Execution of Rudolf Höss #interesting
0Born to Catholic parents in Germany in 1900, Rudolf fought in World War I before joining a nationalist paramilitary group. He first heard Adolf Hitler speak in 1922, and he joined the Nazi Party shortly thereafter. The following year, Rudolf and several accomplices murdered a schoolteacher who’d betrayed a fellow paramilitary soldier to the French. Sentenced to ten years in prison, Rudolf was released in 1928 under a general amnesty. He spent the next few years farming and starting a family but eventually abandoned the agrarian lifestyle in favor of the SS, the Nazis’ elite paramilitary division.
Between 1934 and 1940, Rudolf worked at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, which at the time housed mainly political prisoners. He impressed his superiors so much that they appointed him commandant of the newly created Auschwitz. In this role, he transformed the camp into the Nazis’ chief killing center, settling on Zyklon B as the most efficient method of gassing. As he later said, gassing was preferable to shooting because the latter “would have placed too heavy a burden on the SS men who had to carry it out, especially because of the women and children among the victims.” Rudolf approached the prospect of mass murder with systematic, detached precision. As historian Laurence Rees wrote for History Extra in 2020, “Höss was no mere robot, blindly following orders, but an innovator in the way he organized the killing.” At the camp’s peak, Auschwitz’s gas chambers were capable of murdering 2,000 people an hour