With a final line stating that his writings had been voluntary and unforced, Rudolf put down his pencil.
*
By the spring of 1946, the Polish government had established its own war crimes process, overseen by the Najwyższy Trybunat Narodowy (NTN), the Supreme National Tribunal. Its task was to prosecute those “fascist-Hitlerite criminals” who had committed murder and ill-treatment of civilians and prisoners of war in occupied Poland during the Second World War. Seven trials were held in total, of forty-nine defendants, of whom Rudolf was the most high profile.
Rudolf’s trial began on 11 March 1947 in the auditorium of the Polish Teachers’ Union in the Powiśle district of Warsaw, a hall large enough to hold five hundred. The court was composed of a presiding judge, Alfred Eimer, and four assistant judges, along with a panel of four members of the Polish Sejm—the lower house of the Polish parliament—who were there in a symbolic capacity to represent the people. Rudolf was represented by a Polish lawyer. Attending the trial were observers from the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Britain. At least eighty former inmates were present during the hearings. According to a journalist from the Times, when Rudolf first walked into the court the crowd let out a “slight murmur”; other than that the proceedings were marked by “an almost complete lack of expressed excitement.”
The state was represented by a team of prosecutors, headed by Tadeusz Cyprian, a forty-nine-year-old lawyer and sometime photographer from Sniatyn, today situated in Ukraine. Cyprian had some experience of war crimes trials, having sat through proceedings at both Belsen and Nuremberg as part of an official Polish delegation. To near-total silence in the court, he read out the indictment, which ran to ninety-eight pages. Rudolf was charged with the deaths of 300,000 Polish and Russian prisoners and four million Jews. Rudolf sat in the dock with black headphones, listening to the simultaneous translation of the Polish prosecutor’s opening statement. Cyprian argued that Rudolf was a “willing link” in a system designed to destroy the Slav race and argued that he should hang for his crimes. Over the next few days, the state called sixty-six witnesses, of which forty-eight were Polish and eighteen were foreign. Rudolf’s expression changed little as he heard the accounts provided by a long line of Auschwitz survivors who now filed in and out of the courtroom to take the stand.
Finally it was Rudolf’s turn. He petulantly answered the prosecutor’s questions on logistics, arguing unapologetically that only one and a half million could have been killed in Auschwitz, not four million as the prosecutor had claimed, due to the physical limits set by the crematoria. He admitted, on cross-examination, that on one night a trainload of Gypsies and Jews was taken on arrival and thrown into a large pit where they were burned alive. Forty thousand people had been killed this way.
But his most vehement defense came from his memoirs, written while in Montelupich prison, and which were inserted verbatim into the court record. In the end, he too attempted to dodge culpability. “I never mistreated a prisoner myself, let alone killed one,” he wrote. Regarding the atrocities that took place at the camp, he claimed that “much happened at Auschwitz, allegedly in my name and on my orders, of which I knew nothing. I would have neither tolerated nor approved of it.” Then he insisted that, when he subsequently learned about the “monstrous tortures” in Auschwitz, he got “cold shudders.” He blamed his staff for abusing the prisoners, saying that they did so outside his command and maintained that, until he heard the disclosures at Nuremberg, he had been unaware of the systematic brutality that had prevailed in Auschwitz.
He went on to concede, almost by default, that he was accountable for what had taken place at the camp because of his title, rather than his plan: “All these things did happen at Auschwitz, and I am responsible for them. For according to the regulations of the camps: The camp Kommandant is fully responsible for everything that goes on in his camp.” And Rudolf did admit to overseeing the building of the gas chambers, the selection process and the crematoria. But, crucially, he argued that it had been a mistake, not because this mass murder was immoral or monstrous, but because “it was that very policy of extermination that brought the hatred of the whole world down on Germany.”
The prosecutors found it easy to discount Rudolf’s assertion that he had only recently learned about the atrocities, presenting mountains of evidence collected from camp survivors. Similarly, his claims that his orders were disobeyed were also disproved by witness statements showing that Rudolf was in clear control of all that had taken place in the camp. And in response to Rudolf’s attempt to equate the Allied bombing of Dresden and other German cities, in which tens of thousands of civilians had been killed and millions left homeless, to the murders he had overseen in Auschwitz, the prosecution pointed out that though the bombing of Dresden was indeed tragic, the aim of these attacks were military targets, while the gassings in Auschwitz were the result of the purposeful genocide of a specific ethnic minority, and therefore a crime against humanity.
Finally, in one last effort, and by now displaying loyalty to no person or idea beyond saving himself, Rudolf argued that he had been simply executing Himmler’s commands. However, this argument was promptly thrown out by the court, since a fundamental premise of all the war crimes trials held in the postwar period was that SS guards and officers could not protest that they were merely following orders.
Two weeks after the trial’s start, on March 27, Rudolf stood as the jury’s verdict was read out: Guilty. He showed no surprise. He had told the reporter from the Times that he had been expecting this outcome. On April 2, Rudolf returned to court to hear his sentence. He looked healthier than he had at the Nuremberg Trial, his face no longer gaunt, his hair neatly combed, his gray woolen jacket clean and pressed. Again he stood, black headphones once again in place, two armed guards standing behind him, their white-gloved hands holding rifles. The president of the tribunal, Alfred Eimer, read out the sentence: “Death by hanging in a non-public manner within the territory of the Auschwitz camp.”
