What do I think of the Third Reich today? What is my opinion of Himmler? The SS? The concentration camps? And the Security Police? How do I now see all the events I have experienced?
I am now as I was then, as far as my philosophy of life is concerned. I am still a National Socialist. A person who has believed in an ideology, a philosophy, for almost twenty-five years and who was bound up in it body and soul cannot simply throw it away just because the embodiment of that idea, the National Socialist state and its leaders, acted wrongly. In fact, criminally and through their failure our world collapsed and the entire German people have been plunged into unspeakable misery for decades into the future. I cannot do that.
From the discovered documents which have been published from the trial in Nuremberg, I can now see that the leadership of the Third Reich is guilty of having caused this monstrous war with all its consequences by their politics of tyranny. I can also see that this leadership, by using extremely effective propaganda and through its use of limitless terror had made a whole nation submissive to such an extent that, with a few exceptions, the people followed in every way, wherever they were led, without criticism and without a will of their own. As far as I am concerned, the necessary expansion of the German living space could have been attained in a peaceful way.
I am firmly convinced that wars cannot be prevented, and that there will be wars again in the future. In order to veil the politics of tyranny, one simply has to use propaganda, by cleverly twisting all the facts, make the politics and the actions acceptable to the people. In order to prevent doubt and opposition from the beginning, a system of terror has to be created.
I believe that serious opposition should be conquered by the power of the superior idea. Himmler was a crudest example of the leader principle. Every German had to submit unconditionally and without criticism to the government since it alone was able to represent the true concerns of the
People and to lead the people along the right path. Everyone who did not subject himself to this principle had to be removed from public life. For this purpose Himmler crea td and educated his SS, created the concentration camps, the German police, and the Gestapo.
For Himmler, Germany was the only nation which had the right to exercise supremacy in Europe. All other nations were second rate. The nations with predominently Nordic blood were to be treated favorably with the goal of incorporating them into Germany. The nations of Eastern blood were to be divided and suppressed into insignificance. They were to become serfs.
The prewar concentration camps had to become storehouses for the opponents of the state. These immediately became institutions of education for all types of asocials, and thereby served a useful purpose for the nation as a whole as a result of the cleaning up process. They had also become necessary in fighting and preventing crime. Because of the war, the concentration camps became extermination centers, directly or indirectly, for the nationalities of the conquered lands who had been fighting against the conquerors and oppressors. I have already expressed my attitude about the enemies of the state. It was wrong to exterminate the enemy nationals in any case. The resistance movement could have been reduced to insignificance if the population of the occupied countries would have been sensibly well treated, and only a few truly serious enemies would have remained.
Today I realize that the extermination of the Jews was wrong, absolutely wrong. It was exactly because of this mass extermination that Germany earned itself the hatred of the entire world. The cause of anti-Semitism was not served by this act at all, in fact, just the opposite. The Jews have come much closer to their final goal.
The Gestapo only carried out the orders of the extended police arm of Himmler. The Gestapo and the concentration camps were just the executive organ of Himmler’s desires and Adolf Hitler’s intentions, respectively.
How could it come to the atrocities in the concentration camps? I have already explained enough in these pages and in the personal descriptions. I never personally approved of them. I have never personally mistreated a prisoner, or even killed one. I have also never tolerated mistreatment on the part of my subordinates. Now, when I have to hear the descriptions of the horrible tortures as described during the course of this investigation that took place in Auschwitz and in other camps, I get cold shudders. It is true—I knew that Auschwitz prisoners had been mistreated by the SS, by the civilian employees, and not in the least by their own fellow prisoners. I used every means at my disposal, but I was unable to stop it. I was just as unsuccessful as other camp Kommandants, who had the same views as I did, and who were in camps which were much smaller and easier to oversee. One person is no match for the viciousness, depravity, and cruelty of a guard. The only way it could be controlled is if the guards are kept constantly in the view of the Kommandant. Generally, the worse the whole guard and the watch personnel were, the more the prisoners were mistreated. This was proven clearly enough in my present imprisonment. In the British zone, under the strictest constant surveillance, I was able to study enough of the three categories of guards. In Nuremberg individual mistreatment was not possible since all of the prisoners there were under constant observation of the jail officers.
It was only by luck that a third person walked into the lavatory at the Berlin airport during a stopover, thus preventing my being mistreated.
There was one, just one of the* prison guards in Warsaw, who as soon as he came on duty in our ceil block, ran from cell to ceil, wherever there were Germans, and indiscriminately beat them. This happened in spite of the fact, as far as I could observe and judge from my cell, that the prison was run properly. With the exception of von Burgsdorff, who got away with only a few slaps in the face, every German there was beaten by this young man, approximately eighteen to twenty years old, out of whose eyes flickered cold hatred. He said he was a Polish Jew, even though he did not look like it at all. He certainly never got tired of beating us. Only when one of his colleagues on duty gave him a warning sign that someone was coming would he interrupt his activity. I am firmly convinced that none of the higher officials or the prison warden would have approved of his behavior. Several times I was asked by visiting officials about how I was treated, but I kept this secret because only one of them was like that. The other guards were more or less strict and unfriendly, but no one ever approached me.
