Frau Höss revealed that her husband was currently living on a farm at Gottruepel near Flensberg. Intelligence officers immediately left for northern Germany, liased locally with 93 Field Security Section, and moved up to the farm at eleven o’clock in the evening of Monday, March 11. They surprised Höss in his pajamas at his bunk in the stable block, which also doubled as a slaughterhouse. A British medical officer quickly pried Höss’s mouth open to search for a poison capsule—they all knew that Himmler had managed to kill himself in just such a way the previous year. Höss was hit across the face four times by a British sergeant before he admitted who he was, and was then dragged to one of the slaughterhouse tables where, according to one of the British soldiers who witnessed it, “the blows and screams were endless.” The medical officer shouted to Captain Cross: “Call them off unless you want to take back a corpse!” Höss was then covered in a blanket, yanked over to a car, and driven back to Field Security Headquarters at Heide.
Snow was falling as they arrived in the early hours of the morning, but Höss was made to walk naked through the barrack courtyard to his cell. He was then kept awake for three days—soldiers were told to prod him with axe handles if he showed signs of dozing off. According to Höss, he was also beaten with his own riding crop. Then, on March 14, he signed an eight-page confession.
There are Holocaust deniers who point to the abuse Höss suffered at the hands of British soldiers immediately following his arrest and claim that this discredits his confession. While it could be argued that his initial statement was tainted, during his subsequent imprisonment and interrogation, first at “Tomato”—the code name for No. 2 War Criminals Holding Centre at Simeons Kaserne—and then subsequently both at Nuremberg and at his own trial in Poland, there is no evidence that Höss was mistreated again. It was during this subsequent period that he wrote his memoirs—indeed, he remarks in them how grateful he is to his captors for giving him the chance to write his personal history—and neither then, nor in the witness box when he had the open opportunity to do so, did he recant any of his original confession, though he did feel secure enough to record that he had initially been beaten by his British captors.
In April 1947, Rudolf Höss returned to Auschwitz, to the same building in which he used to work. Only this time he was imprisoned in the basement cells of the Kommandantur rather than installed behind his desk in his firstfloor office. It had been thought fitting that the man who had presided over the death of more than a million people at Auschwitz should be executed at the site of his crimes. But there were problems on the day originally scheduled for the execution. Several thousand people, including many former inmates, came to watch. The atmosphere grew ugly and they pushed forward against the wooden fence erected to restrain them. There was a real feeling, according to Stanislaw Hantz,26 a former prisoner who witnessed the gathering, that “they will lynch Höss here.” He heard mutterings in the crowd. What would the soldiers who were standing guard do if there was a huge surge forward? Would they shoot? The situation grew so dangerous that Höss was not taken from his cell as planned. Instead, an elaborate ruse was devised whereby the soldiers marched off and then drove away, escorting a car that everyone thought contained Höss. But Höss had not been taken away; he was left in his cell overnight and then taken out the next morning. In front of only a handful of people—not the screaming crowds of the day before—Rudolf Höss prepared to die. “I thought as he climbed the gallows, up the stairs, knowing him as a tough Nazi supporter that he would say something,” says Stanislaw Hantz, one of the few witnesses to his execution. “I thought that he would make a statement to the glory of the Nazi ideology that he was dying for. But no. He didn’t say a word.”
Höss’s end was quick—the exact opposite of what Hantz, who had been tortured in the camp, wanted. “According to me Höss should’ve been put in a cage and been driven all around Europe so that people could see him—so people could spit on him, so that it would get to him what he did.” But the intriguing question is this: Would what he had done ever have “got to” Höss? All the clues in his autobiography, which he completed just before his execution, point one way: All the humiliation and mistreatment in the world would never have caused Höss to search into his heart and think—fundamentally—that what he did was wrong. Of course, he does say in his autobiography that he “now” sees that the extermination of the Jews was a mistake—but only a tactical one—because it has drawn the hatred of the world upon Germany.
