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Summary:
SS Kommandant Rudolph Höss (1900–1947) was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss’s autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial. This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.
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An important testiment by the man on the street
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I have read many books on this subject, in an attempt to get inside the mind of the people who perpetrated this crime. Not the far removed bureaucrats in Berlin who gave sweeping orders, but the men who pulled the trigger. Men who had families. Men who saw the faces of women, children, and old people and said, I will do it! The conclusion I draw is they are average people driven by an idea, that is justified through re-education and indoctrination. Like most ideologies that categorize a group of people as outsiders, or dangerous for the society as a whole, it becomes easy for the perpetrators to carry out these acts with little remorse. Once they cross that threshold (point of no return) all of the mechanisms go into a smooth motion. Read "Hitlers Willing Executioners" or the testimony of Einsatzgruppe Commander Otto Ohlendorf, and you will get the idea. Hoess was training for the priesthood (if you can believe that) before he found his calling in the SS. Either way this story has played itself out time and again in Cambodia,Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Sudan. The one important thing Hoess did is to come clean in the end. To all those who deny it happened (Ahmadinijhad)or that it was carried out by heartless rogues, think again. It was carried out by your neighbors and your friends.
A Disturbing Description by a "Super-Sociopath"
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I read this book many years ago in college and decided to reread it recently under the title "Commandant of Auschwitz". This book exemplifies the true meaning of a sociopath, a man who truly kills without conscience. Rudolf Hoess was history's greatest mass murderer, the architect and SS Commandant of the largest killing center ever created, the death camp of "Auschwitz" (located in Poland), whose name has come to symbolize humanity's ultimate, abject descent into evil. Responsible for exterminating over 2.5 million people (primarily Jews, as well as Gypsies, Homosexuals, and Russians), he was a mild-mannered, happily married man who enjoyed normal family life with his five children despite his view of the crematoriam chiminy stacks from his bedroom window. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us At peak efficiency, Auschwitz had the capacity to murder 10,000 people in 24 hours, as Hoess would testify during the War Crimes trials at Nuremburg after World War II. Witness after witness, as well as mass documents produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than Rudolf Hoess, who calmly elucidated how he had come to exterminate 2.5 million people. Nuremberg: The Reckoning (Unabridged) He further expounds upon this in "Commandant of Auschwitz". Rudolf Franz Hoess was born in 1900 and joined Adolf Hitler's Gestapo (the "SS") in 1933. In 1934 he was attached to the SS at Dachau. Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor Then, on August 1st, 1938, he was adjutant of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp until his appointment as Commandant of the newly built camp at Auschwitz in early 1940. This was located near the provincial Polish town of Oshweicim in Galacia. Murder and Mass Murder in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945 In May, 1941 the SS Commander Heinrich Himmler explained to Hoess that Adolf Hitler had given the orders for the final solution for the Jewish question. The "Final Solution' was Hitler's plan to implement Aryian racial purity and rid the continent of any contaminants of Germanic, pure blood Nordic origins, particularly by killing Jews. Hoess details in his book how he converted Auschwitz into an extermination camp and installed gas chambers and crematoriums. Auschwitz became the largest killing center where the greatest number of European Jews were slaughtered. Detailed in this story, Hoess explains how after an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine. By mid 1942, mass gassing of primarily Jews utilizing "Zyklon-B" gas commenced at Auschwitz, whereupon extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with 2.5 million innocent men, women and children were eventually butchered through mostly poison gassing, but also through barbaric methods such as starvation, disease, shooting and burning. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide At Auschwitz "so called" camp doctors i.e. German physicians and scientists performed vile and potentially lethal medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, tortured Jewish and Gypsy children and many others. "Patients" were put into pressure chambers, tested with drugs (lethal gasolene injections), castrated, sterilized, frozen to death and exposed to various traumas. In late 1943 Hoess was appointed chief inspector of all German Concentration camps and worked hard to improve the efficiency of them all. At the end of W.W. II, with Germany's emminent collapse, Hoess describes how he fled at the approach of the Russian Red Army and went into hiding in Germany under the name "Franz Lang". He was arrested by British military police on March 11, 1946. His wife had told the British where he could be found, fearing that her son, Klaus, would be shipped off to Russia. Handed over to the Polish authorities, he was tried in 1947. While awaiting sentencing, Hoess penned this book. He was sentenced to death, and was returned to Auschwitz to be hanged on the gallows outside the entrance to the gas chamber. John J. Hughes, in his book "A Mass Murderer Repents:The Case