He taught from 1973 until his retirement in 1992. His wife was an instructor in a religious school in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
In the 1980s, the Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On began a study of the children of Nazi criminals to understand how they overcame the wall of silence their parents had built around the past in order to make lives for themselves. He also intended to confront these children with child survivors of the Shoah in the hope that an instructive dialogue could be initiated between them. His reasoning was that Nazi children are also victims, of the guilt they feel because of their fathers’ actions. Together these children of both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust visited Auschwitz and Dachau, as well as the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Martin Adolf was one of the participants. He recognized that he would never have another occasion to discuss the war with his parents, but that the silence he faced was different from the one that torments Holocaust survivors. Theirs is a dark wall behind which lies inexpressible trauma. Parents struggle to find the right words when they want to spare their children the fears and anxiety they suffered, but children can feel both the horror that forces their parents into silence and an obligation to suffer with them.
“I had to keep quiet out of the fear, real or imagined, of being found out and prosecuted as the son of my father, accused of all of the crimes committed by the Nazis, crimes I learned about after the war. I will never have the opportunity to discuss the past with my parents and know what they felt responsible for,” Martin Adolf has written.21
After he retired, Martin Adolf continued his spiritual journey, undertaking a bible study trip to Israel in 1993, with an ecumenical travel agency for Protestants and Catholics. The theme of the trip was “On the road to Exodus.” Martin Adolf was fascinated by the country and its people.
He also wrote a document intended for German teachers about how language can be manipulated for the purpose of diffusing propaganda. He based his study on Nazi texts and letters written by his father. For years, he also led workshops with Dan Bar-On in the United States, Germany, and Israel.
His godmother, Ilse Hess, died in 1995. Her son, Wolf Rüdiger, included this epitaph in her obituary: “The gods flee where destiny begins.”22 He also included a photo of Ilse and Rudolf taken shortly after their marriage; they are seated in a car, with Rudolf at the wheel and Ilse beside him. The look on the groom’s face, however, casts an enigmatic pall over the photo. Wolf Rüdiger Hess asked Martin Adolf Bormann to give the eulogy at his mother’s funeral; Martin Adolf had visited her twice when she was living in Hidelang. Although they had exchanged letters for years, in which they expressed their disappointment over Rudolf Hess’s imprisonment, her funeral was the occasion for the two men to see each other again. This reunion of two children of Nazi criminals brought both of them some happiness.
Martin Adolf Bormann died on March 11, 2013, the same day I began to write his story.
THE HÖSS CHILDREN
The Family of the Kommandant of Auschwitz
“Momma, Momma, come see!”
Brigitte pulls her mother’s hand insistently, although she is panting from having run at full speed.
“Come quick! I found strawberries, so many strawberries, in the garden. Hurry!”
The girl is thrilled by her discovery. Mother and child walk faster now in the direction of the strawberry patch.
“Look how big they are! Can I eat them?”
“No, no, not yet,” her mother warns her. “They must be thoroughly washed first.”
“But why? In Bavaria, we always ate strawberries wherever we found them. Are Polish strawberries dirty?”
“Yes! Can’t you see that they are covered in a black dust and smell like ashes? Look, even your fingers get dirty when you pick them!”
This dirt is not dust; it is the ashes from the crematoriums at Auschwitz.
Seated now on the front steps of her house, enjoying the washed berries, the little girl cannot help herself from looking around to see if anything appears to be burning. Some days, there is a horrible odor that stings her throat. Once, she heard the adults complaining about it. The word they used was “cremation,” but she does not know what that means. She also overheard her father say to one of his subordinates that they could not continue like this: on cloudy or windy days, you could smell burning skin for miles. All of their neighbors were talking about the Jews dying. Another time, her mother and father were discussing a conversation her father had with one of the party members. They were talking about an extermination plan whose pyres would be visible for miles.1 That was in 1942.
Since the age of one, Brigitte has lived near the concentration camps. Before the family moved to Auschwitz, they had lived at Dachau, near Munich, and before that at Sachsenhausen, fifteen miles north of Berlin. She knows her father is responsible for the prisoners. He was promoted—thanks to his exemplary conduct—to the post of Kommandant of Auschwitz in Poland.
These days, their home is a comfortable, well-appointed villa decorated by her mother. There are two floors, a dozen rooms, bathrooms, a kitchen, and a laundry. Her parents’ room is on the second floor, and from their window they can see the smokestack of the first crematorium. Brigitte’s room has twin wooden beds and a large armchair. The furniture is expensive, the linen of the best quality, and works of art hang on the walls. Her parents never owned paintings before, but since they moved to Auschwitz, they can help themselves to anything they want in the “Canada” shops, which are a veritable and frightening Ali Baba’s den of fine objects of all kinds, seized from the camp’s victims.2
They have servants here, too: men in striped uniforms with yellow stars or black triangles; they are prisoners under her papa’s command.3 The little girl thinks they are nice because they often play with her. Sometimes, they make wonderful wooden toys for the children. She thinks in particular of a plane that is big enough to sit on and that has wheels so it can be pulled around. How her brother, Hans-Jürgen, delights in it! There is even a family photo in which he is seated at the controls, beaming for the camera. Such a magical toy!
