Rudolf Höss arrived at the crematorium wearing a gas mask, an open canister of Zyklon B in his hand. He was the commandant of Auschwitz, and he was conducting an experiment. In one of the basement cells of Block 11, Soviet prisoners of war, political commissars, and special functionaries were sealed inside. Höss released the gas himself and watched.
The deaths that followed were not merely a trial of a chemical agent; they were a demonstration. When SS chief Heinrich Himmler visited the camp, Höss mentioned what he had done, and the decision followed: Zyklon B would become the standard method for mass extermination. The morgue of Crematorium I, with its hermetically sealed door and holes drilled through the roof for gas injection, was converted into the camp’s first gas chamber. From 1941 to 1942 it functioned as an air-blocking room, a monument to Nazi cruelty, before being rebuilt into a bomb shelter.
The man who engineered this horror had begun his life far from any battlefield or execution pit. Höss was born on November 25, 1900, in Baden-Baden, the most celebrated medical and mineral resort in the German territories, a strikingly beautiful landscape in the southwest. His father, a small shopkeeper and devout Catholic, wanted his son to become an ardent missionary, someone who would bring faith to others. The household was one of strict religious discipline, unconditional submission, and rigid order.
Höss later wrote that from an early age he felt no connection to his parents or sisters. There was no family love, but neither, by his own account, did he develop sadistic inclinations. What the priestly upbringing instilled in him was a profound sense of responsibility combined with blind faith in the instructions of higher authority. It was this formation, he later claimed, that allowed him to regard his crimes as fully justified.
Disappointment came early. In 1913, a priest betrayed the secret of the young Höss’s confession, and he turned away from the Catholic faith. The following year, the First World War began, promising steady earnings and an escape from schooling. Teenagers were taken into the troops, and by 1917 Höss found himself in the middle of a global conflict.
He served in Western Asia, where the Germans were helping the Ottoman army, and earned his first Iron Cross along with two lesser awards, reaching the rank of sergeant major. Disillusioned with religion, he left the regular army and joined the Freikorps, the volunteer battalions of reckless nationalists who rushed to preserve German power in the Baltic states after the war was lost. He was among the 1,200 fighters of the Roßbach Corps, serving in the disputed, mineral-rich regions of Upper Silesia, where local inhabitants had rebelled amid the revolutions spreading across Europe. In the Baltic in 1919, in the ranks of the Freikorps, Höss received the education that would shape the rest of his life: military engineering skills, mobile civil engineering, and the racial theories flourishing under Alfred Rosenberg, the Estonian German who was already developing the ideological foundations of the Nazi Party.
Almost everyone in the Freikorps became not only a nationalist but a racist. Three years later, that background allowed Höss to answer successfully all the questions of the NSDAP admissions committee, and in 1922 he became a follower of Adolf Hitler. A year later, the ordinary sergeant major began actively participating in the cleansing of the homeland from socialists, French occupiers, and representatives of many beliefs. Those who were both Jewish and socialist, and also French by passport, were finished on the spot.
Together with Martin Bormann, Höss participated in the murder of a school teacher who turned out to be precisely such a person. The party had ordered it, and according to the pair, that was reason enough. Having confirmed their loyalty to the Führer, Höss and Bormann were pursued by the police of the Weimar Republic. From 1923 to 1928, Höss was in prison, held in a separate cell with decent conditions: no overcrowding, no mockery, adequate food, and access to books and educational materials.
He read the literature recommended to Aryans by Hitler personally, studied sciences, and mastered languages. Upon release, he was a well-educated twenty-eight-year-old military builder and war veteran, but also a murderer who had put a bullet in the back of the head of a man who had done him no personal harm. From 1928 to 1933, he worked the land, finding it easier to feed himself there, and in the evenings he engaged in the activities of the Artamanen, an organization of Aryans who called on German-speaking people to abandon the cities and live in the open air. It was in this environment that he met his future wife, who would bear him five children.
After the Nazis seized power, Höss joined the SS on September 20, 1933, at the personal invitation of Heinrich Himmler. On December 1, 1934, he was transferred to the SS Totenkopf unit, formed by Theodor Eicke, and assigned to the Upper Bavaria standard, headquartered near the town of Dachau, where the infamous camp had grown. Höss served in various ranks through the 1930s, from a simple guard to an SS officer, eventually holding the post of camp guard supervising the property of prisoners. Transferred to Sachsenhausen, he was appointed adjutant to the commandant on August 1, 1938, responsible for the camp headquarters and official correspondence.
He had made his way from the dirty lower ranks to a clean clerical position, passing a long career path among the Nazis from an illegal party member and prisoner to an officer of the SS concentration camp system. On September 21, 1939, he was appointed commander of the guard at the Sachsenhausen camp under construction, where his tasks included organizing executions of German Bible Students, Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to serve in the army and were sentenced to death personally by Himmler. On February 1, 1940, Höss received the rank of SS captain, and on May 4 of that year, Himmler appointed him commandant of a new camp to be built on the grounds of artillery barracks near the Polish town of Auschwitz. The barracks still had to be turned into a camp, and Höss became not only commandant but head of the construction site.