of Rudolf Hoess" wrote that four days before he was hung, Hoess sent a message to the state prosecuter. His emotionless veneer cracked as he sent the following message to the state prosecuter stating: "My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandand of Auschwitz I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the "Third Reich" for human destruction. In doing so I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I have caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done". The execution was carried out on April 16, 1947. Although never executed, compare Hoess's aforementioned statement with the following. William Calley, the convicted commander of an American fighting unit that on March 16, 1968 entered the South Vietnamese hamlet of "My Lai" and massacred 400 unarmed women children and old men during the Vietnam War, had this to say about his guilt and conscience. This is quoted out of his autobiography. Body count: Lieutenant Calley's story, as told to John Sack; "As a professional soldier I had been taught and instructed to carry out the orders that were issued by the superiors-my lieutenant, my commanding officer, the captain. At no time did it ever cross my mind to disobey or to refuse to carry out an order that was issued by my superiors. I felt that they (Charlie Company) were able to carry out the assigned task, the orders, that meant killing small kids, killing women, because they were soldiers, they were trained that way. I feel that we carried out the orders in a moral fashion, and the orders of destroying the village, of killing the people in the village, and I feel we did not violate any moral standards." Was Calley a sociopath like Hoess? Hoess was also following orders, issued by Adolf Hitler. Were was his conscience? What happened to God's commandmant "Thy Shalt Not Kill? Where was Hoess and Calley's guilt? Another mass murderer, Ted Bundy, a sadistic monster and mass manipulator whose grisly killing spree left at least 30 innocent young women dead, had this to say about guilt: "Guilt? It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism-and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our bodies. And there are much better ways to control our behavior rather than the extraordinary use of guilt. Now, some people could listen to what I just said and say "see, he's a sociopath." or whatever term they use. I feel sorry for people who feel guilt." Ted Bundy : Conversations with a Killer Killing another human being is wrong any way you look at it. Whether it is done on a mass scale such as was done by Hoess and the Nazi's during the Holocaust, or by a serial killer like Ted Bundy, or even using the excuse of a "Holy War", i.e. flying commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11th, 2001 and killing all those innocent occupants of the Twin Towers in N.Y.C. The 2001 World Trade Center Attack (Code Red) Regardless, Hoess's book is an examination into the mind of a cold, sterile killer, a deed that history, or myself will never forgive nor forget. Do yourself a favor, read this book objectively and pray that this never occurs again for eternity's sake!
Testimony of the monster
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I bought this book to see the "other side" point of view The view from the hantchman eyes. Well, I think this book is worth reading, not only to see see how cruel and perverse one can get but olso how hatred can lead to unimaganable crime. Hoss writes this book from prison... His writing is honest although he trys to "whitewash" his actions and blames his subordinates for lots of attrocities which happened in Auschwitz. I think this book is a very good source to see how quickly one can become a real monster, when following insane idiology.
How badly the Germans hate the Jews!
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This is the story about how badly the Germans hate the Jewish people. They hate them so much, that its OK to persecute them, beat them, drive them out of their homes, force them into boxcars and transport them to an extermination camp where they can be gassed and burned. Its so sick that a race of people like the Germans expended so much energy in an effort to exterminate the Jewish people. The memoirs of Hoss show how these Germans were cold and cruel to the Jews, how they treated these souls and turned them into disease bearing animals. Hoss claims he was just following orders from Himmler and the others and that he did nothing wrong because if he disobeyed the orders to exterminate the Jews, he would have been done away with as well. Hoss details the extermination process and gives numbers in the hundreds of thousands of people that were exterminated at Auschwitz, the number one killing center of the German government. Hoss explains how the transports of tens of thousands of Jews from all over Europe were tricked into believing they were getting a shower and how people were ignorant of their fate until the very end. Hoss profiles other high ranking SS officers and takes no blame for the horrible atrocities that took place while he was camp commandant. This book profiles the sickness of the German government and of the German people themselves, how could the German people claim ignorance of the stench of burning flesh. After 9/11 I was in Whitestone Queens miles away from the inferno and I could smell the burning flesh of 3,000 souls, imagine 300,000 souls, this book shows you the sickness of these people and of their mindset
Rudolph Hoess (Auschwitz Kommandant) and the Clarification of Some Holocaust Misconceptions
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I give this book five stars because of its historical value. This work not only gives insight into the mind of the leader of perhaps the greatest death factory ever built, but also allows a clearing-up of some errors that have accreted in the decades since that horrible time.