So even in this small prison the warden could not prevent this behavior. How much more difficult was it in a concentration camp the size of Auschwitz. Yes, I was hard and strict. As I see it today, often too hard and too strict. Yes, I said many a bad word in anger over the deplorable conditions, or the carelessness, and said many things which I never should have done. But I was never cruel, nor did I let myself get carried away to the point of mistreating prisoners. A great deal happened in Auschwitz, presumably in my name, on my direction, on my orders, about which I neither knew, nor would have tolerated, nor approved of. However, all this did take place in Auschwitz, and I am responsible for it because according to camp regulations: the camp Kommandant is fully responsible for everything that happens in his camp.
I am now at the end of my life. Everything of importance which I experienced in my life, all the events which influenced me strongly, which touched me in some special way, I have laid down in these notes according to the truth and the reality as I saw it, and the way I experienced it. I have omitted a great deal that I felt was insignificant. Some of it I have forgotten, and I don’t have clear in my memory anymore about a lot of events. I am also not a writer and never have been particularly skilled with the pen. I am quite certain that I have often repeated myself and probably I have not always expressed myself clearly enough. Also, I don’t have the inner peace and balance to concentrate on such a labor.
I have written just as I remembered it, often mixed up, but without trying to be clever. I have written the way I was; the way I am. I lived a full and varied life. Fate led me through all the highs and lows of life. Often life dealt harshly with me and shook me, but I gritted my teeth and got through it. I have never given up. I had two guiding stars, my country and my family, which gave direction to my life ever since I returned from World War I, when I went in as a school boy and came out as a man.
My tremendous love for my country and my feeling for everything German brought me into the NSDAP [the Nazi Party] and into the SS. I believed that the National Socialist world philosophy was the only one that suited the German people. The SS was, in my opinion, the most energetic defender of this philosophy, and the only one capable of leading the German people back to a life more in keeping with its character.
My family was the second thing that was sacred to me. I am firmly anchored to it. Worrying about their future is always uppermost in my mind. The farm was supposed to be our homestead. My wife and I saw in the children our purpose in life. It was to be our life’s task to enable them to get a good education and create a stable home life for them. And that’s why now most of my thoughts deal mainly with only my family.
What will become of them? This uncertainty concerning my family is what makes my present imprisonment so difficult. As far as I am concerned, I have written myself off right from the beginning. I do not worry about this anymore. I am finished with it. But my wife, my children? Fate has played strange tricks on me. How many times did I miss death by a hair, in the last war, in the Free Corps battles, during work-related accidents, the car accident in 1941 on the Autobahn, where I drove into a tractor trailer with no lights? I was able to recognize it in a split second and was able to jerk the car aside. We ran into it sideways so that even though the car was squeezed together like an accordian, the three of us escaped with just cuts and bruises. Then in 1942 I had a riding accident where I wound up lying next to a stone just as the heavy stallion crashed down onto me and came away with only broken ribs. And again during air raids; so often I wouldn’t have bet a dime on my chances, and yet I came through it all. Also, in the car accident just before the evacuation of Ravensbrttck.
Everyone thought I was dead; the way things looked I couldn't possibly still be alive. Then the vial of poison broke before I was arrested.
Everywhere fate has spared me from death only to do away with me now in such a shameful manner.* How I envy my comrades who were allowed to die an honest soldier’s death. Without realizing it, I became a cog in the wheel of the huge extermination machine of the Third Reich. The machine is smashed, the motor has perished, and I must perish with it. The world demands it.
I would never have allowed myself to open up about myself or to expose my most secret inner self had it not been for the humanity and understanding with which I have been treated. It has totally disarmed me. I never ever could have expected this kind treatment. I owe it to this humane understanding to contribute, as far as it is possible for me, and to shed light on events which needed clarification. I do ask, however, that when these notes are evaluated, all things concerning my family, and all of my tender emotions, my most secret doubts, not be revealed to the public. May the general public simply go on seeing me as the bloodthirsty beast, the cruel sadist, the murderer of millions, because the broad masses cannot conceive the Kommandant of Auschwitz in any other way. They would never be able to understand that he also had a heart and that he was not evil.
These notes comprise 114 pages. I have written all this down voluntarily and without being forced.
Rudolf Hdss
Cracow, February 1947
1. Hoss had requested execution by firing squad because he felt hanging was shameful. The Polish tribunal politely refused his request. Interview with archivists Adamska and Motyl of the Geovna Komisia fiilania Zorodni Hitlerovskich w Polsce, Warsaw.
World History
