The Nuremberg Interviews (55 page)

What happened to Gluecks? “I never saw him since Flensburg. He was quite sick and went to a navy hospital; I think he died there. The last time I saw Eichmann was in April 1945 in Oranienberg, when he told me that he was ordered to go to Prague. That was in the last days of the war. I never heard from him again. His family was in Prague.” Did you work near your family? “I was seven kilometers away from my family in the
navy camp until my discharge, then I went to a farm near the Danish border. I secured this job through the labor office. I worked there eight months before I was arrested.” Did you see your family during that eight months? “No, my wife and oldest son knew where I was and communicated with me but I did not see them.”

During the time you commanded Auschwitz, where did your family live? “In Auschwitz.” What did your wife say or think about what went on under your command? “My wife only learned about it in 1942. Whenever an SS man or guard talked to her or there was mention of these things, she declined to believe it. I myself didn’t tell her when she asked me; I answered something else. In 1942 she heard a remark made by party district administrator Bracht of Upper Silesia, who referred to the extermination program, and then she believed it. After that she asked me about it and I told her.” What was her reaction? “She was very upset and thought it cruel and terrible. I explained it to her the same way Himmler explained it to me. Because of this explanation she was satisfied and we didn’t talk about it anymore. However, from that time forth she frequently remarked that it would be better if I obtained another position and we left Auschwitz.”

Hoess’s children are as follows: boy age sixteen; girl age thirteen; girl age twelve; boy age eight; girl age two and a half. All are living and well.

Didn’t it bother you to kill children of the same ages as your own? “It was not easy for me or other military SS men but we were convinced by the orders and the necessity of these orders.

“If I had not had direct orders plus reasons for the orders, I would have been unable to carry them through on my own initiative — to send thousands, millions of people to death.” Do you feel guilty, or merely a soldier who has done his duty? “Up until the capitulation of Germany I believed I carried out orders correctly and acted in the right manner. But after the capitulation, when I read newspaper reports of the trials, et cetera, I came to the conclusion that the necessity for extermination of the Jews was not as they told me — now I am guilty, as are all of the others, and I have to take the consequences.” What do you think your punishment should be? “To be hanged.” Do you really, or do you think that there are others more guilty than you? “There are others more guilty than me, particularly those who gave me the orders, which were wrong. But as I saw it in the trial in Belsen where SS men worked under the same orders as I had, I will have to face the same punishment.”

Do you know Josef Kramer?
⁶
“Yes, I know him well. He was my first adjutant at Auschwitz, then he was in other camps. For a time he was commander of Birkenau, which is Auschwitz 2. His last job was commandant of Belsen.” What sort of man was Kramer? “He was a quiet, practical man but he lacked wide horizons, had no perspective or outlook, was not very active or elastic, and therefore I couldn’t use him as adjutant. He could not conceive of things easily or use his own initiative. Even later when he was camp leader in Birkenau, he executed orders very precisely but he was not able to adapt himself to new situations or to change orders to fit existing conditions. He had to be led at all times and to be told precisely how to do things.”

Was Kramer a sadist in your opinion? “No.” In your own opinion, are you a sadist? “No, I never struck any internee in the entire time I was commandant. Whenever I found guards who were guilty of treating internees too harshly, I tried to exchange them for other guards.”

Who invented gas chambers? “They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn’t want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead.”

How many concentration camps in Germany or outside of it had gas chambers? “Mauthausen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and in the east, Treblinka; in Russia, they used gas wagons.” What about Majdanek? “They had temporary gas chambers but that camp came under the Security Police — the
Einsatzkommando
and Security Police. In Lublin there was a concentration camp which came under our inspection and supervision but it was not an extermination camp. Majdanek was near the city of Lublin and was an extermination camp under the direction of Lieutenant General Globocnik, who was the SS and political leader of Lublin.”

Hoess was sitting on his cot rather transfixed in facial expression with his hands clasped together, cracking his knuckles; he wore shoes today. I
asked him how he felt and he said, “Good.” He then went on to say that his feet still ached at times, which he attributed to frostbite incurred three weeks ago. Asked to describe this pain or discomfort in detail, he seemed unable to do so except to state that it was an aching beneath the skin. He took his shoes off and I examined his feet, which were not abnormal, of good color, and with no particular sensory disturbances as far as pinprick, light touch, or deep pressure are concerned.

I asked him today what he had been thinking about, and he had the usual puzzled, apathetic expression and gazed from me to the wall and back to Mr. Triest, the translator, in a doleful manner, and then answered, “I haven’t been thinking of anything particular. The prison psychologist, Dr. Gilbert, asked me to write a short biography of my early life, and I have done so.” He had beside him a few sheets of pencil-written material which he had just composed. He asked whether I would like to see this composition which he had almost completed. I did so and I hastily glanced over it. I asked him to tell me in his own words what he had written. “Just what I told you in the last few days and also something we began yesterday about my father and mother and sisters. It is hard to remember one’s early life, and my life was a very good, happy childhood, only I wanted to be a soldier very early and I kept trying to run away from home to join the army. Many times I was taken off the transports on which I had hidden myself and returned to my mother.”

Family History:
“I come from a comfortable home. My father had been an army officer and later a merchant. I have two sisters, four and six years younger than myself. My father died in 1914 and my mother in 1917.”

Father:
He died at the age of forty-two of a heart attack when the subject was fourteen years of age. As an officer in Africa, he had been shot with a poisoned arrow in the upper abdominal region, insofar as Hoess can recall, and he never completely recovered from that wound. He also had recurrent attacks of blackwater fever, also contracted in Africa. He was retired from the army as a major after these illnesses and thereafter he engaged in business enterprises. Just exactly what business he worked at was vague but apparently he was an agent of some sort. At one time his father had been a teacher in the military school in Metz.

