What sort of man was the commandant of Auschwitz, the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world? A place crammed with suffering, where acts of nightmarish atrocity were everyday occurrences. Try to conceive of the person capable of holding down such a job. Who do you see?
At a guess, you are picturing someone like Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow labour camp in Poland, memorably portrayed in Schindler's List by Ralph Fiennes - an irrational, sadistic monster who took pleasure in personally inflicting torture. Someone utterly different from the people you encounter in everyday life. But if you imagined such a person was commandant of Auschwitz, then you're wrong.
According to Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor who interrogated him at the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Höss appeared 'normal', 'like a grocery clerk'. And former prisoners who encountered him at Auschwitz confirmed this view, adding that Höss always appeared calm and collected. He is the greatest mass murderer the world has ever seen, and yet there is no record of him ever personally hitting - let alone killing - anyone at the camp.
Höss lived with his wife and four children in a house just yards from the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp, where some of the earliest killing experiments were conducted using the poisonous insecticide Zyklon B. During his working days, Höss presided over the murder of more than a million people, but once he came home he lived the life of a solid, middle-class German husband and father.
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