This upset Rudolf greatly, who believed that it was dishonorable to die on the gallows, an execution method which he believed to be more suited to a common murderer than a man of his military standing. Eight days later the highest court in the land upheld the decision and shortly after that a letter arrived from the president of the Polish republic saying that he had “decided not to use his power to reduce his sentence.”
On April 11, five days before he was due to be executed, Rudolf wrote a last letter to his wife. It was a final goodbye, and a confession. In it he declared that his principles had been founded on incorrect assumptions, and that it was inevitable that they would one day break down. He said that he now realized that he had been “a cogwheel in the monstrous German machinery of destruction,” an “automaton who blindly obeyed every order,” one who had “followed a very wrong path, and thereby brought destruction on myself.” As a result he had become “the greatest of all destroyers of human beings.” He acknowledged that for these crimes he must die: “With calm and composure, I see my last moments approaching.”
Enclosing his wedding ring, he reminisced about their wedding, and the “spring of their life” on the farm in 1929. He urged Hedwig to move to a new location and to take back her maiden name, arguing that “it will be best for my name to die with me.”
He then completed the letter with these words: “With a heavy heart, my dearest Mutz, my poor unfortunate wife, so very, very dear to me, I send all my love to you. Remember me with love. I am with you, until my last breath.”
Within the envelope he also included a last letter to his children:
You, my dear, good children!
Your daddy has to leave you now. For you, poor ones, there remains only your dear, good Mummy. May she remain with you for a long time yet. You do not understand yet what your good Mummy really means to you, and what a precious possession she is to you. The love and care of a mother is the most beautiful and valuable thing that exists on this earth
. I realized this a long time ago, only when it was too late; and I have regretted it all my life.
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. Learn from life.
Kindi and Püppi, you my big girls!
You are yet too young to learn the extent of the hard fate dished out to us. But you especially, my dear good girls, are specially obligated to stand at your poor unfortunate mother’s side and with love assist her in every way you can. Surround her with all your childlike love from your heart and show her how much you love her . . .
My Burling, you dear little guy!
Hang on to your happy child disposition. The cruel life will tear you, my dear boy, soon enough away from your child’s world . . . You poor little guy have now only your dear good Mummy left who will care for you. Listen to her with love and kindness and so remain Daddy’s dear Burling.
My dear Annemäusl!
How little was I permitted to experience your dear little personality. Your dear good Mummy will have to take you, my dear Mäusl, for us into her arms and tell you of your daddy, and how very much he loved you. May you, with your sunny ways, help your poor dear Mummy through all the dreary hours.
Once more from my heart I ask you all, my dear good children, take to heart my last words. Think of them again and again.
Keep in loving memory,
Daddy
Originally scheduled for April 14, 1947, Rudolf’s execution was postponed because of fears that the residents of nearby Oświęcim would attempt to lynch him when he was being transferred from the jail in Wadowice to the site of the gallows. The execution was rescheduled for two days later. At dawn on April 16, a team of German POWs erected a wooden gallows with a trapdoor a few steps from the old crematorium in Auschwitz, two hundred feet from the villa where Rudolf and his family used to live. No one was admitted to the grounds without a special pass, and armed Polish military guards had been posted at the entrance to the now-deserted camp.
Letter from Rudolf to Hedwig
Rudolf arrived by army truck at 8 a.m. and was taken to the building that had once been his office; less than twenty-five feet from his old house. He asked for a cup of coffee, and once he had drunk it, he was led to a cell in the “bunker,” the camp jail in Block 11, also known as the “Death Block.” This was the building where Zyklon B had first been used on the prisoners six years before.
Led out at 10 a.m, Rudolf appeared calm. He was marched along the cobblestones of the main camp street, past the infirmary where children had been injected with phenol under Dr. Lolling’s orders, and through the courtyard where the inmates had to stand for hours, in sun or sleet, as roll call was taken.
As he turned the corner around Block 4 he saw a crowd of about a hundred people, who had gathered in a semicircle next to the old crematorium. The group comprised some former prisoners, officials from the Polish Ministry of Justice, members of the State Prosecutor’s Office and the Security Bureau. The Polish state had decreed that the execution be conducted in private, so unlike the hangings that had taken place at Belsen and Nuremberg, no journalists were present. It was a cold day and most people wore overcoats, hats and gloves.
As Rudolf approached the gallows, the crowd parted. Since his hands were cuffed behind his back, a soldier helped him climb onto the stool positioned above the trapdoor. Father Tadeusz Zaremba, a local priest whose presence had been requested by Rudolf, now approached the Kommandant and a few last words were exchanged.
After the prosecutor read out the sentence, a black-hooded hangman placed a noose around Rudolf’s neck, which Rudolf adjusted with a movement of his head. At 10:08 a.m., after a nod from the prosecutor, the hangman pulled the stool out from under the former Kommandant so that he hit the trapdoor beneath. The priest then began to recite a prayer.
