Höss, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz

In Reading the Holocaust, Inga Clendinnen mentions the importance of a good biographer in the effort to understand perpetrators. The importance of a biography, rather than an autobiography, rests perhaps in the critical distance implicit in the genre – a distance lacking in autobiographical works such as Rudolf Höss’ Commandant of Auschwitz. While the premise of the autobiographical genre would imply a privileged glimpse of the workings of an individual mind, Höss’s character remains utterly inaccessible throughout the roughly one hundred pages of his autobiography.

Höss wrote his autobiography in the period between his trial and execution in a Polish prison, and was first published in a Polish translation in 1951. The German text was published in 1958, on which the English translation of 1959 was based. Primo Levi provides an insightful, essential introduction to the book, the first paragraph of which is worth quoting:

This book [is] filled with evil, and this evil is narrated with a disturbing bureaucratic obtuseness; it has no literary quality, and reading it is agony. Furthermore, despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel, who sometimes blatantly lies. Yet this autobiography of the Commandant of Auschwitz is one of the most instructive books ever published because it very accurately describes the course of a human life that was exemplary in its way. In a climate different from the one he happened to grow up in, Rudolph Hoess would quite likely have wound up as some sort of drab functionary, committed to discipline and dedicated to order – at most a careerist with modest ambitions. Instead, he evolved, step by step, into one of the greatest criminals in history. (19)

Reading the book is indeed agony, on multiple levels. Not only is Höss prone to long-windedness, repetition, and other stylistic crimes, it is especially agonising on the level of content. Höss describes his prisoners from the moment they step from the train to the eventual disposal of their ashes multiple times in his book, in minute detail, and yet with a detachment incredible for someone who witnessed it first-hand. Whether this is the result of desensitisation (trauma?), or part of Höss’s bureaucratic, precise personality is impossible to tell. He is always careful to include his and his subordinates’ personal responses to the events, but he tends to treat these as a mere afterthought.

The autobiography opens with a description of Höss’s early youth, his imprisonment, and his political activities before joining the SS. The section devoted to his life in prison is rather a pseudo-psychological study of prisoners and guards and a how-to guide for running a prison than a personal account of his own experiences. After this, the book is mostly concerned with the daily workings of Auschwitz: the bureaucratic difficulties Höss faced; the indifference with which his frequent complaints about his subordinates and the lack of financial and material support were met; the impossible demands made by Himmler; and the dreadful circumstances as the camp was flooded with prisoners. Höss portrays himself as working hard to improve the conditions in his camp against immense odds, trying to remedy an unsalvageable situation that became progressively worse despite his best efforts. He portrays his situation as an impossible torment – caught between his fervent devotion to the Führer and a supposed personal disagreement with the Führer’s orders. Höss’s meticulous descriptions of his own actions imply that his disagreement with the Nazi leadership was rather of a pragmatic than an ethical nature. Likewise, his main objections against the Holocaust were that “precisely because of these mass exterminations, Germany has drawn upon herself the hatred of the entire world. It in no way served the cause of anti-Semitism, but on the contrary brought the Jews far closer to their ultimate objective” (178).

The autobiography ends with Höss’s attempt to escape capture, and the statement that these pages contain “the absolute truth, as I saw and experienced it” (180). In a final twist, he states the following:

Let the public continue to regard me as the blood-thirsty beast, the cruel sadist and the mass murderer; for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light. They could never understand that he, too, had a heart and was not evil. (181)

The final seventy pages or so contain appendices in which Höss provides his account of the order for the Final Solution, and his personal dealings with prominent Nazi’s, including Himmler, Eichmann and Eicke, in which he makes sure to incriminate them by explicitly stating the extent to which they knew about and were involved in the Final Solution.

Critical response to Höss’s autobiography has been limited, although his memoir is generally considered as one of the more reliable sources of Holocaust scholarship, ironically enough due to the same meticulous nature that made him such a ruthless Commandant. One prominent examination of Höss’s memoir is Alan Rosen’s “Autobiography from the Other Side: the Reading of Nazi Memoirs and Confessional Ambiguity” in Biography 24.3 (2001), in which he considers the structure of confession and betrayal in the first part of Höss’s autobiography.

Author of this entry: Eline Reinhoud

Höss, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz. 1959. London: Orion, 2000.