Preface

In these decades of peace in the West it is often difficult for younger generations to understand the forces that drove the Nazi SS to systematically murder millions of men, women, and children without feeling and without conscience. Yet Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hdss, the Kommandant of Ausch-witz-Birkenau, did leave us something that helps us to understand that horrible period in history: his memoirs and his testimony.

The memoirs of Kommandant Rudolf Hdss were written between October 1946 and April 1947. At the suggestion of psychologist Professor Stanislaw Batawia and Professor Jan Sehn, the prosecuting attorney for the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, Rudolf Hdss wrote explanations of how the camp developed, his impressions of the various personalities with whom he dealt, and even about the destruction of the millions of human beings in the gas chambers. The memoirs were written to help Hdss remember the details of what he was charged with, to help clarify the court’s understanding, and to put people and events in proper perspective.

Rudolf Hdss’s memoirs are perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because they are the only candid, detailed, and essentially honest description of the plan of mass annihilation from a high-ranking SS officer intimately involved in the carrying out of Hitler’s and Himmler’s plan. In a straightforward manner, with the cold objectivity of a Mafia hit man, Hdss describes the order and manner in which the murder of Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies took place. He portrays his fellow SS members as considerably less than the supermen they are normally pictured as being, and he gives an overview of the machinations of a death factory designed to strip the humanity from every individual and finally to exterminate him.

Hdss’s memoirs allow us to see Auschwitz-Birkenau through the Kom-mandant’s eyes and through his experiences. The reader is easily able to wade through Hdss’s shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his thoughts and feelings. Yet Hdss, like many others in the SS, still succeeded in sublimating his conscience and his humanity in order to carry out his orders. In his mind’s eye, morality had nothing to do with orders. He was the perfect robot; Himmler commands, Hbss obeys without question. He stares at the horror but does not react. He plans, issues orders, yet he does not think of the consequences. He allows conditions in the camp to reduce human beings to walking skeletons, then labels them as subhuman, fit only to die, or he rationalizes that women and even children are enemies of the state, bent on destroying the New Order of the Fiihrer—Adolf Hitler. Despite his whining complaints regarding incompetent staff and insufficient supplies, there was much that he could have done to improve conditions at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In the Western world, especially in the United States, Hdss has hidden in the shadows of history. In recent decades the Western press has focused more on the victims and the survivors, or has been more interested in the living, uncaptured war criminals than those long covered by the dust of time. In addition, the close similarity of Rudolf Hdss’s name to that of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Fiihrer, who flew to England in 1941, further compounds the confusion among the general public. The Deputy Fiihrer—Hess—spent the remainder of his life in prison, first in England, then in Spandau prison in Berlin, after being found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg. In an unguarded moment the ninety-three-year-old Deputy Fiihrer hanged himself on August 17, 1987, with an electrical extension cord left in a cottage on the prison grounds where he was the only remaining Nazi war criminal. The confusion of names is further compounded when the acceptable English spelling of 0-E is used when the o is unavailable in print. Then Hdss comes to be spelled as H-O-E-S-S.

It is easy for the formulators of policy—be they dictators, presidents, or kings—to issue orders when others must do the killing. They do not have to wade through the blood nor listen to the screams nor watch the victims in the dance of death. It is ordinary men and women who are ordered to carry out these horrors. These are the people who should have weighed these orders; it is here that the lesson of history lies. Without the SS there could have been no concentration camps. Without the soldier there could have been no war. It is not only Germany that bears the heavy burden, but the rest of the world also. For it is weU-documented that the Allies and the Christian churches, especially Rome, did not speak out strongly enough to stop the horrors, nor did the Allies take the proper action to halt the trains that led to Auschwitz. By examining these little men and women and their little hatreds, we can learn from this history. Because of the highly organized mass media of today and the orchestrated propaganda spewing forth, be it from the West or the East, it will be the little men and women with their little hatreds who may once again be a tidal wave of destruction that will sweep humanity into another age of horror.

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The words of George Santayana cannot be repeated often enough, for each new generation seems to find new ways to make the same mistakes. It is the hope of the present that they relearn and carry the burden of history: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Steven J. Paskuly