Rudolf Höss built and ran Auschwitz. He took command of the new concentration camp at Oświęcim, in German-occupied Poland, in May 1940 and held the post until the fall of 1943, then went to Berlin as head of Office D I in the SS economic administration, and came back in the summer of 1944 to command the Auschwitz SS garrison again. When the war ended he disappeared under a borrowed name. British Field Security found him in March 1946, and in May of that year he was flown to Warsaw to answer for what had happened under his command.
His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland opened on March 11, 1947, and closed on March 29. On April 2, 1947, the tribunal found him guilty of the crimes alleged in the indictment and sentenced him to death. In the court's finding, the dead of Auschwitz numbered "an undetermined number of people, at least 2,500,000, mainly Jews." He was executed in Oświęcim on April 16, 1947.
It was not the first time a court had sent him to prison for a killing. In 1924, a German court sentenced him to ten years for his part in the death of Walter Kadow, a man killed by members of a nationalist paramilitary circle near Parchim in 1923. An amnesty freed him after less than six years. Within six years of that release he was in the SS, and within twelve he was a camp commandant.
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was born on November 25, 1900, in Baden-Baden, in southwest Germany. In 1906 the family moved to Mannheim, where he finished elementary school and in 1910 entered a classical gymnasium.
On August 1, 1916, at fifteen, Höss enlisted as a volunteer in the reserve squadron of the 21st Baden Dragoons. He served in the Middle East, on the front in Iraq, and was decorated twice with the Iron Cross. He came home to a defeated country in 1919 and did not go to the seminary.
On February 1, 1919, he joined the East Prussian volunteer corps then forming in Königsberg and was placed in the unit led by Gerhard Rossbach, one of the Freikorps that sprang up after the armistice. The Rossbach corps went to Latvia to fight revolutionary forces in support of the Baltic Germans, and on January 4, 1920, Höss received the Baltic Cross for that service. In April 1920 his unit was sent to the Ruhr against the left-wing uprising there, and in May 1921 he fought against Polish insurgents in Upper Silesia, for which he was decorated again. In 1922, after a Freikorps reunion at which he met Adolf Hitler, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), with membership card number 3240, and left the Catholic Church.
In 1923, men from his own Freikorps circle decided that a fellow member was a traitor. A self-appointed tribunal of the group passed its own verdict on him, and he was killed near Parchim. Höss was one of those who took part.
He was arrested, tried and, in 1924, sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for his part in that killing. He served the sentence in Brandenburg. Under a German amnesty law of July 14, 1928, he was released early, after close to six years in custody.
The years in a cell did not move him from the politics that had put him there. While still inside he learned of the Artamanen League, a nationalist movement founded in 1924 that preached a return from the city to farm work and German settlement on the land. He applied to join in the winter after his release and received his membership card on March 1, 1929. He worked on the land, first in Brandenburg and then in Pomerania, and there he met the woman he married. The couple had five children over the following years.
In April 1934 Höss became a full member of the Allgemeine SS, the part-time general SS, with membership number 193616 and the rank of Unterscharführer. He kept his civilian work and gave the SS his free time. That June he took part in a parade of SS cavalry units in Stettin. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was present, and after the display he called Höss over and offered him a place in the active SS. Höss discussed it with his wife and accepted.
The offer took him into the concentration camps. He served first at Dachau, in the guard unit and then in the camp administration, under Theodor Eicke, and was promoted to Untersturmführer. In May 1938 he moved to Sachsenhausen as adjutant to the commandant, then became Schutzhaftlagerführer, the officer in charge of the prisoner compound, and reached the rank of Hauptsturmführer.
In the spring of 1940 Höss led the commission that inspected former Polish army barracks at Oświęcim, and an order from Himmler dated April 27, 1940, established the concentration camp there. Höss was sent to organize it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum lists him as the first commandant, with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer, serving from May 1940 to November 1943. The indictment later laid against him dated his command from May 1, 1940. A commandant at Auschwitz held complete authority over the camp and its SS garrison. From March 1942, all concentration camp commandants answered to Office Group D of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (the WVHA) in Berlin.
What the camp became under his command is set out in the judgment of the court that tried him. The Supreme National Tribunal found that "an undetermined number of people, at least 2,500,000, mainly Jews" had been murdered at Auschwitz, and it described his offense as "participation in the murder" of those people. The Polish state archive's record of the judgment describes the victims as prisoners, mainly of Polish and Jewish nationality, and Soviet prisoners of war.
On November 11, 1943, Arthur Liebehenschel, until then head of Office D I of the WVHA, took over command at Auschwitz, and Höss moved to Berlin to fill Liebehenschel's old post as chief of Office D I. He held it until the end of the war. In the summer of 1944 he was sent back to Oświęcim, and from June to August of that year he commanded the SS garrison there.
