Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men.

This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. In his postwar testimony at Nuremberg, HössĮstimate that at least 2,500,000* victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. It was one of the most efficient slaughters orchestrated by Nazi Germany, though even these were only a small portion of the crimes that stained Höss’s soul. Höss himself is even “honored” as the namesake of Operation Höss, a deportation and extermination project targeting Hungarian Jewry that claimed 420,000 souls just in the last months of the war.

Initially “just” a standard Reich prison camp with a mix of regular criminals, political prisoners, and Soviet POWs, Auschwitz earned its place as the Holocaust’s preeminent metonym in the subsequent years as it evolved into one of the primary killing sites of the Final Solution. In May 1940, he was appointed to direct the brand-new Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland, a position that, excluding a few months when he was relieved of duties for having an affair with a camp inmate, he held until the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. Höss served only a year in prison for the crime.Ĭome the time of the Reich, he joined the SS and was “constantly associated” (his words) with the camp networks - beginning in the very first concentration camp, Dachau, followed by a two-year turn at Sachsenhausen. 3240 in 1922 - soon thereafter proving a willingness to shed blood for the cause by murdering a teacher suspected of betraying to the French the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter. Not to be confused with the Rudolf Hess, the Nazi party defector held by the British in lonely confinement in Spandau until 1987, Höss was true to the swastika from beginning to end.Ī World War I survivor, our guy joined the right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries and scored NSDAP party number no. April 16, 1947, was the hanging-date of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.

Rudolf hoess death