The Nazi Hunters (12 page)

But it was the way Höss spoke—describing how he methodically carried out his orders to expand Auschwitz into a highly efficient extermination
camp—that also chilled his listeners. There was no doubt that he knew what those orders meant. In his confession, he declared: “
The ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe.”

He recounted how he tested the newly constructed gas chambers: “It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending on climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.” And he talked with apparent pride about the “improvements” he oversaw at Auschwitz, the four gas chambers that could hold two thousand people each, as opposed to the earlier gas chambers at Treblinka that could only hold two hundred people at a time.

“Another improvement” over Treblinka, where most victims knew what awaited them, he noted, was the lengths to which “at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process.” But he admitted that there was only so much they could do to prevent word from getting out about the purpose of the camp, pointing out that “the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”

Höss was not facing legal judgment in Nuremberg, since the Americans had decided to bring him in as a witness rather than a defendant at that late date, thinking he would help provide evidence against the top Nazis. In what General Taylor, the chief prosecutor, called “
an extraordinary decision,” the defense lawyer for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, decided to put Höss on the stand to testify for his client. The lawyer wanted him to confirm that Kaltenbrunner, despite having overall responsibility for the entire apparatus of terror and mass murder, had never visited Auschwitz. Höss obliged on that score and some other seemingly minor particulars. But the overall impact of his testimony only helped seal the fate of Kaltenbrunner and the others who received death sentences.

Whitney Harris concluded that, because of his role at Auschwitz,
Höss became “
the greatest killer of history.” He also appeared to have experienced no emotion as he took on his assignments. “Devoid of moral principle, he reacted to the order to slaughter human beings as he would have to an order to fell trees,” Harris added.

The two U.S. Army psychiatrists, who talked separately with Höss in Nuremberg trying to figure out his personality, came to similar conclusions. In their first session, G. M. Gilbert was immediately struck by his “
quiet, apathetic, matter-of-fact tone of voice.” When the psychiatrist tried to press him about how it was possible to kill so many people, the former commandant responded in purely technical terms: “That wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.” He then went on to explain the math of killing ten thousand people a day. “The killing itself took the least time,” he added. “You could dispose of 2,000 head in a half hour, but it was the burning that took all the time.”

Gilbert tried again to press him on the larger question of why he didn’t express any reservations or feel any qualms when Himmler informed him that Hitler had ordered the Final Solution. “I had nothing to say; I could only say ‘
Jawohl,
’ ” he responded. Couldn’t he have refused the order? “No, from our entire training the thought of refusing an order just didn’t enter one’s head,” Höss continued. He claimed anyone who did so would have been hanged. It also didn’t occur to him that he could be held responsible for the consequences of what he was doing. “You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.” Gilbert tried again by asking about the human element. Höss cut him off: “That didn’t enter into it.”

To Leon Goldensohn, he offered a similar explanation, although its wording was even more striking: “
I thought I was doing the right thing. I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don’t know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody.
I was just the director of the extermination program in Auschwitz
[my italics]. It was Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the order regarding the transports.”

Höss signaled his understanding that the psychiatrists were trying to categorize
him. “I suppose you want to know in this way if my thoughts and habits are normal,” he told Gilbert on another occasion. He then provided his own answer: “I am entirely normal. Even while I was doing this extermination work, I led a normal family life, and so on.”

Their conversations took on an increasingly surreal character. When Gilbert asked him about his sex life with his wife, he responded: “Well, it was normal—but after my wife found out about what I was doing, we rarely had desire for intercourse.”

The notion that perhaps he was doing something wrong only occurred to him, he told Gilbert, after Germany’s defeat. “But nobody had ever said these things before; at least we never heard of it.” The next step in Höss’s journey would be back to Poland; the Americans had decided to fly him to Warsaw and hand him over to the authorities there for trial. The former commandant recognized that this would be his final journey, but nothing appeared to shake his lethargic demeanor.

Gilbert’s conclusion at the end of his sessions with the prisoner: “There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly distress him. One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could be hardly more extreme in a frank psychotic.”

• • •

Jan Sehn, who had helped prepare some of the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors that were used by the prosecution team in Nuremberg, had also continued to lay the groundwork for the trial of Höss and other Auschwitz personnel in Poland. By the time he was able to interrogate the former commandant at length in Kraków, he had accumulated a wealth of damning testimony. But he was more eager than ever to elicit everything he could from the country’s most famous prisoner.

Sehn was a stern taskmaster, as his nephews and co-workers quickly discovered.
Later in his career when he served as the head of the Institute of Forensic Research, situated in an elegant nineteenth-century villa that he had procured for it, he was a stickler for details. He checked that his employees arrived promptly at eight in the morning, and reprimanded
anyone who failed to do so. But he also was quick to help any staffer in need. Zofia Chłobowska recalled arriving late one morning because her son had been hospitalized. When she explained what had happened, Sehn insisted that she use the institute’s car and driver every morning to visit her son as long as he was being treated.

The dapper, handsome jurist, who also taught law at the Jagiellonian University, was usually referred to as “the professor” by his staff. But if that signaled respect tinged with a bit of distance, he easily mingled with both the Kraków elite and his subordinates. A chain-smoker, he was almost always holding a lit cigarette in a jade or wooden holder as he received visitors, and often reached into his office closet for a choice bottle of vodka to treat them with a shot. When employees like the institute’s pharmacologist Maria Paszkowska pulled out a bottle of homebrew, he happily participated in the office tastings. Much of the homebrew was produced right in the institute, using strawberries, cherries, plums, or whatever else was in season.

