Höss recalled that in the summer of 194116 Himmler told him: “The Führer has ordered the Endlösung [Final Solution] of the Jewish question—and we have to carry out this task.”17 He explained his reaction to the Nuremberg psychologist, Gilbert: “I had nothing to say; I could only say ‘Jawohl!’… We could only execute orders without any further consideration. That is the way it was.”18 Auschwitz was chosen for its isolation and its proximity to an existing railway.19 Höss returned to Auschwitz from that meeting in Berlin with orders to put in place an effective process for large-scale exterminations by gas. It was thought that any other method, especially as used on women and children, would be “a tremendous strain on the SS soldiers who would have to carry out the order.”20 For Höss, “Only gas was suitable since killing by shooting the huge numbers expected would be absolutely impossible.”21 Nevertheless, the extermination kommandos found it increasingly stressful to perform their duties.22 According to Joachim Fest, it was this mechanization of death that would allow Höss to reject any responsibility or guilt: since he engaged in murder without having the impression he was participating in murder, he was therefore not guilty of murder. What mattered was who gave the order.23
Death became Höss’s daily companion; his orders were to kill, and he carried them out unfailingly. He was trained to exterminate, then count the dead with a maniacal obsession for numbers and industrial-quality efficiency. In his memoirs, he explains the machinery behind the factory-like extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz, where he was the commandant from 1940 to 1943. It is a dehumanized man who is the author of these pages: he is faithful to his ideals, lays out the obstacles he encountered, and justifies everything he did. In his opinion, pity and compassion were a sign of weakness and had no place in the SS. He recounts his first time observing the use of Zyklon B: “As the gas was thrown in some of them yelled ‘Gas!’ and a tremendous screaming and shoving started toward both doors, but the doors were able to withstand all the force. It was not until several hours later that the doors were opened and the room aired out. There for the first time I saw gassed bodies in mass. Even though I imagined death by gas to be much worse, I still was overcome by a sick feeling, a horror.”24 He is quick to point out, however, that he never killed a man with his bare hands and never tolerated any abuses by the guards. He also declares himself satisfied that he accomplished the mission given him with tenacious effectiveness.
By 1942, the two camps formed a single, enormous complex, many miles square. Despite his difficulties keeping the guards working efficiently to process inmates through the crematoriums at an ever faster rate, he was proud of his success, for which he was awarded the Pour le Mérite cross. Until the end, his only concerns involved the routine problems of the job. Himmler chose Höss over his superiors to create Auschwitz and placed his faith in him, an expression of trust that Höss felt deeply obligated to honor. He wanted to live up to his mission.
The Höss family lived at the camp; a simple wall separated their villa from the gas chambers. The family went about its daily activities, untroubled by what was happening a stone’s throw away. Unlike other children of Nazi officials discussed in this book, who were protected from the horrors planned and perpetrated by the Reich—at least until after the war—the Höss children lived next-door to the genocide in progress. Years later, Höss’s grandson, Rainer, would call the gate linking the family’s yard to the death camp, the “door to Hell.”25
Höss and his wife were happy together, even if the marriage was passionless. Rudolf’s priority was his family’s well-being. Although Himmler had forbid him from revealing anything to anyone about the Final Solution, Rudolf broached the matter with Hedwig in late 1942, in the context of his diminished sex drive, which he blamed on the nature of his daily tasks at Auschwitz.26 Hedwig shared his feelings about the Jewish race and the Polish people, who “only exist to work until they perish.”27
At home, he continued his efforts to be an exemplary father. Whenever he could, he interrupted his day to play with the children or read them poetry. He was a loving father who deeply regretted not having more time for them.
In addition to two servants who lived in the house, and who were usually Jehovah’s Witnesses, the family had a cook, a governess, a painter, a tailor, a seamstress, a barber, and a driver to attend to their daily needs. Hedwig, whose nickname was the “Angel of Auschwitz,” insisted a full house staff was necessary to host Reich officials such as Himmler, Adolf Eichmann—who managed the mass deportation of Jews—and Richard Glücks—who was the chief inspector of the camps. The family was especially flattered whenever “Uncle Heini” (Himmler) paid them a visit. Höss photographed the children on these occasions, dressed in their Sunday best and posing on the lap of the Reichsführer.
The family’s gardener, Stanislaw Dubiel, was a Polish political prisoner and a privileged observer of the Höss family’s private life. In that capacity, the District Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland questioned him on August 7, 1946. He stated that his employers hosted lavish receptions for which he was tasked to appropriate wine, meat, milk, sugar, cocoa, flour, and other foodstuffs, from the camp’s warehouse. They lived in a certain opulence for which they paid nothing; Frau Höss was known to be demanding and his job was to satisfy her every whim, taking from the supplies meant for prisoners, if necessary, and all in secret. At the “Canada” shops, which, in camp slang, designated the warehouses where prisoners’ personal effects were stored, she took the fine linens and other goods stolen from the women sent to the gas chambers and had them made into clothes for herself by two Jewish seamstresses in her personal service. Dubiel described such a luxuriously appointed and well-equipped house that Frau Höss declared, “I want to live here until I die.”28 After the family fled Auschwitz, four trucks were requisitioned to transport all of the property they had taken for themselves.