Mother:
Died in 1917 at the age of thirty-nine. “I was in the field at the front at the time. When I returned my sisters told me that she had died of general sickness. She had always been sickly, never healthy.” He was
completely unable to depict the personalities of his mother and father except to say, “Both were very quiet, self-contained, very religious Catholic people. I can’t remember any more, just that they lived well together and dedicated all of their love to the children. My parents wanted me to become a Catholic priest. Because of this I studied at the gymnasium.”

Did you yourself ever want to become a priest? “No, I always wanted to become a soldier. In my childhood I might have been talked into becoming a missionary in Africa because my father told me much about the life of these missionaries there.”

Siblings:
Sister born in 1904; sister born in 1906. Both are married. The older has one child, the other has two children. The older sister is married to a carpenter, the younger one to a cement worker. Both brothers-in-law own their own businesses. Neither, so far as Hoess knows, was a Nazi Party member, nor were his sisters. The husband of the older sister was never in the army, but the younger sister’s husband was drafted, wounded soon thereafter, and retired to civilian life.

When was the last time you saw your sisters, and how often do you see them? “Since I left home at the age of sixteen, I have seen my sisters very few times and have had little contact with them. Sometimes there is correspondence between us; once a year at birthdays, but nothing regularly. I saw my younger sister for the last time in 1937 and the older sister for the last time in 1941. The older one lives in Ludwigshaven and the younger one in Mannheim.

“I inspected the IG Farben factory in Ludwigshaven at that time, 1941, and so I dropped in and visited my sister.” Did either of your sisters know of your occupation? “Yes, they knew I was in the SS and in charge of concentration camps, but of course they had no conception of the details of my work. Moreover, neither of them, being good housewives, had any idea of concentration camps, and I didn’t talk much about them.”

Adolescence:
“I had little patience for school and was only an average student because I always had it in mind to quit school and join the army. In 1914 when the war broke out I had a very strong impulse to be a soldier but I was too young. I tried to smuggle myself to the front with troop transports but I was always caught and brought home. In 1916 when I was working as a helper in a hospital — all schoolboys were used in army hospitals part-time — I met a cavalry captain in the hospital who
knew my father. He had served in the same regiment as my father. I talked him into taking me with him into his squadron.

“At the end of the school term in early summer, I pretended to be going to visit my grandparents in the Black Forest. That was the usual thing for me to do during the summer vacations, and so my parents did not become suspicious. But that year, instead of visiting my grandparents, I actually went to the garrison of the captain of cavalry. He was organizing a unit to be sent to Turkey — the Asiatic Corps. I was trained hurriedly and two weeks later left for Turkey. It was only after my departure that I wrote my mother of my whereabouts, because I was afraid if they knew where I was in Germany, they would have me returned.”

Why did you want to leave home so urgently? “I had a good life at home but I wanted to become a soldier, that is the only reason.” Was your father a companion to you as a child? “A companion? What do you mean?” A friend — that is, was he easily approachable and very friendly to you? “Now that you mention it, I can hardly answer that question because it is so long ago and he died when I was fourteen. Most of the time he was away from home. No, I shouldn’t say most of the time, but a good deal of it, and when he was at home he was a good father, but he was, like myself, so busy. He did not have much time to play games or other things with us, if that is what you mean.”

Further attempts to get a picture of his father or of his mother were fruitless. It would seem, however, that the mother was a chronic invalid, sufferer from illnesses which are either unknown to the subject or were possibly psychosomatic. This is all so vague that a conclusion about it cannot be made. The only certain thing that can be said in regard to Hoess’s relationship to his mother is that it was not an intimate one and that at her death he was left quite unaffected and not at all surprised, since she had always been, as Hoess says, “sickly and unhealthy.”

“Then I served in the field in the Freikorps after my army career. Is there anything else you want me to tell you?”

Of your five children, who is your favorite? “There is no difference, all five are alike.” Do you love them? “Of course, my only concern now is not my own fate, because I know I shall hang, but the welfare of my wife and children.” The latter expression of concern was made with the same apathetic appearance and lack of expression as previously.

Regarding the disciplining of your children, what did you do? “I hardly did it, my wife took care of it. Only rarely did I take care of disciplining,
and that was with the older children. Maybe I hit them lightly two or three times if they were bad. There was never any occasion for punishing the children; they were never bad and always well behaved. My wife is a very energetic mother in bringing up the children.” What do you mean by energetic? “Well, she treated them with love, but in their whole education and upbringing they were taught to obey immediately.”

How many servants did you have in your home at Auschwitz? “Until 1940, I had just one girl servant, whom I obtained from the Labor Service. These girls had to serve a year of compulsory service in a home plus a half year with a family with children. It was part of the labor movement. After 1940 when I lived in Auschwitz, I had two women internees who worked for us. These women belonged to a religious sect, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Whenever they circulated pamphlets or participated in active ways in that sect, they were placed in concentration camps. The two women who worked for me in my home were over fifty. These women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, when physically fit, were put into families with children in order to make them forget their religious sects. They lived in my house, were free to go shopping, wore civilian clothes. Of course, they had to remain in the house at night and could not go around visiting.”

How did you meet your wife? “When I was released from prison in 1928 I went to an organization which was called the Union of Young People, people who wanted to be sent from the city to the country in order to learn farming and eventually become farmers themselves. My wife was also a member of this union and I met her on an estate where she was a helper in the household of the estate owner. But she was never a servant girl.” How old was she and how long did you court her? “She was twenty years old when I met her and I knew her three months before we married.”