Mission at Nuremberg (24 page)

The previous July, a group of prisoners had been disinfecting bedding with a chemical pesticide consisting mostly of sulfuric acid called Zyklon B when the gas killed a cat that was wandering by. An SS guard took the discovery to Hoess. In September 1941, camp officers tried Zyklon B on 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners. Later that month, Hoess watched while 900 more Russian soldiers were killed using the gas.

Over the next year, as the red house and the white house were in use, Hoess began building four dedicated gas chambers—disguised as shower rooms—and crematoria. Two of the facilities consisted of an underground gas chamber with a crematorium at ground level. Two more freestanding gas chambers supplied corpses to other freestanding crematoria. SS guards lowered Zyklon B cans through openings in the chamber's ceilings, into mesh columns. The heat of the victims' own bodies turned the pellets into fatal gas.

Hoess said later that the effectiveness of the Zyklon B wasn't consistent. “After all of the observations done all of those years, I feel that it depended upon the weather, the wind, the temperature; and as a matter of fact, the effectiveness of the gas itself was not always the same,” he told a U.S. Army psychiatrist in Nuremberg.

 

Usually it took from three to fifteen minutes to extinguish all these people, that is, for no sign of life anymore. In the farmhouses we had no peek holes so that sometimes when we opened the doors after a considerable period of time had elapsed, there were still some signs of life. Later on, in the newly erected crematory and gas chambers, which I designed, we had peek holes so that we could ascertain when these people were all dead.

An electrical ventilation system kicked on when there was no longer any movement inside the chamber. According to historian Richard J. Evans,

 

After twenty minutes or so, the canisters were pulled up again, to remove the possibility of any more gas escaping, while the chamber was ventilated and a special detachment of Jewish prisoners dragged the corpses out into another room, pulled out gold teeth and fillings, cut the women's hair off, removed gold rings, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and other encumbrances, and put the bodies into elevators that took them up to the crematorium room on the ground floor, where they were put into the incinerating ovens and reduced to ashes. Any remaining bones were ground up and the ashes used as fertilizer or thrown away in nearby woods and streams.

Hoess sent the hair of murdered women to Nazi workshops, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets.

Burning the bodies of 2,000 people took about twenty-four hours. “Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1,700 to 1,800,” Hoess said later. “We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was always much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.”

At its most populous, the camp held 144,000 people, roughly the population of Dayton, Ohio. About 7,000 SS men worked at Auschwitz during its existence, not including secretaries and administrators. At one point, when Hoess was using prisoners to dig his many burning pits, the SS forced sixty prisoners to fill their wheelbarrows full of dirt and run as fast as they could behind one another along the rim of the deep pit. Some of the older prisoners fell into the pit with their wheelbarrows and the SS men laughed, called them “saboteurs,” and began using them for target practice. A kapo named Reinhold noticed that an older Jewish man was having trouble scrambling up the side of the pit, and so he sent the man's son down after him. As the son began helping his father out, Reinhold ordered him to drown his father in the pit's standing water. After killing his father, the distraught young man found his way out of the hole, and Reinhold ordered more prisoners to throw him back down, then ordered the Jews left in the pit to drown him in the same water in which the young man had just drowned his father.

Hoess was involved in every aspect of Auschwitz's evil. He said later that he was present at most, if not all, the gassings. When typhoid broke out in one of the hospital barracks, Hoess gave the order to kill all the patients and anyone who had worked in the hospital. One day, as SS men slowly worked at the drudgery of throwing corpses into the massive burning pits, Hoess arrived, grabbed the body of a small child by the leg, and threw it into the pit. His example cheered morale, and the SS men nearby each grabbed the body of a small child and threw it into the flames.

Hoess's superior, Adolf Eichmann, had told Hoess that 2.5 million people had been murdered during his reign at Auschwitz. Hoess had thought the number was an exaggeration, but in the immediate aftermath of the war and the relatively recent discovery of the horrors of the concentration camps, he admitted to 2.5 million dead at trial. Historians now believe that despite Hoess's testimony at Nuremberg, at least 1 million and possibly 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz. About 90 percent of those killed were Jews, making Hoess responsible for at least 15 percent of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

When the war was over, Hoess went into hiding, disguising himself as a sailor at the Naval Intelligence School on the Island of Sylt in northern Germany. Afterward, he found work on a farm under the name Franz Lang, but British troops eventually arrested him in March 1946. Many Nazi officers carried a vial of cyanide with them so they could kill themselves in case they were caught by the Allies, but Hoess had accidentally broken his vial days earlier. Within a month he was sent to Nuremberg to be a witness in the trials of the major war criminals.

Those who saw or talked to Hoess at Nuremberg described the then-forty-five-year-old as “short, rather heavy set, somewhat red of face, with close-cropped hair.” They remarked on his “weak, high voice” and said he “looked harmless, at least at a distance.”

Nuremberg's U.S. Army psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn asked Hoess if the memories of gassings, executions, burning of corpses, if any of those thoughts “come upon you at times and in any way haunt you?”

No, Hoess said, “I have no such fantasies.” He said he never had nightmares. He said he was “entirely normal. Even while I was doing this extermination work, I led a normal family life.” In fact, Hoess and his family lived just outside the perimeter of the camp, where his wife's garden was filled with flowers and their children kept pet turtles and lizards. Auschwitz had provided a social life for Hoess and the other SS families who lived near the camp and had enjoyed the services of a nearby pub, a medical center, and the Dresden State Theater, which held concerts and performances.