My personal experience of having encountered a number of former Nazi perpetrators makes me believe that one single paragraph in Höss’s memories offers the strongest clue as to what he really felt at the end. In it he asks—as he did at Nuremberg—what would have happened to a pilot who had refused to drop bombs on a town that he knew contained mainly women and children. Of course, says Höss, that pilot would have been court-martialed: “People say that is no comparison,” writes Höss. “But in my opinion the two situations are comparable.”27
In essence, Höss justified his actions by simplistic comparison—the Allies killed women and children by bombing, the Nazis killed women and children by gassing. This is a line of argument still supported by many former perpetrators (and Nazi apologists) today. One former member of the SS, who refused to be interviewed formally, went so far as to say in a casual conversation with me: “The children who died in our gas chambers suffered less than the children who died in your fire bombing of German cities.”
More openly—and expressing himself more carefully—Oskar Groening says,We saw how bombs were dropped on Germany, and women and children died in firestorms. We saw this and said, “This is a war that is being led in this way by both sides,” and the Holocaust was part of the fight against the warmongers and part of our battle for freedom.
As he sees it, the fact that the Allies, “regardless of whether it was militarily necessary or not, murdered women and children by throwing bombs of phosphorus on them,” and were not then held accountable for their actions at the end of the war, means that it is hypocritical to focus all the guilt for “war crimes” on SS perpetrators.
Of course, one instinctively finds such a comparison repellent. The arguments about the conceptual difference between the two actions—the Allied bombing of cities and the Nazi extermination of the Jews—also are easy to rehearse: that the Germans could have stopped the bombing instantly by surrendering, while the extermination of the Jews was a policy determined by ideology; that no individual group of Germans was targeted by the bombing, unlike the Nazis’ murder of one specific category of people in their empire; that it was the towns and buildings the bombers primarily sought to destroy, not the people themselves; that the Nazi persecution of the Jews (for example Eichmann’s brutal Nisko plan) predated the bombing of German cities, therefore the notion that the bombing in any way acted as a justification at the time for the Nazis as they committed crimes against the Jews is absolute nonsense; that any comparison between the pragmatic Allied planners and dedicated Jew-haters like Hitler, Heydrich, or Eichmann, is ludicrous.
Then there is the additional argument—which is often the first recourse of the non-specialist—which runs simply: “The Germans started it, as they bombed British cities before the British bombed Berlin.” But this, in reality, is the weakest rationale of all. It scarcely can be a defense to say of any action that it becomes legitimate if one’s enemy commits it first.
Despite all the attempts to differentiate the two methods of killing, however, the false comparison between them made by Höss and other Nazis still remains emotionally disturbing. One reason is that it is well known that there was disquiet about the policy of bombing German cities inside the Allied leadership—not least, toward the end of the war, from Churchill himself. The revelation in recent years that, in spring 1945, one Allied criterion used in the process of deciding which German cities and towns to target was their “burnability”—something that helped lead to the targeting of medieval cities like Würzburg—only adds
to the sense of unease.
Additionally, there is another, less obvious, reason why the comparison of Allied actions to Nazi actions is unsettling. It is because the development of high-level bombing involved the inevitable “distancing” of the aircrew from the killing. “It’s not like I was going out and sticking a bayonet in someone’s belly, OK?” says Paul Montgomery,28 a member of an American B-29 crew who took part in the fire-bombing of many Japanese cities during the war.
You still kill them but you kill them from a distance, and it doesn’t have the demoralizing effect upon you that it did if I went up and stuck a bayonet in someone’s stomach in the course of combat. It’s just different. It’s kind of like conducting war through a video game.
Montgomery’s testimony is, of course, worryingly reminiscent of the distancing effect the Nazis sought to create for themselves by building the gas chambers. Just as it was easier to kill people by dropping a bomb on them rather than bayoneting them, so it was easier for the Nazis to kill human beings by gassing them rather than shooting them. Twentieth-century technology not only allowed more people to be killed in war than ever before, it allowed those who did the killing to suffer less psychological damage as a result of their actions.
