by Rudolf Hoess
Outwardly cold and even stony, but with most deeply disturbed inner feelings, I attended the inquiries and examined the bodies of those prisoners who had committed suicide, or had been shot while attempting to escape—and I was well able to recognize whether such cases were genuine or not, or had been accidentally killed at work, or had “run into the wire,” or had been legally executed and now lay in the dissecting room.
It was the same with the floggings and other punitive measures ordered by Loritz, most of which he supervised himself. These were “his” punishment fatigues, “his” executions of sentence.
My stony mask convinced him that there was no need to “toughen me up,” as he loved to do with those SS men who seemed to him too weak.
And it is here that my guilt actually begins.
It was clear to me that I was not suited to this sort of service, since in my heart I disagreed with Eicke’s insistence that life in the concentration camp be organized in this particular way. My sympathies lay too much with the prisoners, for I had myself lived their life for too long and had personal experience of their needs.
I should have gone to Eicke or to the Reichsführer SS[30] then, and explained that I was not suited to concentration camp service, because I felt too much sympathy for the prisoners.
I was unable to find the courage to do this.
I did not want to make a laughingstock of myself. I did not wish to reveal my weakness. I was too obstinate to admit that I had made a mistake when I abandoned my original intention of settling on the land.
I had voluntarily joined the ranks of the active SS and I had become too fond of the black uniform to relinquish it in this way.
My admission that I was too soft for a job assigned to the SS would unquestionably have led to my being cashiered, or at least immediately discharged.
And this I could not face.
For a long time I wrestled with this dilemma, the choice between my inner convictions on the one hand and my oath of loyalty to the SS and my vow of fidelity to the Führer on the other. Should I become a deserter? Even my wife knows nothing about my mental struggle on this issue. I have kept it to myself until this very moment.
As a National Socialist of long standing, I was convinced of the need for a concentration camp.
True opponents of the state had to be securely locked up; and asocials and professional criminals, who under the law as it then stood could not be imprisoned, must be deprived of their freedom in order to safeguard the rest of the people from their evil deeds.
I was also convinced that this task could only be carried out by the SS in their capacity as the guardians of the new state.
But I was not in agreement with Eicke’s attitude toward the inmates of these camps. I disagreed with the way he whipped up the vilest emotions of hatred among the SS guards, and with his policy of putting incompetent men in charge of the prisoners and of allowing these unsuitable, indeed intolerable, persons to keep their jobs.
Nor did I agree with the arbitrary method of fixing the term of imprisonment.
Nevertheless, by remaining in the concentration camps I accepted the ideas and the rules and regulations that there prevailed.
I became reconciled to my lot, which I had brought upon myself quite freely. Silently I continued to hope that one day I might find another form of service.
But for the time being there was no prospect of this. In Eicke’s opinion I was pre-eminently suitable for the job of looking after prisoners.
Although I became accustomed to all that was unalterable in the camps, I never grew indifferent to human suffering. I have always seen it and felt for it. Yet because I might not show weakness, I wished to appear hard, lest I be regarded as weak, and had to disregard such feelings.
I was then given the post of adjutant at Sachsenhausen.[31]
I now got to know the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, its work and its usages. I became more closely acquainted with Eicke and with the effects of his influence upon the camp and the troops.
I came into contact with the Gestapo.
From the mass of official correspondence I learned to understand the relationships within the higher reaches of the SS. In short, I acquired a broader view.
I heard a lot about what went on in the Führer’s immediate circle, from a friend on Hess’s liaison staff. Another of my old friends held an important post at the headquarters of the Reich Youth Organization, while yet a third was a public relations officer on Rosenberg’s staff and a fourth was with the Reich Chamber of Medicine. Tn Berlin I often saw these old comrades of mine from Freikorps days, and became increasingly knowledgeable concerning the ideals and intentions of the Party, since I enjoyed their confidence. During these years a powerful upsurge could be felt throughout Germany. Industry and trade flourished as never before. Hitler’s foreign policy successes were plain enough to silence all doubters and opponents.
The Party ruled the state. Its successes could not be denied. The means and the ends of the NSDAP were right. I believed this implicitly and without the slightest reservation.
My inner scruples about remaining in the concentration camp, despite my unsuitability for such work, receded into the background now that I no longer came into such direct contact with the prisoners as I had done in Dachau.
Also, in Sachsenhausen there was not the same atmosphere of hatred that existed in Dachau. And this in spite of the fact that Eicke’s own offices were located in the camp.
The troops were of a different type. There were many young recruits and many junior SS officers from the Junker school.
“Old Dachauites” were only to be met with now and then.
The commandant, too, was a different sort of man.[32]
Strict and severe, it is true, but with a meticulous desire for justice and a fanatical sense of duty. He was for me the prototype of the original SS leader and National Socialist. I always regarded him as a much enlarged reflection of myself. He, too, had moments when his good nature and kind heart were in evidence, yet he was hard and mercilessly severe in all matters appertaining to the service. He was a perpetual example to me of how, in the SS, “hard necessity” must stifle all softer emotions.