When Germany surrendered, Höss went into hiding. Under the name Franz Lang, a navy boatswain, he made his way to a naval signals school on the island of Sylt and passed with other sailors into British captivity, where he gave his trade as farmer. He cleared every British check and was released to work on a farm near Flensburg, in Schleswig-Holstein.
The British Field Security Police in their occupation zone were looking for the commandant of Auschwitz. In early March 1946, British investigators learned his false name and where he was. On the night of March 11, 1946, a Field Security team arrested him near Flensburg, and after a first round of questioning he was handed over to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
On April 15, 1946, the 108th day of the main trial, Höss took the oath at Nuremberg and testified as a witness called by the defense of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, not as an accused.
Poland asked for him. Cooperation between the Polish authorities and the Allied occupation zones on extraditions was close, and between 1946 and 1949 about 1,000 people suspected of crimes at Auschwitz were sent to Poland, most of them from the American zone. On May 25, 1946, Höss was flown to Warsaw and placed at the disposal of the prosecutors of the Supreme National Tribunal. On July 30, 1946, he was moved to Kraków, where more than 110 members of the Auschwitz staff were already held.
The case against him had been building for more than a year. From April 1945, the Kraków district commission for the investigation of German crimes had gathered documents, expert opinions and the statements of former prisoners. Its investigating judge now questioned Höss himself, thirteen times between September 29, 1946, and January 11, 1947. A Polish criminologist and physician examined him in the same period. At his urging, Höss wrote an account of his life during the investigation, and parts of that autobiography were later used as evidence.
The investigation closed on January 11, 1947. The authorities decided that the trial would be held in Warsaw before the Supreme National Tribunal rather than in Kraków or Katowice, which had also sought it.
The indictment charged "Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, a German subject" with two groups of crimes. The first was membership: that "he was a member of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP), a criminal organization," "and also was a member of the SS, a further criminal organization." The second covered his conduct at Auschwitz: that "as Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp set up by him," from May 1, 1940, until the end of October 1943, then as head of Office D I of the WVHA from December 1943 until May 1945, and from June to August 1944 as commander of the Auschwitz SS garrison, he had deliberately "deprived of life" prisoners of the camp, supervised their ill-treatment and "supervised wholesale robbery of property."
The legal basis was the decree of August 31, 1944, in its amended form of December 1946, taken together with the parallel offenses of the 1932 Polish Criminal Code. The tribunal heard the case under the decree of January 22, 1946, that created it, as revised on October 17, 1946. The prosecution also argued that the crimes against Soviet prisoners of war breached the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.
The trial opened on March 11, 1947, in the auditorium of the Polish Teachers' Union in the Powiśle district of Warsaw, the one large hall in the ruined capital that could be fitted out for it. The room held about 500 people, most of them former prisoners of Auschwitz. Correspondents came from abroad.
The bench was the full composition the law required: three professional judges, presided over by a judge of the Supreme Court, and four lay assessors, who under the tribunal's decree had to be members of the Legislative Sejm. Prosecutors of the tribunal conducted the case, and the court assigned Höss two advocates as court-appointed defense counsel.
Witnesses came from almost every country in Europe, most of them Polish former prisoners, and they gave evidence in person or through written statements gathered during the investigation. Nine experts presented opinions. The documentary record ran to 38 volumes.
Höss sat through it composed and did not appear to expect acquittal. He answered the prosecutors' questions at length and often asked the court to correct details in the documents that he believed were wrong, including some that touched his own responsibility. He admitted in substance all the facts set out in the indictment, his membership of the NSDAP and the SS among them. He disputed the total number of the dead. He denied that he had personally ill-treated prisoners. He called no witnesses and offered no evidence of his own. His entire defense rested on one submission: that he had acted on orders from his superiors. At the same time, he accepted responsibility for everything that had happened in the camp while he commanded it. On March 29, 1947, he gave his final statement, and the hearing closed.
On April 2, 1947, the Supreme National Tribunal delivered its judgment. In the words of the report later published by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, "The Tribunal found the accused guilty of the alleged crimes and sentenced him to death." It added the loss of public and civic rights and the forfeiture of all his property. The judgment described the dead as "an undetermined number of people, at least 2,500,000, mainly Jews," and it framed his offense as "participation in the murder" of them, where the indictment had spoken of depriving them of life.
The tribunal rejected his plea of superior orders and duress under Article 5, paragraph 1, of the 1944 decree. On the membership counts it drew a line. Under Article 4 of the decree, membership of the NSDAP was criminal only for those who had held leading positions in the party, and Höss had held none, so the tribunal placed the weight on his membership of the SS. The court did not rule expressly on whether he had personally ill-treated prisoners.
No appeal lay from the Supreme National Tribunal. Its verdicts were final, and only the President of the State National Council could alter a sentence, by clemency. The sentence was not commuted. In early April, Höss was moved from Warsaw to a prison in the district that held jurisdiction over Oświęcim.