None of this, however, means that any legitimate comparison is possible between the Allied bombing of Germany and the extermination of more than a million people at Auschwitz. For all of the reasons mentioned, the two actions are conceptually different. But in Höss’s mind, and in the minds of many other Nazis, the comparison did hold—bombing and gassing were simply different methods of killing the enemy. This meant that no matter how Höss was treated—even if he had been paraded around “in a cage” as Stanislaw Hantz wanted—he would never have truly regretted what he had done. As it is, he is most likely to have walked up the steps to the gallows with two thoughts in his head: “I die not because of my crimes, but because we lost the war; and I die a much misunderstood man.” Ultimately, that is why such an outwardly nondescript person as Höss is such a terrifying figure.
In 1947, as Höss left this life, the camp complex he created was decaying fast. Poles in the nearby area were dismantling some of the barracks of Birkenau to use the wood to repair their own houses, and an even more disturbing looting of the camp was taking place. When Polish teenager Józefa Zielińska and her family returned to Auschwitz after the war, they discovered they had nowhere to live. Their house had been destroyed in the massive Nazi reorganization of the area and they were forced to live in a shed that had once housed chickens. To make money, Józefa and her friends went to the site of the crematoria at Birkenau and searched for gold. They dug up the soil and the fragments of bones that lay within it, placed them in a bowl, and sieved them through with water. “Everyone felt bad doing it,” says Józefa. “Whether they had family that had died in the camp or not, everyone felt uneasy because they were human bones, after all. It wasn’t a pleasure. But it was poverty that forced us to do such a thing.” With the money gained by selling the gold they had prospected from the soil of Birkenau, Józefa Zielińska’s family managed to buy a cow.
Jan Piwczyk was another Pole forced by circumstance to live in one of the chicken coops near Birkenau, and he too admits that he searched for valuables near the remains of the crematoria: “I remember I found a gold tooth and a Jewish coin and a gold bracelet. Now today I wouldn’t do it, right? I wouldn’t look through human bones, because I know this is sacrilege. But at the time the conditions forced us to do it.” When he was not searching for valuables, Jan and his friends also bribed the Soviet soldiers, who occasionally patrolled nearby, so that they could take wood from the barracks of Birkenau to use to build their own houses. “You know,” says Jan, “after the war it was tough—you had to start from scratch.”
Immediately after the war, Stanislaw Hantz, the former Polish political prisoner who had witnessed Rudolf Höss’s execution, got a job guarding the Birkenau site. He tried to protect the camp from locals intent on stealing from the remains of the crematoria by firing warning shots above their heads. “We called them cemetery hyenas,” he says. “We couldn’t understand how these people could search these tombs.” Away from the site, he had a foolproof way of detecting their presence, “You could recognize them by the smell—they smelt from afar. It was a stench of fermenting bodies. You could tell such a person walking down the street.”
It would take years for the site of the atrocities at Auschwitz to be appropriately maintained and cared for. Indeed, not until well after the fall of Communism would the signage at the museum finally be changed to reflect in a proper manner the suffering of the Jews.
In the meantime, Oskar Groening, who had spent several years in the SS at Auschwitz, steadily rose through the management structure of the glass factory where he now worked, eventually becoming head of personnel. Finally, he was made an honorary judge of industrial tribunal cases. Without seeing any sense of irony or inappropriateness in his words, Oskar Groening believes that the experience he gained in the SS and Hitler Youth helped him do his job as a personnel officer better, because “from the age of twelve onwards I learned about discipline.”
Even though he had worked at Auschwitz and helped in the extermination process by sorting and counting the foreign money stolen from the arriving transports, Groening never considered himself “guilty” of any crime. “We drew a line between those who were directly involved in the killing and those who were not directly involved.” Additionally, he felt he was—using the words of the infamous Nazi post-war defense—acting under orders, and he attempts to defend himself with this analogy: “The first time a company of soldiers gets a volley of machine gun fire they don’t all get up and say, ‘We don’t agree with this—we’re going home.’”