Indeed, for many Nazis working the camps, the cruelties of war had deadened their senses of humanity. Albert Badewitz, a former Auschwitz engineer, testified at the Auschwitz atrocity trials in 1947:

 

A big part of the Polish intelligentsia died in the lumberyard in Auschwitz, whimpering in the snow. Some moved with a last flickering of survival instinct toward a rotten piece of bone and tried to put it in their mouth. Often they died in this position. Then a fellow-sufferer took the piece of bone out of their hand. I myself and several others have in this condition gulped raw horsemeat. The horse had died several days ago, and the cadaver had already been buried in the earth. I am not ashamed for that, the instinct of self-preservation made half animals in all of us.

For Hoess, however, evil, and perhaps the ordinariness he found in his life at Auschwitz, came from an unquestioning obedience. When Heinrich Himmler gave Hoess the order to design and build a massive extermination center, “the order was authoritative—the explanation sufficient,” Whitney Harris, a member of the American prosecution team who took Hoess's deposition later wrote. “In [Hoess's] mind, he had no alternative but to obey. He did so to the best of his ability, and his ability was such that he became the greatest killer of history. Devoid of moral principle, he reacted to the order to slaughter human beings as he would have to an order to fell trees.”

Goldensohn asked Hoess whether the destruction of millions of people was justified in his mind.

“Not justified,” Hoess said. “But Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews.”

“How could the Jews exterminate the Germans?” Goldensohn asked.

“I don't know,” said Hoess. “That is what Himmler said. Himmler didn't explain.”

“Don't you have a mind or opinion of your own?” asked Goldensohn.

“Yes,” Hoess said. “But when Himmler told us something, it was so correct and so natural we just blindly obeyed it.”

Hoess told Gustave Gilbert that “it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning,” but that he “never gave it much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.”

Hoess was certainly aware that what he was directing in Auschwitz was wrong. He later described the small children as they made their way into the gas chambers “playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys.” He recalled that “one woman approached me as she walked past, and, pointing to her four children who were . . . helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' ” He said later he “had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers.”

In 1942, when Hoess's wife found out what was actually happening inside the gates near her garden, she confronted Hoess, who told her the truth. “She was very upset and thought it cruel and terrible,” he said later. “I explained it to her the same way Himmler explained it to me. Because of this explanation she was satisfied, and we didn't talk about it anymore. However, from that time forth, she frequently remarked that it would be better if I obtained another position.”

In their final session together at Nuremberg, Goldensohn asked Hoess if he was a sadist.

“No,” Hoess said. “Whenever I found guards who were guilty of treating internees too harshly, I tried to exchange them for other guards.” Besides, he said, “I never struck any internee in the entire time I was commandant.”

Goldensohn had also spoken with Kaltenbrunner just before his testimony began in April, and Kaltenbrunner's psychology was similar to that of Hoess, his underling.

Kaltenbrunner told Goldensohn he knew he was “thought of as another Himmler.”

But “I'm not,” he said, smiling. “The papers make me out as a criminal. I never killed anyone.”

 

AN ESTIMATED SIXTY MILLION
men, women, and children were murdered in the twentieth century in mass killings and genocides. After the genocide of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century came the annihilation of the Hereros of southwest Africa by the Germans in 1904, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks beginning in 1915, the manufactured starvation of the Ukrainians by the Soviets in 1932, the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Rudolf Hoess was responsible for 1.5 percent of the genocidal murders of the twentieth century.

Few people believe themselves to be capable of the extraordinary human evil perpetrated by the Nazis, and the inability to comprehend how the Holocaust occurred has reassured or comforted millions since the Second World War. “It helps side us, normal men as we take ourselves to be, against the doers, the Nazi perpetrators,” wrote philosopher Arne Vetlesen. “The doers, we like to think, are not like us; indeed, their being unlike us is the very quality which explains that they could do what they did. Having committed atrocities so outrageous in nature and scope as to explode our faculties of comprehension, they, authors of the unthinkable, must surely be—or have been—abnormal men.”

To think in this way, however, is to turn away from what the Holocaust means, to refuse to fully acknowledge its scope and what it says about the human condition. “It is,” wrote Vetlesen, “to help perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place.”

Genocide scholar and social psychologist James Waller has written that:

 

the greatest catastrophes occur when the distinctions between war and crime fade; when there is dissolution of the boundaries between military and criminal conduct, between civility and barbarity; when political, social, or religious groups embrace collective violence against a defenseless victim group as warfare or, perhaps worse yet, as “progress.” Such acts are human evil writ large.

Hoess and Kaltenbrunner certainly were killers in some capacity, but were they psychopaths? Gilbert's diagnosis of Hoess at Nuremberg was that he was “intellectually normal with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.” If not psychotic, was he sane and evil?

Evil can be defined as any source of suffering or destruction to a living thing and can be divided into two main categories—natural and moral. Natural evil occurs outside of the control of humans and includes acts of God such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Moral evil begins in the human heart. It is the suffering we inflict on one another.

Waller defines moral evil as “the deliberate harming of humans by other humans.” He breaks down moral evil into smaller harms, such as the destruction of property or psychological harm from the threat of physical injury, and larger harms, which include extraordinary evil. Instead of focusing on the acts of serial killers or gunmen who attack public spaces, Waller is interested in “the harm we perpetrate on each other under the sanction of political, social, or religious groups—in other words, the malevolent human evil perpetrated in times of collective social unrest, war, mass killings and genocide.”