Frau Höss’s seamstress was thirty-four-year-old Janina Szczurek, a Pole. In a statement she made on January 13, 1963, she remembered that the lady of the house was always fair with the house staff and the children were no trouble: “They used to run in the garden and watch the prisoners work.”29 Rudolf tucked the children in every night and kissed his wife every morning. He also wrote poetry praising the “beauty of Auschwitz.” She recounted one incident that occurred while she worked for the family: “One day they came to me and asked [me] to sew them arm-bands with badges such as the prisoners had…. Klaus put on the arm-band of a capo and for the other children I sewed triangles of different colors on their clothes. The children were pleased and as they were running about the garden they met their father who tore off their badges and took them inside. I was not punished but only warned not to do such things.”30
Rudolf never spoke at home of his work, but to the children he seemed more tired and tense as the years passed. He took it upon himself to oversee the entire extermination process with each new arrival of prisoners, at any hour of the day or night, even watching through a peephole while the prisoners died in the gas chambers.31 He confided in his memoirs that he was becoming “unapproachable and visibly harder.”32 Yet he tried to keep a calm countenance, knowing that everyone looked to him to set the tone. He wrote that when memories of the horrors he had witnessed at the camp returned to him when he was at home, he could not bear to see the happy scenes of his wife and children together.33
His wife attributed his ill humor to occupational stress and told him repeatedly: “Don’t always think of your duty, think of your family too.”34 She took him to the theater and to receptions, hoping desperately to brighten his mood, but her efforts were in vain. Rudolf had no appetite for sharing; solitude was his safe haven. He confessed that he never had close family relationships or friendships, even as a boy. He was an island unto himself, and that was enough for him.
The Höss children rarely knew a time when they did not live in proximity to a concentration camp. Brigitte was born on the farm on the Baltic Sea, lived at Dachau for four years be
ginning at age one, then at Sachsenhausen from age five to seven, and then at Auschwitz from age seven to eleven. The youngest child, Annegret, was born at Auschwitz on September 20, 1943.
Beginning in December 1943, Rudolf Höss was faced with a new challenge. He was appointed head of the Political Department of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in the SS Economy and Administration Head Office (SS-WVHA), which oversaw the finances and supply system of the SS as well as the management and inspection of all the concentration camps. He understood his transfer as a consequence of the subdivision of Auschwitz into three separate managing bodies. Others saw it as a move made in the aftermath of an investigation into corruption in the camps or in response to mounting rumors of mass exterminations, which were circulated on British radio. Still others saw an effort to improve productivity in the other camps.35 Exhausted, Höss requested a six-week leave on grounds of overwork, and he left for the mountains, alone.
Annegret was a little over eight weeks old and she would not see her father again for six months. Hedwig and the children stayed in the villa at Auschwitz. When Rudolf returned in May 1944, he had little time for his family; he had been ordered to exterminate four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. The crematoriums began working day and night, spreading a dark cloud of ash for miles in all directions.
When Germany fell to the Allies, Höss managed to elude capture for a time. The family—with the exception of Klaus, who stayed with Rudolf—fled north by car, driving at night with the headlights off, following the Himmlers and accompanied by the wife and children of Theodor Eicke. The roads were under constant bombardment by the Allies, forcing them to take shelter in the woods. News of Hitler’s death arrived on May 1, 1945.
Like many Nazi Party members and their sympathizers, Höss had planned to commit suicide with his family and had obtained the necessary fatal doses of poison in case of capture by the Russians. He saw no future for them in Germany. He had made his decision clear to Hedwig but they did not carry through because of the children. Later, Höss would regret they turned away from a death that would have spared the family many difficulties and him having to outlive the world he worked so hard to create.36
Passing through Berlin, Hedwig and the children stopped in Holstein—in northern Germany—where Rudolf’s brother-in-law found them a rudimentary shelter: an old wooden hut with just a stove and a few pieces of furniture. The family slept on the floor with not so much as a blanket. Food was scarce.
Rudolf and Klaus joined Himmler in Flensburg, where the Reich had established a provisional government. Klaus was fifteen: old enough to join the Nazi resistance, at least in the eyes of Rudolf, who was the same age when he enlisted to fight in World War I. They did not expect the news they received from Himmler: “Gentleman, it’s over; you know what you have to do.” His advice was to hide themselves among the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Höss sent Klaus to his mother, then slipped through British lines and made his way to a German navy outpost on the island of Sylt in northern Germany. After Germany’s surrender, he found work on a farm, not far from where Hedwig and the children were hiding. He was able to send letters to them using his brother-in-law as an intermediary, as well as a little money with the help of his former driver at Auschwitz. Nevertheless, the family had only the clothes on their backs and no shoes. They were forced to steal coal to heat the hut and went barefoot in the snow all winter long.
