so that at last I might be put to death in this shameful manner.
How greatly I envy those of my comrades who died a soldier’s death.
Unknowingly I was a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich. The machine has been smashed to pieces, the engine is broken, and I, too, must now be destroyed.
The world demands it.
I could never have brought myself to make this confession of my most secret thoughts and feelings had I not been approached with a disarming humanity and understanding that I had never dared to expect.
It is because of this humane understanding that I have tried to assist as best I can in throwing some light on matters that seemed obscure.
But whenever use is made of what I have written, I beg that all those passages relating to my wife and my family, and all my tender emotions and secret doubts, shall not be made public.
Let the public continue to regard me as the bloodthirsty beast, the cruel sadist, and the mass murderer; for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light.
They could never understand that he, too, had a heart and that he was not evil.
These writings consist of 114 pages. I have written them voluntarily and without compulsion.
APPENDIX 1
The final solution of the Jewish question in Auschwitz concentration camp
In the summer of 1941, I cannot remember the exact date, I was suddenly summoned to the Reichsführer SS, directly by his adjutant’s office. Contrary to his usual custom, Himmler received me without his adjutant being present and said in effect:
“The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.
“The existing extermination centers in the East are not in a position to carry out the large actions which are anticipated. I have therefore earmarked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged. At first I thought of calling in a senior SS officer for this job, but I changed my mind in order to avoid difficulties concerning the terms of reference. I have now decided to entrust this task to you. It is difficult and onerous and calls for complete devotion notwithstanding the difficulties that may arise. You will learn further details from Strumbannführer Eichmann of the Reich Security Head Office who will call on you in the immediate future.
“The departments concerned will be notified by me in due course. You will treat this order as absolutely secret, even from your superiors. After your talk with Eichmann you will immediately forward to me the plans of the projected installations.
“The Jews are the sworn enemies of the German people and must be eradicated. Every Jew that we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed now during the war, without exception. If we cannot now obliterate the biological basis of Jewry, the Jews will one day destroy the German people.”