The war came, and with it the great turning point in the history of the concentration camps. But who could then have foreseen the horrifying tasks to be assigned them as the war went on?
On the very first day of the war, Eicke delivered an address to the officers of the reserve formations which had relieved the regular SS units in the camps.
In it he emphasized that the harsh laws of war now prevailed. Each SS man was committed body and soul, regardless of the life he had hitherto led. Every order received must be regarded as sacrosanct and even those which appeared most harsh and severe must be carried out without hesitation. The Reichsführer SS demanded that every SS man should exhibit an exemplary sense of duty and should be prepared to devote himself to his people and his fatherland even unto death.
The main task of the SS in this war was to protect Adolph Hitler’s state from every kind of peril and especially against internal dangers. A revolution, as in 1918, or a munition workers’ strike, such as that of 1917, was out of the question.[33]
Anyone identifiable as an enemy of the state and any saboteur of the war effort must be destroyed.
The Führer demanded of the SS that they protect the homeland against all hostile intrigues.
He, Eicke, therefore demanded that they, the men now serving with the reserve formations in the camps, should display an inflexible harshness toward the prisoners. They would have most difficult tasks to perform and the hardest orders to obey. That, however, was the reason for their being there. The SS had now to show that the intensive training they had received in peacetime was justified. Only the SS were capable of protecting the National Socialist State from all internal danger. All other organizations lacked the necessary toughness.
On this same evening the first execution of the war was carried out in Sachsenhausen.
It was of a Communist who had refused to carry out ARP work at the Junkers factory in Dessau. The responsible factory authority had reported him, and he was arrested by the local police and taken to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where he was interrogated. A report of the proceedings was laid before the Reichsführer SS, who ordered that he be shot forthwith.
According to a secret mobilization order, all executions ordered by the Reichsführer SS or by the Gestapo were to be carried out in the nearest concentration camp.
At ten o’clock that night Müller of the Gestapo[34] telephoned to say that a courier was on the way with orders.
These orders were to be carried out at once. Almost at once a truck arrived with two police officials and a handcuffed civilian. The commandant opened and read the orders, which said, quite briefly: “By command of the Reichsführer SS the prisoner is to be shot. He is to be informed of this while in custody, and the sentence is to be carried out one hour later.”
The commandant immediately informed the condemned man of the orders he had received. The man was completely resigned to his fate, although, as he later said, he had not expected to be executed. He was allowed to write to his family, and was given cigarettes for which he had asked.
Eicke had been informed by the commandant and arrived in the course of the hour before the sentence was to be carried out.
As adjutant, I was head of the commandant’s staff and, in accordance with the secret mobilization order, had to carry out the execution. When, on the morning that war was declared, the commandant opened the sealed mobilization order, neither of us thought that we should have occasion to follow the instructions in it regarding executions on that very same day.
I quickly got together three of my older and more imperturbable junior staff officers, told them what had to be done, and instructed them in matters of procedure.
A post was rapidly erected in a sand pit adjoining the workshops, and almost at once the trucks arrived. The commandant told the condemned man to stand by the post. I led him there. He calmly made himself ready. I stepped back and gave the order to fire. He collapsed and I gave him the coup de grâce. The doctor established that he had received three bullets through the heart. In addition to Eicke, a few officers of the reserve formations were also present at the execution.
None of us who had listened to Eicke’s instructions that morning had imagined that his words would so quickly become harsh reality. Nor indeed had Eicke, as he himself told us after the execution.
I had been so busy with the preparations for the execution that it was not until it was over that I began to realize what had happened. All the officers who had been present at the shooting assembled for a while in our mess. Oddly enough, no real conversation took place, and each of us just sat, wrapped in his own thoughts. We all remembered Eicke’s speech. We had just been given a clear picture of war with which we would be faced. Apart from myself, all those present were elderly men who had already served as officers during the First World War. They were veteran leaders of the SS, who had held their own in street battles during the NSDAP’s early struggle for existence. All of us, however, were deeply affected by what had just happened, not least myself.
Yet in the days to come we were to have plenty of experiences of this kind. Almost every day I had to parade with my execution squad.
Most of those we executed were men who refused to do their war service, or saboteurs. The reason for execution could only be learned from the police officials who accompanied them. They were not given on the execution order itself.
One incident affected me very closely. An SS leader, a police official with whom I had had many dealings, since he frequently accompanied notable prisoners or came to the camp to deliver important secret documents to the commandant, was himself suddenly brought in one night for immediate execution. Only the day before, we had been sitting together in our officers’ mess discussing the executions. Now a similar fate was to overtake him, and it was I who had to carry out the order! This was too much even for my commandant. After the execution, we went for a long, silent walk together through the camp, trying to calm our feelings.