Hoess rejected God and the Church (p. 52-53, 57, 59, 72, 192), having rebelled against his father's wish that he become a priest. Like Himmler, he became an Artaman (pp. 202-203; a communal movement resembling the 1960's US communes, albeit Teutonic-centered) before switching to Nazism for his substitute religion.
Hoess wrote: "Until the beginning of 1942 the main body of prisoners was Polish." (p. 128). Many Poles were murdered secretly (the cause of death listed as natural), "...because of political and security reasons..." (p. 224).
During the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy, attempts were made to belittle the victimhood of Auschwitz Poles through the premise that they, unlike most Jews, were not generally killed upon arrival at Auschwitz. Hoess, in contrast, rejected any such dichotomy (if anything, praising the slow-death genocidal methods--as perfected by the Communists): "The Gestapo delivered the prisoners to the camps to be exterminated. It made no difference to them whether it happened by firing squad, gas, or by the horrible conditions in the camps. It was part of their plan not to improve conditions in the camps...Thus, the concentration camps were changed deliberately, and sometimes unintentionally, into large-scale extermination centers. The Kommandants received extensive composite reports from the Gestapo about the Soviet concentration camps. Escaped prisoners had made reports about the conditions and organization of these camps down to the smallest detail. They emphasized that by using forced labor methods the Soviets were annihilating entire nationalities." (pp. 168-169).
Holocaust-uniqueness advocates sometimes claim that the genocide of the Polish intelligentsia, unlike that of Jews, served a rational purpose--the elimination of resistance. Actually, the latter was, at most, a hoped-for byproduct of this nation-destroying act: "I want to add this, that the general opinion at SS headquarters was that the total annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia would also destroy the resistance movement. [SS Major] Thomsen was an ardent defender of this theory." (p. 322).
Initial plans to kill all Jews gave way to the sparing of some of them for forced labor (p. 34).
Hoess discussed the Jewish Sonderkommando in considerable detail. Those Jews temporarily got to save their lives by dutifully assisting in the deception, gassing, despoiling, and cremation of their fellow Jews. He also observed Jew-against-Jew behavior by some Jews who had no hope of postponing their own deaths. As they entered the gas chambers, they told Germans the addresses of fugitive Jews back home. Hoess commented: "I cannot explain what motivated them to reveal this information. Was it personal revenge, or were they jealous because they did not want the others to live on?" (p. 160).
In common with many Germans, Hoess attempts to rationalize his exterminatory conduct by equating it with the Allied bombings of German women and children. He estimates German civilian casualties in the several millions (p. 171), which is at least a 20-fold exaggeration.
As for lebensraum, Hoess belatedly concluded that Germany could have achieved it peacefully (p. 182).
Hoess suggested that crude propaganda such as Der Sturmer had hindered the development of scientific anti-Semitism (p. 140). He also came to believe that the extermination of Jews only brought hatred against Germany and increased Jewish power by discrediting anti-Semitism (p. 183).
This volume isn't limited to Hoess' memoirs. The entire Wannsee Protocol is printed in translation. It is obvious that the choice of Poland as the site of the German death camps was based solely on practical considerations (minimalized transportation) and had nothing to do with real or stereotyped Polish attitudes towards Jews: "State Secretary Dr. Buehler declared that the government of Occupied Poland would welcome it if the final solution to this question would be started in Occupied Poland. His reason: transport plays no important role here and the deployment of workers during the operation would not cause any problems." (p. 380).
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