In the same year, he organized the camp’s so-called sphere of influence, seizing land from Polish peasants and evicting the indigenous inhabitants. By 1942, Polish Jews had become the main contingent of prisoners, followed by prisoners of war. Two years later, most of the Roma in the camp were also destroyed, their ashes scattered in the pond and gardens adjacent to the camp wall, maintained by Höss’s wife, Hedwig. His domestic life was outwardly respectable but built on layers of deception.
Hedwig managed the household and organized a sewing workshop that saved the lives of some talented dressmakers. Höss, however, was not satisfied with his wife. His mistress was an Italian communist named Eleonore Hodys, a prisoner in the camp. Their paths had crossed before the war, when both had fought against monarchism and bourgeois liberalism, but while she chose communism, he chose fascism.
Despite that divergence, they kept in touch. Höss led her through the documents as a civilian mate, and because of her dark hair and eyes, the Jewish women of the camp considered her one of their own. He visited her as a lover in the dark, calling her his night wife in his diary. For Hodys, self-preservation prevailed; as a communist, she would have been executed anywhere in Europe, and behind her lover’s back she was behind a stone wall.
Höss’s hypocrisy extended to his subordinates. He ordered the shooting of SS guards who used prisoners as sexual partners, insisting that only Aryan mistresses were acceptable, while he himself kept an Italian communist prisoner as his unofficial wife. He also claimed to feel compassion for the courageous female prisoners and for civilians mercilessly killed, but he considered Soviet prisoners, among them communists and political officers, enemies of the utmost importance, worthy only of extermination. He reasoned that if more than a dozen of them survived, they would organize resistance in the camp.
In his memoirs, Höss wrote, I was only following orders. But some of his actions were not routine SS work; they resembled small shows meant to awaken emotions. On his own initiative, he used Zyklon B gas to exterminate prisoners of war. The gas was produced by the company Tesch and Stabenow.
After the success of the experiment, the morgue of Crematorium I was converted into a gas chamber, and the process was refined. When the first trucks and trains with Jews from Upper Silesia began to arrive, Himmler brought orders that gold teeth were to be removed from corpses and hair from women was to be cut. The Third Reich was determined to become a waste-free death machine. The work was carried out by Sonderkommandos, consisting of Jewish prisoners.
Until the summer of 1942, bodies were buried in mass graves; later they were burned in crematoria. Since the end of summer, the destruction of the mass graves began. Remains were taken out, stacked like firewood, about two thousand corpses each, and burned in pits, poured with oil sediment and wood alcohol. By the end of November 1942, all the mass graves were emptied.
The number of corpses buried in them was counted: almost 107,000. In 1942, during a visit by Himmler himself, the SS chief observed the entire liquidation process, from the unloading of transports to the removal of corpses from the bunker. Höss accompanied him, watching everything in person. The scenes of murder, with fleeing women and children, blood and screams, were so severe that his subordinates began to drink, and some committed suicide rather than continue witnessing them.
Höss himself wrote about the prisoners as a zoologist discusses animals, adopting a eugenic attitude that treated people as harmful insects. On November 9, 1943, Höss was transferred to the Concentration Camp Inspectorate of the SS, heading the DI office of Group D and serving as deputy chief inspector of the camps under Richard Glücks. He recorded all of it in his personal diary. In May 1945, he fled Poland for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, hiding under the false name Franz Lang.
But his face was known to many. On March 11, 1946, he was detained by British military police on a farm near Flensburg. He first became a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against the main war criminals, and appeared before the American Military Tribunal in the case of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. On May 23, 1946, he was handed over to Polish authorities.
From March 11 to March 29, 1947, a trial was held in Warsaw in his case. When asked why he had killed so many innocent Jews, Höss replied, First of all we should have listened to the Führer, not philosophized. There were no further questions. On April 2, 1947, the Supreme National Tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging.
Before the execution, the cog of the Nazi punitive machine suddenly returned to the Catholic religion. He repented to a Polish priest and wrote a letter to the prosecutor admitting that he had caused terrible suffering to people, asking forgiveness from God and from the entire Polish people. He had finished writing his memoirs that same year. The execution was carried out at the scene of his crimes, in one of the courtyards of Auschwitz.
He was hanged on a simple single scaffold, wearing a uniform that had become baggy, on a day of special slush. The executioner wore a black hood with slits for the eyes, unwilling to be photographed. In the last image, Rudolf Höss is already hanging. He did not twitch for a particularly long time, and there was no ugly distorted face.
The world of normal people could only exhale more freely. One less cruel and evil being.