Auschwitz (48 page)

Moshe Tavor says that he himself was involved “about five times” in revenge killings and claims that altogether his comrades in the Jewish Brigade “were involved in about twenty executions.” Not surprisingly, given that he and his comrades were acting outside the law, it is hard to substantiate the detail of Tavor's testimony. He is careful not to refer to specific individuals that he killed or specific places where the murders took place. Equally, it is always possible that the reality was a good deal less dramatic than the concerted campaign he describes—perhaps just the occasional murder of a suspected Nazi (and one must treat his claim that the killings were based on proper “intelligence” with caution). But other evidence,
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including eyewitness testimony from Haim Laskov, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army, does confirm that members of the Jewish Brigade took part in “revenge” killings, and the (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts of other Jewish “avengers” to poison the water supply of a camp in which SS prisoners were held are well established.
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The motivation behind the actions of Moshe Tavor and his comrades in the Jewish Brigade seems clear enough—to avenge the murder of other Jews, some of whom were their own relatives. But it is not quite that simple. There was another element lurking in their minds that drove them to be tough and ruthless—a lingering feeling that the Jews who had suffered at the hands of the Germans had not resisted enough. Tavor says,

Moshe Tavor's attitude is not unique. Some survivors of the camps who settled in Israel after the war claim that they faced a hidden sense of criticism that they too had not done more to fight back against the Nazis. Never mind that it would have been almost impossible for women and children who had no homeland, who were living in communities in eastern Europe that often, even now, have little sympathy for them, to do more to resist. There remains the often unspoken belief from others that they should not have been, as Moshe Tavor puts it, “sheep to the slaughter.” And, if there was one single lesson that someone like Tavor took from the Nazis' “Final Solution” and sought to embed in the psyche of the new state of Israel, it was that the Jews should never again submit to an enemy without resistance.

While Moshe Tavor carried out his distinctly unauthorized retribution against the Germans, the rest of the Allies tried to stay within the law and catch the perpetrators. Initially without much success. Most of the SS members who had worked at Auschwitz were not identified in the immediate post-war period. Notable figures like Dr. Mengele and Rudolf Höss were both initially held by the Allies and then released. In Mengele's case, the lack of an SS blood group tattoo under his arm meant that he never was identified as SS, and Höss's disguise as a member of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, meant that no one ever looked for his tattoo.

But by the autumn of 1945, the War Crimes investigation section of 21 Army group and the British Intelligence Corps were on the trail of Rudolf Höss.
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The British first learned in detail about the career of Rudolf Höss as a result of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Systematic questioning of the survivors revealed intriguing news—many of them spoke with horror about their time at another camp in Upper Silesia: Auschwitz. Now, the British were determined to capture the commandant of this murderous place. The Intelligence Corps recognized that often the best way to find perpetrators was through their family. Individual Nazis might have taken a new identity, might even have fled the country, but they remained emotionally attached to their wives and children, and the families were almost always easier to find.

This was the case with Frau Hedwig Höss and her children. Traced by British intelligence to a village ten kilometers from Belsen, they were immediately put under surveillance. Frau Höss was finally arrested on March 8, 1946 and imprisoned. For several days she was repeatedly asked where her
husband was, and each time she responded: “He's dead.” Finally, the Intelligence Corps officers tricked her into revealing the truth. The rear of the prison abutted a railway line, and a train was noisily shunted into position directly behind her cell. According to Captain William “Victor” Cross, Officer Commanding 92 Field Security Section:

Frau Höss revealed that her husband was currently living on a farm at Gottruepel near Flensberg. Intelligence officers immediately left for northern Germany, liased locally with 93 Field Security Section, and moved up to the farm at eleven o'clock in the evening of Monday, March 11. They surprised Höss in his pajamas at his bunk in the stable block, which also doubled as a slaughterhouse. A British medical officer quickly pried Höss's mouth open to search for a poison capsule—they all knew that Himmler had managed to kill himself in just such a way the previous year. Höss was hit across the face four times by a British sergeant before he admitted who he was, and was then dragged to one of the slaughterhouse tables where, according to one of the British soldiers who witnessed it, “the blows and screams were endless.” The medical officer shouted to Captain Cross: “Call them off unless you want to take back a corpse!” Höss was then covered in a blanket, yanked over to a car, and driven back to Field Security Headquarters at Heide.

Snow was falling as they arrived in the early hours of the morning, but Höss was made to walk naked through the barrack courtyard to his cell. He was then kept awake for three days—soldiers were told to prod him with axe handles if he showed signs of dozing off. According to Höss, he was also beaten with his own riding crop. Then, on March 14, he signed an eight-page confession.

There are Holocaust deniers who point to the abuse Höss suffered at the hands of British soldiers immediately following his arrest and claim that
this discredits his confession. While it could be argued that his initial statement was tainted, during his subsequent imprisonment and interrogation, first at “Tomato”—the code name for No. 2 War Criminals Holding Centre at Simeons Kaserne—and then subsequently both at Nuremberg and at his own trial in Poland, there is no evidence that Höss was mistreated again. It was during this subsequent period that he wrote his memoirs—indeed, he remarks in them how grateful he is to his captors for giving him the chance to write his personal history—and neither then, nor in the witness box when he had the open opportunity to do so, did he recant any of his original confession, though he did feel secure enough to record that he had initially been beaten by his British captors.

