Hoss, Rudolf

(1900–1947)

   The commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943. Hoss had been a war hero during World War I and joined the Nazi Party in 1923. After having served time in prison for a brutal murder, he was released in July 1928, and for the next few years served in various capacities in Nazi Party service groups. In 1934, Heinrich Himmler urged him to join the Schutzstaffel (SS), and he was subsequently assigned to Dachau, where he served under Theodor Eicke. In 1938, along with his promotion to the rank of SS captain, he was assigned to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

   In 1940, Hoss was promoted to commandant of Auschwitz. In his administration of the death camp, Hoss proved to be a tireless worker and an efficient bureaucrat in the implementation of the extermination camp. Hoss, however, made it a practice to not personally attend the Selektions for the gas chambers or executions. Rather, he saw to it that the killing process ran smoothly. From all accounts, Hoss does not appear to have been a sadist or even a radical antiSemite. He was a family man who attended church, loved animals, and approached the killing process in a purely administrative manner. Hoss’s concerns dealt with the practical problems of adhering to timetables, the size of transports, the type of ovens that were to be used, and the methods of gassing.

   Unlike Christian Wirth, Hoss was an advocate of Zyklon B because he found the gas more efficient in dispatching the victims. Likewise, Hoss found the gas safer, inasmuch as the operator was protected by a gas mask and had only to open the tin and scatter the contents through a grill on the roof of the chamber. Within minutes, the victims were dead. Hoss would later write that the gassing process had a calming effect on him, because he always had a horror of the shooting process, “thinking of the number of people, the women and children. I was relieved that we were all spared these bloodbaths.”