In 1946, Hedwig and the children were living in a small apartment above a sugar factory in the village of St. Michaelisdonn, where, on March 8, she was arrested, leaving the children behind without any supervision. British intelligence officers returned several days later to question the children in the hope of obtaining information that would lead them to their father. According to Brigitte, who was thirteen, they screamed at the children, “Where is your father? Where is your father?” The children claimed to know nothing, so the officers imprisoned Klaus along with his mother.
Hedwig was threatened with deportation to Siberia if she did not cooperate with the investigation into Rudolf’s whereabouts. After at first insisting that he was dead, she finally cracked and gave them his assumed name, “Franz Lang,” and told them where to find him.
Shortly thereafter, on March 11, 1946, Rudolf Höss was captured on a farm near Flensburg. His cyanide vial had broken several days earlier, leaving him no choice but to give himself up. He would testify at Nuremberg as a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of Reich Security, whose lawyer hoped to prove that Kaltenbrunner had never visited Auschwitz nor signed any execution orders. However, Höss’s testimony was immensely damning, and Höss himself said later that he never understood why he had been called as a witness. The Nuremberg psychologist G. M. Gilbert asked him if he felt the Jews had deserved to die. Höss answered: “We SS men were not supposed to think about these things, it never occurred to us. And besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything.”37
As a prisoner of the British army, Höss was transferred to the Polish authorities and tried by Poland’s Supreme National Tribunal beginning in March 1947. He was a model prisoner as well as a model defendant: he answered questions with extreme precision and never made any attempt to whitewash his answers, probably because he did not appreciate the enormity of his actions. He testified he had long ago stopped feeling any emotion. In the eyes of this ardent National Socialist, Auschwitz was no different than the bombing of German cities. Höss was in complete agreement with the Weltanschauung of National Socialism, a philosophy “uniquely linked to the character of the German people” and “able to lead them gradually back to a lifestyle in harmony with nature.”38 His memoirs close on these dumbfounding words: “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 …”39
On the eve of his death, he confided that his family was as dear to him as National Socialism: “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…. 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?”40 He was executed by hanging on April 16, 1947, at Auschwitz, about 150 feet from the family’s former home.
Höss wrote a final letter to his wife and children dated April 11, 1947. In it, he urges Hedwig to move as far away as possible and to use her maiden name because “it’s better that my name dies with me.” To the children, he wrote, “Your daddy has to leave you now.” For his eldest son, Klaus, he had these words: “Klaus, my dear boy! You are the oldest. You are now going out into the world. You have to now make your own way through life. You have good aptitudes. Use them! Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and to judge for yourself, responsibly. Don’t accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true.”41
Impoverished, the family kept a low profile and tried to make a clean slate of life.42 Hedwig and the children lived for ten years in St. Michaelisdonn where they were eventually accepted into the community, although not by everyone. As the widow of a war criminal, she was not eligible for a pension or any government support. The children moved away as adults: Klaus to Australia, others to the Baltic countries, Brigitte to the United States.
In 1950, Brigitte, the third of the five children, left Germany for Spain. She was a beautiful blonde and found work as a fashion model for Balenciaga. She also met her future husband, an Irish American working in Washington, DC. It was at this same time that her father’s memoirs were published, a confession that will go down in the annals of history. She lived successively in Liberia, Greece, Iran, and Vietnam, f
ollowing the career of her husband (the couple married in 1961) with whom she had a son and a daughter. Brigitte shared her family history with her future husband shortly after they met; he expressed some shock but came to the conclusion from their talks that she was a victim, a child at the time of the events whose life shifted from privilege to poverty from one day to the next.
In 1972, the couple moved to northern Virginia but Brigitte was uncomfortable in these new surroundings, without friends, any marketable skills—she admitted she was incapable of writing a check—or fluency in English. She found work as a part-time salesclerk, where her sense of fashion prompted a Jewish client to suggest she go to work at Saks Jandel, a designer clothing store catering to the Washington elite. Not long after starting in this new job, she got drunk with the store’s manager and told him that her father was none other than Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz. The manager relayed the information to the store’s owners, who were German Jews who had emigrated to the United States after Kristallnacht in 1938. They chose not to fire Brigitte who, in their estimation, had committed no crime herself.
Brigitte would learn of their discretion many years later; she continued to work at Saks Jandel for thirty-five years, where the owners treated her as an individual in her own right, not as “the daughter of …” They never revealed her secret to anyone. Brigitte hid her identity from friends and acquaintances, saying only that her father died during the war. She struggled with the question of revealing her father’s identity to her grandchildren. When her mother died in 1989, she had her buried under an assumed name.
After Brigitte and her husband divorced, she moved closer to Washington, DC, to live with her son, a jazz pianist. Her daughter had died of cancer, and Brigitte was similarly diagnosed. In 2013, she granted an interview43 to Thomas Harding for his book, Hanns and Rudolf, about Höss’s capture after the war by Harding’s great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew. She requested that neither her married name nor her maiden name be used, or any other personal information that could lead to her identification, fearing possible retaliatory measures against her or her family.
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