We learned from the officials who had accompanied him that this SS officer had been ordered to arrest and bring to the camp a man who had formerly been an official of the Communist Party. The SS officer had known the man well and for a long time, since he had had to keep him under supervision. The Communist had always behaved with complete good faith. Out of kindness the SS officer had let him pay a last visit to his home, to change his clothes and say goodbye to his wife. While the SS official and his colleagues were talking with the wife in the sitting room, the husband escaped out of the back. By the time they realized he had fled, it was too late. The SS officer was actually arrested inside the Gestapo building while reporting the escape, and the Reichsführer SS ordered him court-martialed immediately. One hour later he was sentenced to death. The men who had accompanied him were given long terms of imprisonment. Even attempts by Heydrich and Müller to intercede on his behalf were sharply dismissed by the Reichsführer SS. This first grave dereliction of duty on the part of an SS officer since the start of the war must be punished with terrifying and exemplary severity. The condemned was a respectable man in his middle thirties, married and with three children, who had hitherto carried out his duties faithfully and conscientiously.
Now he had fallen victim to his own good nature and trustfulness.
He met his death with calm and resignation.
I cannot understand to this day how I was able, quite calmly, to give the order to fire. The three men of the firing squad did not know the identity of their victim, and this was just as well, for their hands might well have trembled. I was so agitated that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grâce. But I was able to pull myself together sufficiently to prevent those present from being aware of anything unusual. I know this, because I asked one of the three junior officers in the execution squad about it a few days later.
This execution was always before my eyes to remind me of the demand that had been made upon us to exercise perpetual self-mastery and unbending severity.
At the time I believe that this was asking too much of human nature, and yet Eicke was insisting on ever greater harshness. An SS man must be able to destroy even his closest dependents should they commit an offense against the state or the ideals of Adolf Hitler. “There is only one thing that is valid: Orders!” That was the motto which he used as his letterhead.
What this motto implied, and what Eicke meant by it, I was to learn in these first few weeks of the war, and not only I, but also many of the other old SS leaders. Some of these, enjoying very senior rank in the General SS and with very low SS serial numbers, dared to express their opinion in the mess that such hangman’s work soiled the black uniform of the SS. This was reported to Eicke. He sent for them and also summoned all SS officers in his Oranienburg district, and he addressed them more or less as follows: The remarks about hangman’s work and the SS show that the men concerned, despite their long service with the SS, have not yet understood what the function of the SS is. The most important task assigned to the SS is to protect the new state by any and every means. Every opponent of the state, according to the danger he represents, must either be kept in custody or be destroyed. In either case it is the responsibility of the SS to see that this is done. Only thus can the security of the state be guaranteed, until a new code of laws has been created which will give true protection to the state and the people. The destruction of internal enemies of the state is just as much a duty as is the destruction of the enemy from beyond the frontiers, and such action can therefore never be regarded as dishonorable.
The reported remarks show adherence to the ideology of an out-of-date bourgeois world which, thanks to Hitler’s revolution, has long ceased to exist. They are a sign of weakness and sentimentality, emotions which are not only unworthy of an SS leader, but which might become dangerous.
/> For this reason it was his duty to export the persons concerned to the Reichsführer SS, with a view to punishment.
So far as the district under his control was concerned, he forbade once and for all any such weak-kneed attitude.
He only had use for men who were unconditionally tough, and who also understood the meaning of the death’s head, which they wore as a special badge of honor.
The Reichsführer SS did not punish the men concerned directly. But he personally warned and lectured them. They were, however, given no further promotion and roamed around for the rest of the war as Ober- or Hauptsturmführer.[35]
They also remained subordinated to the Inspector of Concentration Camps until the end of the war. Theirs was a heavy fate to bear, but they had learned at least to hold their tongues and to do their duty regardless.
At the beginning of the war those prisoners in the concentration camps who were considered worthy to bear arms were examined by recruiting officers from the various sub-districts. The names of those passed as fit for service were submitted to the Gestapo or to the Criminal Police, and those offices decided whether the men should be set free for military service, or should be further detained.
There were many Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sachsenhausen. A great number of them refused to undertake military service and because of this the Reichsführer SS condemned them to death. They were shot in the presence of all the inmates of the camp duly assembled. The other Jehovah’s Witnesses were placed in the front rank so that they must watch the proceedings.
I have met many religious fanatics in my time; on pilgrimages, in monasteries, in Palestine, on the Hejaz road in Iraq, and in Armenia. They were Catholics, both Roman and Orthodox, Moslems, Shiites, and Semites. But the Witnesses in Sachsenhausen, and particularly two of them, surpassed anything that I had previously seen. These two especially fanatical Witnesses refused to do any work that had any connection whatever with military matters. They would not stand at attention, or drill in time with the rest, or lay their hands along the seam of their trousers, or remove their caps. They said that such marks of respect were due only to Jehovah and not to man. They recognized only one lord and master, Jehovah. Both of them had to be taken from the block set aside for Jehovah’s Witnesses and put in the cells, since they constantly urged on the other Witnesses to behave in a similar manner.