The inmates planted the garden, as well, with shrubs and exquisite flowers in every color. Thousands of flowers in pots and seeds are delivered regularly to the house. Her mother loves to plant flowers and they have a vegetable garden too. It’s lovely when everything is in bloom. Her father put in a wading pool and a big wooden slide, just for them. The whole family loves animals, and her papa has had the children hold all kinds: rabbits, turtles, cats, grass snakes, and martens. The men in striped uniforms sometimes bring the children new animals under her father’s supervision. They have a beehive, too, and her papa is teaching the children to pull the honeycomb trays out without disturbing the swarm.4 Nothing is too beautiful for them. The whole family grins with delight in photos taken in their magnificent garden during the magical years they spent at Auschwitz.
There is even a stable because her father has always loved horses; as a child, he had a pony that he would bring into his bedroom when his parents were away. After work, he loves to go for a gallop; he says it clears his mind and helps him calm his obsessive fears. On Sundays, he often brings the children to the stables to show them how to currycomb the horses and to see the foal, or to the dog kennel to see the German shepherds. When the weather is fine, they launch canoes on the Sola, the nearby river, and Brigitte brings the white mice she keeps as pets and lets them run in the high grass. “A paradise in Auschwitz.”5
The family lacks for nothing at Auschwitz, although Brigitte wishes her papa would spend more time with them. But he is so busy. The camp calls him at all hours of the day and night with problems. He says there are some tasks that no one can do except him. She thinks her papa must have a very difficult job. He looks so tired and worried sometimes when he comes home at the end of the day.
Her father is Rudolf Höss, the man who oversees the daily functioning of the most relentless death machine even known to man: Auschwitz.
Rudolf Höss was one of the Reich’s most zealous criminals. How could this man be capable of absolute evil, sending thousands of people to their deaths every day, without so much as a shrug, while showing his family unconditional devotion and love? No one could understand or explain this man.6 During his examination by the American psychologist at Nuremberg, G. M. Gilbert, he offered: “I am completely normal. Even while I was carrying out the task of extermination, I led a normal family life and so on.”7 He wanted people to know that he, too, “had a heart.”8
Rudolf Höss (the name could also be spelled Höß) was not a Nazi official but rather one of those men without whom a genocide of such magnitude could never take place. He was average in all aspects and, as a result, similar to an Eichmann or a Franz Stangl, the executioner at Sobibor and Treblinka. He was the kind of person who could follow the order of a superior officer to kill Jewish men, women, and children, as well as Roma, homosexuals, and “enemies of the state,” without the slightest twinge of conscience.
Rudolf Höss was born in 1901 in Baden-Baden, whose natural beauty and thermal baths attracted Germany’s high society to the Black Forest. His family was extremely pious, and his father’s wish was that his only son become a priest (there were two younger daughters in the family: Maria and Margarete). The Höss family patriarch was a fervent Catholic and an authoritarian father who ruled his children with an iron fist.
He ingrained in Rudolf from a young age the lesson to respect and obey adults, as Rudolf remembered: “Most of all, it was essential to be helpful, and this was my highest duty. It was emphatically pointed out again and again that I carry out the requests and orders of parents, teachers, priests, and all adults, even the servants, and that this principle be respectfully obeyed.” He was punished for the slightest mistake. His father’s rule of complete obedience to superiors would guide him his entire life. “This type of training is in my flesh and blood,” he would write in his journals.9 He became an adult who would follow orders automatically.
This solitary, withdrawn child was educated to join the priesthood, but his religious convictions were definitively shaken when his confessor reported to his father that Rudolf had been involved in an unremarkable fight at school. For Rudolf, this was nothing less than a monstrous betrayal of his trust; it turned him away from the Church for the rest of his life, and his father’s death—in 1914—provided no reason to return. Life as a civilian filled him with anxiety, however, so he chose to become a soldier, like all of the men in his father’s family. When World War I broke out, he joined the army. He was fifteen years old.
Germany’s defeat left him looking for another military post to satisfy his need for stability. In 1919, he joined the Rossbach Free Corps, operating in East Prussia, as a border guard. This was a nationalist paramilitary group created to fight Communists in the Baltic region, and, with it, Höss would witness for the first time atrocities committed against civilians. He joined the National Socialist party in 1922, as party member 3240. The Rossbach Free Corps was notorious for its brutality, and it would lead Höss to prison. In 1924, he was sentenced to ten years of forced labor in the same murder case involving Martin Bormann, the man who would become Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary, and involving the assassination of the Communist Walter Kadow.
Unconditional obedience to the laws of the State was a supreme duty for Höss, as he explained to the Nuremberg psychologist G. M. Gilbert: “[F]rom our entire training the thought of refusing an order just didn’t enter into one’s head, regardless of what kind of order it was …”10 Would he have killed his own children if he had been ordered to? Höss wished for one thing only: to never have to give an order, only to execute it. This, he believed, exonerated him from any wrongdoing. He was made for prison life with its strict discipline and minutely ordered schedule, and he was a model prisoner, obeying with pleasure.