In those final days Höss asked to see a Catholic priest. A Jesuit visited him on April 10, 1947, and Höss returned to the Church he had left in 1922. He wrote a farewell letter to his family. Four days before his death he gave a written statement in which he acknowledged that, as commandant, he had carried out part of the Third Reich's plans, and asked the Polish nation for forgiveness.
The execution was set for April 15, 1947, but was put off for a day. On April 16, 1947, Rudolf Höss was executed in Oświęcim. He was 46.
His case was the first major Polish trial of the Auschwitz command, and it was not the last. From November 24 to December 16, 1947, the same tribunal sat in Kraków to try 40 former members of the Auschwitz SS garrison, among them his successor as commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel. On December 22, 1947, it handed down 23 death sentences, two of them later commuted to life imprisonment, six life terms and ten prison terms of three to fifteen years, and acquitted one defendant. In that judgment the tribunal went a step further than in the Höss case and declared the camp authorities, administration and garrison of Auschwitz a criminal group in their own right.
Between 1946 and 1953, regional and special courts across southern Poland tried other members of the garrison. Charges were brought in all against 673 people, 21 of them women.
The Supreme National Tribunal was created by a decree of the State National Council dated January 22, 1946, and amended on October 17, 1946, to try war criminals, as a national counterpart to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. It sat as a mixed bench of three professional judges and four lay assessors drawn from the Legislative Sejm, and its judgments could not be appealed. The defendant was entitled to counsel of his own choosing or to court-appointed defenders named by the tribunal's president from among the advocates practicing in Poland.
The law it applied in the Höss case was the decree of August 31, 1944, on the punishment of Fascist-Hitlerite criminals, as consolidated in December 1946. Article 1, point 1, made it a capital crime to take part, on behalf of the German occupation authorities, in killing civilians, soldiers or prisoners of war, or in ill-treating or persecuting them. Article 4 made membership of organizations declared criminal a crime in itself, and the tribunal read it in step with the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: the SS was a criminal organization, while for the NSDAP only leading positions counted. On February 28, 1948, the Polish Supreme Court confirmed that reading, limiting the party's "leading positions" to those the Nuremberg tribunal had itself recognized. Article 5, paragraph 1, closed off the defense that a crime had been committed on superior orders or under duress, and Article 7 provided the additional penalties of loss of rights and forfeiture that the tribunal imposed alongside the death sentence.
Alongside the decree, the indictment invoked the parallel offenses in the Polish Criminal Code of 1932. The tribunal also used the term genocide in its reasoning, giving that name to the Nazi program aimed at destroying whole groups of people.
Höss admitted the substance of the indictment but contested two things: the number of the dead and the charge that he had ill-treated prisoners with his own hands. On the first, the tribunal did not adopt the figures in the indictment and settled on its own finding of at least 2,500,000 people, mainly Jews, while leaving the precise number undetermined. On the second, the judgment made no express finding either way.
His one legal defense, that he had acted on superior orders, failed as a matter of law under the 1944 decree. The tribunal also declined to treat his membership of the NSDAP as criminal, because he had held no leading position in the party, and rested the membership charge on the SS alone.
The 1924 conviction belongs to a separate jurisdiction and a separate era. The killing near Parchim was carried out by members of a nationalist circle acting as their own court, and Höss was sentenced for his part in it, not as its sole author.
November 25, 1900: Born in Baden-Baden, Germany.
August 1, 1916: Enlists as a volunteer in the 21st Baden Dragoons; later serves on the Iraq front.
February 1, 1919: Joins the East Prussian volunteer corps; serves with the Rossbach Freikorps in Latvia.
1922: Joins the NSDAP.
1923: Takes part in a killing near Parchim.
1924: Sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for his part in the killing.
July 14, 1928: Amnesty law under which he is released early.
March 1, 1929: Joins the Artamanen League.
April 1934: Becomes a member of the Allgemeine SS; later joins the active SS at Dachau.
May 1938: Adjutant to the commandant at Sachsenhausen.
May 1940: Becomes first commandant of Auschwitz, Oświęcim.
November 11, 1943: Hands over command to Arthur Liebehenschel; becomes chief of Office D I of the WVHA in Berlin.
June to August 1944: Commands the Auschwitz SS garrison.
March 11, 1946: Arrested near Flensburg by British Field Security.
April 15, 1946: Testifies as a witness at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg.
May 25, 1946: Flown to Warsaw and handed to Polish prosecutors.
September 29, 1946, to January 11, 1947: Questioned thirteen times by the Kraków investigating judge.
March 11 to 29, 1947: Trial in Warsaw.
April 2, 1947: Found guilty and sentenced to death.
April 16, 1947: Executed in Oświęcim.
December 22, 1947: Judgment in the Kraków trial of 40 members of the Auschwitz garrison.
February 28, 1948: Polish Supreme Court confirms the tribunal's reading of NSDAP membership.