In April 1947, Rudolf Höss returned to Auschwitz, to the same building in which he used to work. Only this time he was imprisoned in the basement cells of the Kommandantur rather than installed behind his desk in his firstfloor office. It had been thought fitting that the man who had presided over the death of more than a million people at Auschwitz should be executed at the site of his crimes. But there were problems on the day originally scheduled for the execution. Several thousand people, including many former inmates, came to watch. The atmosphere grew ugly and they pushed forward against the wooden fence erected to restrain them. There was a real feeling, according to Stanislaw Hantz,
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a former prisoner who witnessed the gathering, that “they will lynch Höss here.” He heard mutterings in the crowd. What would the soldiers who were standing guard do if there was a huge surge forward? Would they shoot? The situation grew so dangerous that Höss was not taken from his cell as planned. Instead, an elaborate ruse was devised whereby the soldiers marched off and then drove away, escorting a car that everyone thought contained Höss. But Höss had not been taken away; he was left in his cell overnight and then taken out the next morning. In front of only a handful of people—not the screaming crowds of the day before—Rudolf Höss prepared to die. “I thought as he climbed the gallows, up the stairs, knowing him as a tough Nazi supporter that he would say something,” says Stanislaw Hantz, one of the few witnesses to his execution. “I thought that he would make a statement to the glory of the Nazi ideology that he was dying for. But no. He didn't say a word.”

Höss's end was quick—the exact opposite of what Hantz, who had been
tortured in the camp, wanted. “According to me Höss should've been put in a cage and been driven all around Europe so that people could see him—so people could spit on him, so that it would get to him what he did.” But the intriguing question is this: Would what he had done ever have “got to” Höss? All the clues in his autobiography, which he completed just before his execution, point one way: All the humiliation and mistreatment in the world would never have caused Höss to search into his heart and think—fundamentally—that what he did was wrong. Of course, he does say in his autobiography that he “now” sees that the extermination of the Jews was a mistake—but only a tactical one—because it has drawn the hatred of the world upon Germany.

My personal experience of having encountered a number of former Nazi perpetrators makes me believe that one single paragraph in Höss's memories offers the strongest clue as to what he really felt at the end. In it he asks—as he did at Nuremberg—what would have happened to a pilot who had refused to drop bombs on a town that he knew contained mainly women and children. Of course, says Höss, that pilot would have been court-martialed: “People say that is no comparison,” writes Höss. “But in my opinion the two situations are comparable.”
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In essence, Höss justified his actions by simplistic comparison—the Allies killed women and children by bombing, the Nazis killed women and children by gassing. This is a line of argument still supported by many former perpetrators (and Nazi apologists) today. One former member of the SS, who refused to be interviewed formally, went so far as to say in a casual conversation with me: “The children who died in our gas chambers suffered less than the children who died in your fire bombing of German cities.”

More openly—and expressing himself more carefully—Oskar Groening says,

As he sees it, the fact that the Allies, “regardless of whether it was militarily
necessary or not, murdered women and children by throwing bombs of phosphorus on them,” and were not then held accountable for their actions at the end of the war, means that it is hypocritical to focus all the guilt for “war crimes” on SS perpetrators.

Of course, one instinctively finds such a comparison repellent. The arguments about the conceptual difference between the two actions—the Allied bombing of cities and the Nazi extermination of the Jews—also are easy to rehearse: that the Germans could have stopped the bombing instantly by surrendering, while the extermination of the Jews was a policy determined by ideology; that no individual group of Germans was targeted by the bombing, unlike the Nazis' murder of one specific category of people in their empire; that it was the towns and buildings the bombers primarily sought to destroy, not the people themselves; that the Nazi persecution of the Jews (for example Eichmann's brutal Nisko plan) predated the bombing of German cities, therefore the notion that the bombing in any way acted as a justification at the time for the Nazis as they committed crimes against the Jews is absolute nonsense; that any comparison between the pragmatic Allied planners and dedicated Jew-haters like Hitler, Heydrich, or Eichmann, is ludicrous.

Then there is the additional argument—which is often the first recourse of the non-specialist—which runs simply: “The Germans started it, as they bombed British cities before the British bombed Berlin.” But this, in reality, is the weakest rationale of all. It scarcely can be a defense to say of any action that it becomes legitimate if one's enemy commits it first.

Despite all the attempts to differentiate the two methods of killing, however, the false comparison between them made by Höss and other Nazis still remains emotionally disturbing. One reason is that it is well known that there was disquiet about the policy of bombing German cities inside the Allied leadership—not least, toward the end of the war, from Churchill himself. The revelation in recent years that, in spring 1945, one Allied criterion used in the process of deciding which German cities and towns to target was their “burnability”—something that helped lead to the targeting of medieval cities like Würzburg—only adds to the sense of unease.

Additionally, there is another, less obvious, reason why the comparison of Allied actions to Nazi actions is unsettling. It is because the development
of high-level bombing involved the inevitable “distancing” of the aircrew from the killing. “It's not like I was going out and sticking a bayonet in someone's belly, OK?” says Paul Montgomery,
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a member of an American B-29 crew who took part in the fire-bombing of many Japanese cities during the war.