When he was released four years later from Berlin’s Brandenburg Prison, his initial plan was to become a farmer. He contacted the Artamans, a small group of young nationalists promoting a populist ruralism. Höss enjoyed country life, as did Heinrich Himmler, who also joined the group, and it was through the Artamans that Höss met his future wife, Hedwig Hensel, in 1929. They each discovered a soul mate, sharing the same opinions and ideals. Höss had absolute confidence in Hedwig but his innate discipline never allowed him to share his private thoughts with his wife: his problems were his alone to work out.11 They had five children together: Klaus, who was born three and a half months after their wedding on February 6, 1930; Heidetraut, on April 9, 1932; Inge Brigitt, called Brigitte, on August 18, 1933; Hans-Jürgen in 1937; and Annegret in 1943.
While all around them the German political landscape was changing radically, the family was living quietly on a farm in an isolated region on the Baltic Sea. Rudolf and Hedwig put all their energy into working the land, trying as best they could to meet the needs of their growing family, which counted three children at the time. Despite their idealism, it was a rugged, hard life, and Höss, who had met Himmler in 1929, was eager to accept his invitation to join the SS for active duty. This was in June 1934, when Himmler, as the Reichsführer-SS and in the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, had wrested control of the camps from the SS’s rival organization, the Nazi Party’s Storm Detachment.
In 1934, Höss was assigned to Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis, near Munich. The camp’s commandant, Thomas Eicke, taught him the first rule of governing the camps: break down the prisoners, mentally and physically. Emblazoned across the top of Eicke’s personal stationery was the following phrase: “Only one thing matters: following orders!” His maxim was perfectly in line with Höss’s own philosophy. Eicke believed that an SS officer should be prepared to kill his closest family members if they gave cause by refusing the rule of Hitler.12 Under the direction of Himmler, who thought any emotion was a mark of weakness, the SS became a desensitized, dehumanized security force. Höss had no misgivings about following its lead and falling in step; like a marionette jumping into action on the slightest whim of his superiors, he obeyed orders to the letter. The Nuremberg psychologist Gilbert wrote: “One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.”13
The Höss family soon joined him at Dachau; the three children ranged in age from four years to one and a half. The family lived in an officer’s house near the camp. In 1937, Hedwig was expecting again, and Hans-Jürgen would become the couple’s fourth child and their second son. The Höss children went to the local school in Dachau with the children of other SS officers.
Höss proved what he was capable of at Dachau, which was intended by Himmler to serve as a model for future camps. Höss’s formidable efficiency, sense of strategy, and pragmatism moved him up the ranks. Dachau grew to house almost twenty thousand inmates.
Four years later, Höss was transferred to Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, as the camp’s second in command. The family moved as well, and their lives were never troubled by the neighboring camp. When war was declared, however, and Poland was invaded on September 1, 1939, prisoners began to stream in.
In the evenings and on weekend afternoons, Höss liked to regale his children with popular German folktales or stories about Max and Moritz, two incorrigible little German pranksters of whom Höss enjoyed in particular. He also played music for them on a gramophone. This good, attentive father was—at the same time—supervising the deliberate deaths of millions of people. For years, he led a double life with ease.
When Himmler decided to open a new camp in Upper Silesia, thirty-seven miles west of Kraków, Höss, who was by this time experienced in the daily functioning of the camps, was part of the delegation sent to inspect the site—a former Polish army barracks on a marshy plain near the Polish town of Oświęcim—in May 1940. Thanks to Höss’s efficiency, this new camp, which consisted of twenty-two brick “blocks” arranged in three
lines and surrounded by a double perimeter of thirteen-foot-high, barbed-wire enclosures, was ready to receive its first inmates by autumn. The heavy iron gate at the camp’s entrance bore the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free).
With the camp up and running, Hedwig and the children joined Rudolf in the house near the camp. As was the case during Höss’s earlier postings, the children were sent to the local school. However, Höss’s position made it difficult for them to make friends.
The surging numbers of prisoners and Berlin’s ever-more insistent demands to build an extension made Höss’s life impossible. In the memoirs he wrote while in prison in Poland, he remembered: “Every new problem that appeared lashed me on to even greater intensity.”14 His superiors were unreliable, his subordinates incompetent, and he was frequently faced with logistical difficulties to fulfill his mission, a recurring point of frustration in his memoirs. Höss was the first man to arrive at the camp in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. Himmler turned a deaf ear to his reports, in which Höss noted a multitude of problems: insufficient supplies, defective machinery, incompetence, and health epidemics among them. Himmler’s only concern was to complete the extension of the camp at all costs. After meeting with Himmler at Auschwitz in March 1941, Höss noted: “The following plans for the camp spoke clearly enough: preparation of the camp for 100,000 POWs, the remodeling of the old camp for 30,000 prisoners.”15
In the autumn of 1941, Höss began work on a second camp, which would become Auschwitz-Birkenau, located about three miles away. This is where the cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B, would be tested for use in the gas chambers (it was already in use to decontaminate the barracks) beginning in September 1941. Even a small dose was fatal, and the Nazis had a large stock of it.
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