Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz [Paperback]

I have read many books about Nazis and the holocaust, but this one is unique in that it is one of the few written in graphic detail by an SS man himself. I think Hoess definitely had qualms about his role, but was too much of a bureaucrat to openly challenge the regime. His credibility has been doubted, since he was often inconsistent about the number of deaths while at Auschwitz. I don't think Hoess was personally a cruel man; he seemed to have taken a dispassionate role in his work. He did emphasize, before his execution, that he still considered himself a National Socialist, and acknowledged his guilt for taking part in the Final Solution. Hoess seemed to place all the blame on Himmler. Hoess, in the first third of the book, wanted to portray himself as a normal, decent family man who simply ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. In short, this book conveyed a very powerful message and warning, despite some of the irrelevant personal details about Hoess's life. Especially interesting are the profiles of various SS members at the end of the book.

Hoess reveals how a family man who loved horses could himself survive in charge of the Auschwitz complex. Is an authentic read as Hoess blunders here and there with a faulty memory and shows self doubt as the date of his execution nears. Holocaust deniers will find no comfort in the book, although it has to be said that Hoess left the camp in 1943 and that prison memoirs are always suspect to some degree. Hoess seems to have realized all along that a death sentence was certain. The argument that he admitted mass gassings in an attempt to obtain a lighter sentence is unlikely. But you have to read the book to get a feel for this particular nazi whose only aim was to please Berlin.

The great majority of personal testimonies of the Holocaust have been written by people who were victims of it, and while all of it is fascinating, horrifying and essential reading, it must be admitted that not all of it is of the same literary quality. In general, the more truthful and better-written they are, the harsher and more disturbing they are likely to be, and the less likely they are to provide us with easy platitudes about the survival of the human spirit, or instructive little parables about saintly fools. This is why Primo Levi's books are, to my mind, far superior to Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", or even the works of Elie Wiesel.

Nevertheless, all Holocaust testimony should be available to us and it should all be read. There is, of course, another kind of Holocaust writing that is for obvious reasons less popular with the reading public, but which is still of crucial importance: that which was written by people who perpetrated the crimes. Most people would prefer to read about what it's like to undergo terrible experiences, than read about what it's like to inflict them. The trouble is that most of us in comfortable, relatively prosperous countries seldom have to undergo terrible experiences. We are more often in the position of allowing them to go on in our name, and with our tacit consent.

Most of the chief culprits of the Holocaust were dead or disappeared by the end of the war, but there is a still a very large amount of information written by former Nazi functionaries which is of considerable importance. The most substantial and important mass of material by a single person, other than trial evidence, is probably the written testimony of former Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss, all of which is collected in this book.

This collection supersedes an earlier translation of Höss's memoirs by former British Army officer Constantine Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon's translation is good, but this edition is more complete and contains things like Höss's last letters to his wife and family.

Höss's character, as revealed in this book, is that of a man who seems to have been an almost perfect fit for his job. Obedient, diligent, hard-working and thorough, he seems to have taken no great pleasure in his job but it never occurred to him for a second to refuse to do it. He personally supervised the expansion of Auschwitz from a small concentration camp based in an old Polish army barracks to, as he put it himself, the greatest extermination centre of all time. The Operation Reinhard death camps of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor were solely for the purpose of extermination, but Auschwitz was a multi-function camp and thousands died from illness and starvation as well as from execution. Nobody knows exactly how many people died at Auschwitz but I am inclined to accept the figure of approximately 1.1 million, suggested by the great Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg.

There are a couple of flaws in this edition. I personally think that the title "Death Dealer" is lurid and unnecessary, and prefer the earlier translation's plain title "Commandant of Auschwitz". The photographs are atrociously reproduced, murky and blotchy and almost impossible to figure out. It does have, however, the benefit of an excellent preface by Primo Levi (far more informed and perceptive than the earlier translation's rather silly preface by Bertrand Russell, which suffered from Russell not having enough access to the archives) and some very useful diagrams of the camp. Plus, as stated above it is more complete.

There is no inspiring tale of hope in this Holocaust story. Höss did his work, was arrested at the end of the war and apparently badly treated by his British captors, but was then handed over to the Polish authorities who behaved towards him with remarkable and exemplary kindness. This seems to have inspired him to finally feel guilt about his crimes, which is not expressed in his memoirs so much as in his mawkish letters to his family. He was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947. His book is a glimpse into the mind of a man who was one of the principle administrators of mass murder. Everyone should read it, because the truly frightening thing about Höss is that he wasn't a sadistic psychopath who enjoyed torturing people; he was a dull, unimaginative and ordinarily callous bureaucrat who was able, like most of us, to close his mind to the consequences of his behaviour for as long as he was allowed to get away with it. Höss is more like us than Hitler ever was, or Göring. That is why this book should be taught in schools.