On the morning of April 16, 1947, Rudolf Höss walked through the camp he had once commanded. His hands were handcuffed behind his back, and his steps were calm as he moved past the buildings where more than a million people had been murdered under his authority. He was led to a cell in Block 11, the death block of Auschwitz, where he waited for the final hour. At ten o’clock, he was escorted to the gallows.
A priest approached him, the sentence was read aloud, and the noose was placed around his neck. Höss adjusted it with a slight movement of his head. The hangman pulled the stool away, the trapdoor opened, and the man who had organized mass murder on an industrial scale was hanged inside the camp where he had committed his worst crimes. Eighteen minutes later, a physician pronounced him dead.
His remains were likely cremated and scattered in an unknown location. The road to that gallows had begun more than two decades earlier in Germany. Rudolf Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler in Munich. He was a violent man even then.
He became part of a group that beat a schoolteacher to death, a man Martin Bormann had wanted eliminated. Höss was tried as a ringleader and sentenced to ten years in prison. After his release, he married and started a family, eventually fathering five children. His path into the Nazi security apparatus came through Heinrich Himmler.
Höss idolized the head of the SS, even preferring him to Hitler himself. He joined the SS on April 1, 1934, and was assigned to the Death’s Head unit. In December of that year, he was posted to Dachau concentration camp, where he worked as a block leader. After being promoted to captain, he became an adjutant to Hermann Baranowski at Sachsenhausen, where he was involved in the camp’s leadership.
It was there that Höss led the firing squad that executed August Dickmann, the first conscientious objector to be executed after the war began on September 15, 1939. Höss fired the finishing shot himself. After the German invasion of Poland, Höss transferred to the Waffen-SS in 1939. But it was on May 1, 1940, that he took the role that would define his legacy.
He was appointed commandant of a prison camp in western Poland, built around an old army barracks. The camp was named Auschwitz. Höss had been briefed to create a transit camp for ten thousand prisoners, but he had far larger ambitions. He wanted to build the most efficient camp possible, more efficient than anything he had seen before.
He moved his wife and children into a villa on the camp grounds and, while overseeing the machinery of mass murder, maintained a relatively normal home life. Under Höss, Auschwitz grew into a vast complex. At its peak, it consisted of three main facilities served by dozens of sub-camps, spread across roughly twenty thousand acres. Auschwitz I served as the main administrative center.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau was the extermination camp. Auschwitz III-Monowitz was a slave labor camp for German industrial conglomerates. In June 1941, Höss met secretly with Himmler, who informed him of the order for the Final Solution. Himmler had chosen Auschwitz for the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population because of its easy access by rail and its enormous size.
The project was classified as secret. Höss began developing and testing methods of killing as many people as possible in the most efficient way. Under his command, Auschwitz became the most efficient instrument of the Holocaust. He experimented with different methods of gassing prisoners, seeking the quickest way to kill the largest numbers.
During his time as commandant, Höss oversaw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After his arrest, he gave his own accounting of the killings. He recalled the figures from the larger actions: 250,000 from Upper Silesia and the General Government, 100,000 from Germany, 95,000 from Holland, 20,000 from Belgium, 110,000 from France, 65,000 from Greece, 400,000 from Hungary, and 90,000 from Slovakia. These numbers alone brought his total to roughly 1.
1 million. He said he could no longer remember the figures for the smaller actions. When asked about a total of 2. 5 million deaths, he dismissed it as far too high, saying even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capabilities.
Höss was removed from Auschwitz in 1943 after an affair with an inmate, which could have ended his career entirely. But he returned on May 8, 1944, to oversee an operation that bore his name. Operation Höss saw 430,000 Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz and killed in just fifty-six days. The sheer volume was so enormous that the camp struggled to keep up, with thousands of bodies burned in open pits.
Höss finished his career at Ravensbrück, organizing the gassing of prisoners there. He was arrested in March 1946, though he made an attempt to bite a cyanide pill and evade capture. He was called to testify at the Nuremberg trials, appearing as a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s lawyer. During his testimony, he stated that he estimated 2.
5 million people had been executed at Auschwitz during his time in command, a figure he said represented about 70 to 80 percent of all those sent to the camp. While he had been accused of murdering 3. 5 million people, he insisted the correct number was 2. 5 million, saying the rest had died from disease and starvation.
Höss was then handed over to Polish authorities, who tried him for murder. While in prison, he wrote about his experiences and claimed he had been mistreated by the British while held in captivity. Throughout his trial, he remained calm and controlled, fully aware of the fate that awaited him. He asked that his wedding ring be sent to his wife.
On April 2, 1947, the court sentenced him to death by hanging. The day after the verdict, former Auschwitz prisoners requested that the execution take place on the grounds of the camp itself. The execution was originally scheduled for April 14 but had to be postponed out of fear that local residents would attempt to lynch Höss while he was being transported to the site. The date was moved to April 16.
The gallows had been built by German prisoners of war, with a trapdoor fitted into the platform. Four days before his execution, Höss confronted the scale of what he had done. He wrote: “As commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the Third Reich for human destruction. ” That human destruction had been the driving purpose behind his expansion of one of the most inhumane places on earth.
The man who had inflicted so much horror was finally brought to justice in the very place where he had committed it, and his name would be remembered as one of the most evil in the history of the Holocaust.