When Sehn began his interrogations of Höss in November 1946, he treated him with unfailing courtesy. His goal was to gather every possible bit of information about Auschwitz’s operations—and about Höss’s personal history. Like the American psychiatrists, he wanted to understand the personality of the man who had been responsible for the biggest killing factory in history. He had the former commandant brought from prison to his office in the mornings, and the interrogations would end by noon.

Sehn reported with satisfaction that Höss “
testified willingly and provided exhaustive answers to all the questions of the investigator.” If Höss had any doubts about agreeing to Sehn’s request that he also start writing down everything he could remember, they quickly evaporated. Guided by the judge’s questions, he wrote extensively in the afternoons, often after a lunch provided by Sehn at his own expense. When there were breaks of a few days between their sessions, Sehn reported, “he wrote also of his own initiative when he noticed that something touched on at the margin of the interrogation was of interest to the interrogator.”

As his rendezvous with the hangman neared, Höss asked Sehn to deliver
his wedding ring—the same ring that had betrayed his identity to the British search party at the end of the war—to his wife after his death; his interrogator agreed. “
I must admit that I had never expected such decent and considerate treatment as I received in Polish custody,” the former commandant declared. He also more than welcomed the writing assignments Sehn gave him. “
Such employment spared me hours of useless and enervating self-pity,” he wrote. He saw the writing as “absorbing and satisfying,” producing every evening “the satisfactory feeling that not only had I put another day behind me, but also I had done a useful job of work.”

That “useful job of work” would eventually form the basis of Höss’s autobiography, which was first published in Polish in 1951, four years after he was hanged.

• • •

“
In the following pages I want to try and tell the story of my inner-most being,” Höss wrote at the start of his memoirs, which would later be published in German, English, and other languages. He described a lonely childhood on the outskirts of Baden-Baden among isolated farmhouses near the woods. “My sole confidant was my pony, and I was certain he understood me,” he recalled. He had no desire to spend time with his sisters, and, while he claimed that his parents treated each other with “loving respect,” they never displayed any signs of affection.

He was forbidden to go into the woods alone, he wrote, “since when I was younger some travelling gypsies had found me playing by myself and had taken me away with them.” According to his account, a peasant who knew the family encountered the Gypsies on the road and, recognizing the boy, delivered him back to his home.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to recognize that this bit of family lore, whether true or not, inculcated the notion that there were dangerous strangers out there with evil intentions. The other part of his upbringing involved his father’s plans for him to become a priest. A devout Catholic and a former soldier in German East Africa, the father was a salesman who was frequently away from home, but later the family moved to Mannheim and he traveled much less. Spending more time with his son,
he insisted on a strong religious upbringing and told him about the good work of missionaries in Africa. That produced the desired effect upon the boy. “I was determined that I myself should one day be a missionary in the gloomy jungles of darkest Africa,” he recalled. “I was taught that my highest duty was to help those in need.”

Then there was the predictable moment of disillusionment with religion, which Höss recounts as if it can explain his whole subsequent path in life. When he was thirteen, he “unintentionally” threw one of his classmates down the stairs of his school, and the boy broke his ankle in the fall. Höss rationalized that hundreds of pupils must have fallen down those steps before, and it was only his bad luck that his classmate was hurt. Besides, he immediately went to confession and “made a clean breast of the incident.” The confessor was a friend of his father, and told him about his son’s misdeed when he was a guest at his house that same evening. The next day Höss’s father punished him for not telling him what he had done.

The younger Höss was shocked by his confessor’s “undreamed of betrayal,” pointing out that it is a basic tenet of Catholicism that priests are never supposed to reveal what they are told in the confessional. “My faith in the sacred priesthood had been destroyed,” he wrote. His father died a year later, and when World War I broke out he longed to join in the fighting despite his young age. He enlisted secretly at age sixteen, and was soon deployed to Turkey and then Iraq. In his first battle with British and Indian troops, he admitted that he was “seized with a terror” as he saw his fellow soldiers cut down by bullets, and he could not do anything. But as the Indian soldiers moved closer, he overcame his fear and shot one of them. “My first dead man!” he wrote, with the exclamation mark signaling his pride. He noted that he never felt the same degree of fear in the face of death again.

If this were not the story of a future mass murderer, there would be nothing all that remarkable about it. Which is precisely the point. Höss presents himself as an ordinary teenager who had to grow up fast because he was plunged into a war where he was wounded twice. His wounds also put him in a situation where he would have to let down his guard, overcoming
his instinct since early childhood to shun “all demonstrations of affection.” A nurse who was taking care of him had at first made him uneasy with her “tender caresses,” but then something changed. “Under her guidance stage by stage until its final consummation,” he experienced “a wonderful and undreamed of experience . . . at last I too fell under the magic spell of love.”

Höss confessed that he never would have been able “to summon enough courage” to start the affair and that it had a major impact on his thinking. “In all its tenderness and charm, it was to affect me through the rest of my life,” he wrote. “I could never again speak flippantly of such matters; sexual intercourse without real affection became unthinkable for me. Thus I was saved from casual flirtations and brothels.”

As in so much of Höss’s account, he simply ignored anything that contradicted the portrait he was painting of himself.
In Auschwitz, he began to pay special attention to an Austrian prisoner, Eleanor Hodys, a non-Jewish seamstress who had been caught forging a Nazi document. When she was working in his villa, he startled her by kissing her on the lips, causing her to lock herself in the bathroom. Soon she was locked up in a cell in the interrogation block. Careful to avoid detection by his own guards, Höss started visiting her in secret; she resisted him again at first, but then gave in. She became pregnant, and was moved to a dark, tiny cell in the basement, where she was kept naked and given minimal food. When she was finally released, she was six months pregnant and, at the commandant’s behest, sent to a doctor who performed an abortion.