He was captured in 1945, was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, and was tried and hung in Poland in 1947. While in prison, he wrote a memoir that is much more chilling than “the banality of evil” of the dumb fuck Eichmann variety.
The history of the Nazi Germany has become so Disneyfied. No one reads or really knows much about it anymore. Everyone vaguely knows (if that!) that the Nazis did camps and that was bad, but that’s all. But when you read that text, I think it becomes clear that not only such atrocities can be repeated very easily today, they will be repeated precisely in the name of all that is “good.”
Anyway. Höss was the only SS officer at the Nuremberg trials who testified to everything that he’d done. During his own trial he confessed, admitted his guilt, and refused the opportunity to appeal. You will see from the memoir he was a smart, and not even particularly callous man. AND FUCKING YET. That’s the point. It is chilling to the bones, and is all the more chilling because of how lucid that memoir is. The only reason he admitted his wrongs was because the Nazis were defeated. It will make you think about those yet undefeated and the atrocities they commit in the name of what they may genuinely consider to be “good.”
Links, huge trigger warning obviously :
The memoir (skip to page 118, that’s where his tenure at Auschwitz starts)
A kind of condensed article about Höss , with some quotes from the memoir + the trial in Poland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Höss
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rudolf_Höss
People are forgetting this shit. It is not enough to know that Nazis = bad. We’ll fucking repeat it without learning what actually happened. Look at Ukraine where an SS division has recently been celebrated in the capital because some people there hate the USSR legacy more than they hate fascism, treating these death squads as “liberators.”
here’s a sample quote, eternally relevant:
There were three main political groups among the Polish prisoners, and the adherents of each fought violently against the others. The strongest was the chauvinistic nationalist group. Each group competed with the others for the most influential posts. When one man managed to obtain an important position in the camp, he would quickly bring in other members of his own group and would remove his opponents from his domain. This was often accomplished by base intrigue. Indeed I dare say that many cases of spotted fever or typhus resulting in death, and other such incidents, could be accounted for by this struggle for power. I often heard from the doctors that this battle for supremacy was always waged most fiercely in the hospital building itself. It was the same story in regard to the control of work. That and the hospital building offered the most important positions of power in the entire life of the camp. Whoever controlled these, ruled the rest. And they did rule too, in no halfhearted fashion. A man who held one of these important positions could see to it that his friends were put wherever he wished them to be. He could also get rid of those he disliked, or even finish them off entirely. In Auschwitz everything was possible. These political struggles for power took place not only in Auschwitz and among the Poles, but in every camp and among all nationalities. Even among the Spanish Communists in Mauthausen there were two violently opposed groups. In prison and in the penitentiary I myself had experienced how right and left wing would fight each other.
In the concentration camps these enmities were keenly encouraged and kept going by the authorities, in order to hinder any strong combination on the part of all the prisoners. Not only the political differences, but also the antagonisms between the various categories of prisoners, played a large part in this.
However strong the camp authorities might be, it would not have been possible to control or direct these thousands of prisoners without making use of their mutual antagonisms. The greater the number of antagonisms and the more ferocious the struggle for power, the easier it was to control the camp. Divide et impera! [divide and conquer] This maxim has the same importance, which must never be underestimated in the conduct of a concentration camp as in high politics.
Also, maybe, if this above interests you, have a look at Agamben’s Homo Sacer, whose main thesis is that the camp has become global and we live in it.