Rudolf+Höss

jared Debruyckere

Auschwitz command On 1 May 1940, Höss was appointed commandant of a prison camp in western Poland, a territory Germany had incorporated into the province of Upper Silesia. The camp was built around an old Austro-Hungarian (and later Polish) army barracks near the town of Oświęcim; its German name was Auschwitz. Höss commanded the camp for three and a half years, during which he expanded the original facility into a sprawling complex known as Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Höss went to Auschwitz determined "to do things differently" and develop a more efficient killing center than those in which he had previously served. Höss lived at Auschwitz in a villa together with his wife and five children.

After visiting Treblinka extermination camp (which became operational in July 1942) to study its methods of human extermination, Höss, beginning on 3 September 1941, tested and perfected the techniques of mass killing that made Auschwitz the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution and the most potent symbol of the Holocaust. According to Höss, during standard camp operations, two to three trains carrying 2,000 prisoners each would arrive daily for periods of four to six weeks. The prisoners were unloaded in the Birkenau camp; those fit for labor were marched to barracks in either Birkenau or one of the Auschwitz camps, while those unsuitable for work were driven into the gas chambers. At first, small gassing bunkers were located deep in the woods, to avoid detection. Later, four large gas chambers and crematoria were constructed in Birkenau to make the killing more efficient and to handle the increasing rate of exterminations.

Capture, trial and execution

On 25 May, 1946, after over a year in hiding, he was handed over to Polish authorities and the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland tried him for murder. During his trial, when accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, "No. Only two and one half million – the rest died from disease and starvation."Höss was sentenced to death on 2 April 1947. The sentence was carried out on 16 April immediately adjacent to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz I concentration camp.