This was, perhaps surprisingly, a similar line to the one taken by West German prosecutors after the war as they sought to determine who from Auschwitz should face war crime charges and who should not. If a member of the SS was not either in a senior leadership position or directly involved in killing, he generally escaped prosecution. Thus, when Oskar Groening’s past was eventually uncovered—inevitably, because he never made any attempt to change his name and hide—the German prosecutors did not press charges against him. His experience therefore demonstrates how it is possible to have been a member of the SS, worked at Auschwitz, witnessed the extermination process, contributed to the “Final Solution” in a concrete way by sorting the stolen money, and still not be thought “guilty” by the post-war West German state.
Indeed, out of the 6,500 or so members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and who are thought to have survived the war, only approximately 750 ever received punishment of any kind.29 The most notorious legal process was the “Auschwitz trial” in Frankfurt between December 1963 and August 1965, when, of the twenty-two defendants, seventeen were convicted and only six received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
However, it was not only Germany that failed to prosecute in substantial numbers those SS members who had worked at Auschwitz. This was a collective failure of the international community (with the possible exception of the Polish courts, who tried a remarkable 673 out of the 78930 Auschwitz staff ever to face justice). Prosecutions were hindered, not just by lack of consistency between nations about what conduct constituted a “crime” in Auschwitz, but also by the division caused by the Cold War and—it must be said—by a clear lack of will.
Despite the Nuremberg trials stating that the SS was a “criminal” organization in its entirety, no attempt was ever made to enforce the view that the mere act of working in the SS at Auschwitz was a war crime—a view that popular opinion would surely have supported. A conviction and sentence—however minimal—for every SS man who was there would have sent a clear message for the future. It did not happen. About 85 percent of the SS members who served at Auschwitz and survived the war escaped scot-free. When Himmler began the development of the gas chambers in order to distance the SS men from t
he psychological “burden” of shooting people in cold blood, he could scarcely have predicted that it would have this additional benefit for the Nazis. This method of murder meant that the vast majority of the SS members who served at Auschwitz could escape punishment after the war by claiming to not have been directly involved in the extermination process.
Oskar Groening also feels no unease about the fact that, while many of those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz faced further hardship after they were liberated, he enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) a life of comfort. “It’s always like that in the world,” he says.
Each person has the freedom to make the best of the situation he’s in. I did what every normal person tries to do, which is to make the best possible situation for himself and his loved ones, if he has a family. So I succeeded in doing that—others didn’t succeed. What happened before is irrelevant.
Given this attitude of insouciance, it is all the more surprising that, towards the end of his life, Oskar Groening decided to speak openly about his time in Auschwitz. The circumstances that led to his change of heart are intriguing. After the war, Groening became a keen stamp collector and was a member of his local philately club. At one of the meetings, more than forty years after the war, he started to chat to the man next to him about politics. “Isn’t it terrible,” said the man, “that the present government says it’s illegal to say anything against the killing of millions of Jews in Auschwitz.” He went on to explain to Groening how it was “inconceivable” for so many bodies to have been burnt, and he also maintained that the volume of gas that was supposed to have been used would, in reality, have killed “all living beings” in the vicinity.
Groening said nothing to contradict these statements at the philately club, but later obtained one of the Holocaust deniers’ pamphlets that his fellow stamp collector had recommended, wrote his own ironic commentary on it and posted it to him. Then he suddenly started to receive odd phone calls at home from strangers who disputed his view that Auschwitz was really the center of mass killing by gassing. It turned out that his denunciation of the Holocaust deniers’ case had been printed in a neo-Nazi magazine. And now “90 percent” of the calls and anonymous letters he received “were all from people who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn’t happened.”
Auschwitz Page 37