The 'Final Solution'?:
DAWIDOWICZ, LUCY S.
The ‘Final Solution'? Commandant of Auschwitz. By Rudolf Hoess. World. 285 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz Contributor, ''Commentary," "Menorah Journal" ON APRIL 5, 1946, Rudolf...
...At that time he said that his original total of 2.5 million gassed was far too high and had been based on estimates by Karl Eichmann, head of the Gestapo section concerned with the "final solution of the Jewish problem...
...They could not understand that he, too, had a heart and that he was not evil...
...for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light...
...It was for Frank a moment of terrifying realization that brought about his confession of guilt...
...He concluded his autobiography in the same schizoid vein in which he had lived his life: '"Let the public continue to regard me as the bloodthirsty beast, the cruel sadist, and the mass murderer...
...It is not particularly noteworthy that some schizoids were Nazis or that some Nazis were schizoids or paranoids...
...That is something that people will talk about for a thousand years...
...Then Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and the notorious governor of Nazi-occupied Poland, said: "That was the low point of the entire trial—to hear a man say out of his own mouth that he exterminated 2.5 million people in cold blood...
...Awaiting trial in a Polish prison, he wrote his autobiography...
...Reared in a rigidly Catholic and authoritarian home, Hoess could never relate to people—parents, sisters, schoolmates, women, adult friends...
...Mental disease in individuals is sometimes comprehensible, but not the insanity that sweeps a whole people...
...A Soviet State Commission concluded that not less than 4 million people were put to death...
...A year later Hoess was arrested and convicted...
...Most of these, he admitted, were Jews...
...Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz Contributor, ''Commentary," "Menorah Journal" ON APRIL 5, 1946, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, former commandant of Auschwitz (Oswiecim), declared in an affidavit for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that while he had commanded the concentration camp "at least 2.5 million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning...
...But there was no such moment for Hoess...
...He spent over five years of a 10year term in solitary confinement in a Prussian prison and was released in 1929 under an amnesty for political prisoners...
...Gerald Reitlinger (author of The Final Solution) estimated that a little less than a million were killed at Auschwitz...
...After his testimony at Nuremberg, Hoess was turned over to Polish authorities, who tried him in Warsaw in March 1947...
...Hoess wrote that SS officers and Nazi dignitaries used to come to Auschwitz to see for themselves the extermination process...
...We shall never know whether Hoess, in his original claim, was merely repeating Eichmann's boast of having achieved the "final solution...
...From then on, Hoess rose in the SS's concentration camp administration, until he became commandant at Auschwitz in 1941...
...Little wonder, then, that in 1960 swastikas which might merely be the doodles of malicious mischief-makers should have awakened world-wide anxiety...
...G. M. Gilbert, an American prison psychologist who examined, questioned and tested Hoess during the Nuremberg trials, described him in The Psychology of Dictatorship as "the insensitive, unthinking schizoid with the burnt-out superego, accepting the ideology uncritically and mechanically following the course of least resistance in a psychopathic society...
...But there was no such cry—not from Hoess, his superiors or underlings...
...Hoess had no questions about his role at Auschwitz: "If the Fuhrer had himself given the order for the 'final solution of the Jewish question.' then, for a veteran National Socialist and even more so for an SS officer, there could be no question of considering its merits...
...when the war was over he joined the Freikorps, volunteer fighting units of ex-soldiers, at first semi-legal and later illegal...
...A guilt-laden outcry might have given Hoess a touch of humanness...
...He joined a Nazi farm organization and in 1933 applied to the SS...
...shortly thereafter Himmler appointed him to service at Dachau on the ground that Hoess' prison experience qualified him professionally...
...In 1922, when he joined the Nazi party, Hoess and others kidnapped and murdered a man they claimed was a German traitor...
...In 1916, at the age of 16, he enlisted in the Army...
...My invariable answer...
...The Fuhrer commands, we follow' was never a mere phrase or slogan...
...We are not any nearer understanding a society that gave these madmen, whether little cogs—as Hoess considered himself—or leaders, the authority to determine the fate of millions...
...After observing the executions and the removal and burning of the bodies, visitors repeatedly asked how Hoess and his men could keep watching these operations...
...Nor has there been any significant spontaneous admission of guilt or plea for forgiveness by the Germans...
...Hoess explained, "was that the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler's orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions...
...In Nuremberg Diary Gilbert recorded the conversation of the Nuremberg defendants in the lunch recess following Hoess's testimony...
...But seeing Hoess revealed as an apathetic, withdrawn psychopath does not really explain his role in Nazi Germany...
...He was condemned to death and executed in April 1947...
...At first there was depressed silence...
...It was meant in bitter earnest...
...This unquestioning, unswerving obedience to super-authoritarian persons and institutions was only one aspect of Hoess' sick personality...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 19