At 10:21 a.m. Rudolf Höss was pronounced dead.
A few minutes later his body was cut down and placed in a simple wooden box. The corpse was later transported to a hospital in Krakow, where doctors performed an autopsy. The next day it was taken to a local cemetery, where it was buried in an unmarked grave.
EPILOGUE
* * *
The families of the Nazi leaders reacted to their legacies in many different ways: pride, shame, fear. The Höss family chose denial. It was almost as if their family history had started in May 1947. Given a clean slate, new myths were created, the foremost being one of heroic survival, particularly on the part of the head of the family, Hedwig Höss, who, so the story went, managed to feed and protect her family against all odds in the harsh years after the war.
And there was truth in that, for life was indeed harsh. After Rudolf’s execution, Hedwig and her five children continued to live in the small apartment above the sugar factory in St. Michaelisdonn. They walked around with rags tied to their feet, and subsisted on vegetables grown in their patch of garden. People in the village shunned them. It was now dangerous to be associated with such a high-ranking Nazi family.
But they survived, and when Klaus found a job in Stuttgart, three hundred miles south, the rest of the family joined him. Over the years, the five Höss children moved away—to the Baltic Sea, to Australia, to America—but Hedwig remained in Germany. Unlike other widows of German soldiers, Hedwig was not granted a state pension, nor did she receive any other income from the government. In 1965, Hedwig was called as a witness at the Frankfurt Trial, the German government’s belated attempt, after twenty years of procrastination, to deal with some of the Nazis who had lived unabashedly in and among German society. Hedwig’s only role here was to confirm that one of the defendants had never visited Auschwitz. Her appearance lasted approximately two minutes, just long enough to be sworn in, and to deny that she had ever seen the man in her husband’s camp. It was the last time Hedwig Höss appeared in a courtroom.
*
After returning from their honeymoon on the Scilly Isles, Hanns and Ann moved to north London. The Alexander family was reunited once again, and began to grow. In 1948, Ann gave birth to their first child, Annette, and then to Jackie, in 1950. Elsie and Erich had three children, Frank, Michael and Vivien. Bella remarried soon after the war and spent the next years bringing up four boys: Peter, Tony, Julian and Stephen. Paul, meanwhile, found it harder to settle down. He jumped from job to job, eventually becoming a freelance builder and moving to Canada, only to return a few years later. He married twice and had two children, John and Marion.
Hanns’s father was never able to replicate the medical practice that he had established in Berlin, but he was well liked by his patients and he and Henny lived comfortably enough. A man who had always loved the sweet things in life and had never given up his cigars, Alfred died of a heart attack in 1950. His death sent shock waves through the family. Henny was of course most affected, but she was nothing if not stoic, and for another twenty years she wore the badge of matriarch with grace.
In 1948, the Czech government announced its wish to honor Hanns with its Medal of Merit Second Class for “recognition of exceptional merit in regards to the Czechoslovak Army and Czechoslovak people forcefully held in Germany.” A year later, the Luxembourg government announced its intention to award him their National Order of the Oaken Crown, the equivalent of a British knighthood. However, the British government had ruled that its soldiers were forbidden from accepting honors from foreign governments for services rendered after the end of the Second World War, and the honors were declined. Hanns did not receive either award; in fact he never knew about them.
Hanns did not seek the excitement or adventure that he had experienced during the war years in later life. His work—at Japhet & Co., the company he joined before the war, and later at S. G. Warburg—his family and hi
s community were enough for him. Hanns began to spend more time at the synagogue that his family had helped to found. Housed at first in a series of temporary accommodations—the dining room of the boardinghouse, then a hall borrowed from another congregation—the synagogue finally found a permanent home in the vicarage of an old church in Belsize Square in northwest London. Made up entirely of German Jewish refugees, and led by a rabbi who had survived a concentration camp, the synagogue drew upon the Liberale traditions of German Jewry. From the start, the Alexander Torah was the synagogue’s first and most important asset. Later there would be other scrolls, but for years the Alexander Torah was the congregation’s workhorse, brought out for every Friday-evening and Saturday-morning service, for the High Holy Days and all the other religious events.
Hanns and Paul were to become the unofficial caretakers of the synagogue. For the next forty years, first in top hats and tails, and later in blue pinstriped suits, they attended every religious event, making sure that the services had been well prepared, that the tables had been set up, that glasses were filled, and that prayer books and shawls were in the right place. Though they continued to play pranks and tell inappropriate jokes, much to the joy of the many children in their lives, they became a mainstay—perhaps even the mainstay—of this progressive and social community.
As he aged, Hanns never forgot the debt that he owed the British nation for taking him and his family in. So it was that in 1986, at the age of sixty-nine, and fifty years after his arrival in London, he and Ann threw a “Thank You Britain Party” at the Croydon Aerodrome, the spot at which he had first stepped onto British soil. At the end of the meal, Hanns stood up with a glass in hand, and said: “Some of you were yourself refugees from Nazi oppression. We are most grateful and we are here by the grace of God. I would like you to be upstanding and to join me in the toast to Her Majesty the Queen.”
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