I recently found quite an interesting website, https://allthatsinteresting.com/ more so allowing readers to view articles that most want to hide away from you. Scrolling through the history section of this site I found an article posted on Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss. Now for those who don't already know he was a man of many crimes mostly being the one responsible for turning Auschwitz into the Nazis’ largest death camp.
The picture seen here is during his trial in Warsaw, Poland, March 31, 1947. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
His hatred of Jews started like how any other German had too, Germany's defeat of World War 1 and the blame being put on the Jewish. Seeing Hitler during his speech in 1922 grew his passion to do something about it. So he joined the Nazi Party, later on, in 1929, meeting Heinrich Himmler and many other key people soon on.
"The following year, he seemed to prove his loyalty when he participated in the brutal murder of Walther Kadow, a teacher who Höss and others believed had betrayed Nazi member Leo Schlageter to the French occupation authorities." says the website. It was acting like this that made such people like Rudolf himself stick out from the rest of the Nazis, as you probably already know.
This famous photo, I hope you recognize or have seen at least one because it depicts a photo of some of the worst people and their "jobs" and duties within the Nazi Party. Rudolf Höss (right) stands beside SS officer Richard Baer (left) and SS physician Josef Mengele (center) in 1944.
From Höss working at Dachau for "educational purposes", says the camp was used for moving to higher concentration camps, to Auschwitz he was a man with much experience just boiling to let out his anger in any possible way, that is to exterminate any living Jew in his sight.
“Anyone who shows even the slightest vestige of sympathy towards [the prisoners] must immediately vanish from our ranks,” thundered Theodor Eicke, the camp commandant. “I need only hard, totally committed SS men. There is no place among us for soft people.”
Humanly enough you could assume that it must have been a horrible sight that would stick with you for life making you feel guilty for murdering people, most in a brutal way, and it was that way for Höss he recalled, but not for very long probably realizing it was their duty as a Nazi and that there should be no guilt felt, but pride.
“At the beginning of the war, I attended my first execution, but it did not affect me nearly so much as witnessing that first corporal punishment,” says Höss
It's an important fact to know that although Nazi members and Germans had no choice but to do what their Fuhrer had told them so, most did worry that if they did not do their duty they themselves were worried about the outcome, that you would most definitely be murdered for not following the oath. It was in 1943 that in Himmler's speech he said that there was simply no point in even leaving the Jewish children because they would only grow up to be like the adults. All based around sadism to just get a kick out of murdering innocent people.
“In the summer of 1941, I cannot remember the exact date, I was suddenly summoned to the Reichsfuhrer,” Höss later testified. “Contrary to his usual custom, Himmler received me without his adjutant being present and said in effect: ‘The Fuhrer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.'”
It was Höss himself who implemented what we know as the gas inside the chambers, Zyklon B at not only Auschwitz to begin with but mostly all concentration camps. Capable of killing around 2,000 people a day, Höss is responsible for over 1 million murders
The entrance of Auschwitz pictured above
“Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself,” Höss testified. “In the crowded cells, death came instantaneously the moment the Zyklon B was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry, and it was all over.”
Sometimes, Höss claimed, he felt the weight of his terrible work. He had a “weakness” about killing children. But Nazi Adolf Eichmann assured him that it was for the greater good.
“[Eichmann] explained to me that it was especially the children who have to be killed first,” Höss later testified.
“Because where was the logic in killing a generation of older people and leaving alive a generation of young people who can be possible avengers of their parents and can constitute a new biological cell for the reemerging of this people?”
Of course as any Nazi criminal, as soon as the war ended and they had lost once again he fled for cover. Rudolf Höss was tracked down by Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled Berlin during the Nazi rise to power. Höss was arrested and put on trial, later hanged to death.
Höss showed little remorse, although he did acknowledge that he felt “pity” for the victims. He stated that he’d just been following orders.
“It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order,” Höss testified. “Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out.
“Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”
On April 14, 1947, the former Auschwitz commandant was brought back to Auschwitz. After a cup of coffee, guards led him to the gallows just before 10 a.m. There, Rudolf Höss was hanged, dying not far from where he’d sent millions to their deaths, says the website.
Very sick