The “Confessions” of Rudolf Höss

Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (also spelled Hoß or Hoess) was arrested by British authorities 58 years ago today.  What follows is a background of the “confessions,” an explanation of what was "confessed", and why the “confessions” are problematic. 

Background

At 11pm on March 11, 1946, former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was attacked while he slept at his employer’s farm near Flensburg, Germany.  Höss initially believed that he was being robbed, but quickly found out that the perpetrators were British military police (many of whom were Jewish) who came to capture him for his alleged crimes.  Höss’s subsequent “confessions” became vital in establishing the official Holocaust narrative, thus it is critical to study how his confessions came to be.  There are four documents that make up the “confessions” of Rudolf Höss, each of which are pretty consistent with one another:

1.       NO-1210 – An 8 page hand-written deposition in German dated March 14, 1946 (March 15?—of the two witnesses, one did not date, the other dated March 15).

2.       PS-3868 – A 22 page affidavit in English dated April 6, 1946.

3.       Oral deposition on April 15, 1946 before the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal.

4.       Commandant of Auschwitz text allegedly written by Höss while in Polish custody.

After the war ended in May of 1945, Höss was taken into British custody and sent to a camp for SS prisoners.  Apparently unaware of the importance of the prisoner, he was granted work release due to his experience in agriculture.  Höss found employment as an agricultural laborer at a farm near Flensburg where he took the assumed name Rudolf Lang and stayed for eight months until his capture.  British intelligence specialists obtained the location and assumed name of Höss by threatening his wife, Frau Höss, and children.  Captain Bernard Clarke, one of the individuals that captured Höss, admitted shouting the following at Frau:

If you don’t tell us [where your husband is] we’ll turn you over to the Russians and they’ll put you before a firing-squad.  Your son will go to Siberia.

Höss’s son and daughter received similar treatment.

On the night of March 11, Clarke and five other intelligence specialists surprised Höss while he was sleeping in a room that was used to slaughter cattle.  According to Clarke, he asked the unsuspecting man for his name.  Each time Höss answered “Rudolf Lang,” Clarke struck him in the face.  After four blows, Höss finally admitted his true identity, at which point he was flung down from his bunk, stripped naked, dragged onto one of the slaughtering tables, and was beaten mercilessly until the Medical Officer ordered a halt to the assault (“Call them off, unless you want to take back a corpse”).  Höss was then taken to Heide where he was forced to walk naked through the prison yard to his cell.   According to Clarke, “it took three days to get a coherent statement out of [Höss].”  Three soldiers had the task of guarding Höss during the time of his interrogation.  For three days, Höss was not allowed to sleep.  “We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance,” said Ken Jones, one of the guards, in an article in Wrexham Leader (October 17, 1986). Höss was flogged by the guards and had alcohol forced down his throat.  After three days, Höss broke down and signed the “confessions” set out by the authorities.  The allies eventually numbered this document NO-1210.  Two British sergeants signed as witnesses; one did not date and the other dated March 15.  There was no indication as to the location.

Rudolf Höss signed a 20 page affidavit 22 days later on April 5 that was to become PS-3868.  This document was typed in English (not his first language of German).  At the time Höss was, of course, still imprisoned, however under somewhat better conditions than the first few days of his captivity.  Robert Faurisson notes several anomalies withthis document:

In its form, this text is, if possible, even less acceptable than the preceding one. In particular, entire lines have been added in capital letters in the English style, while others are crossed out with a stroke of the pen. There is no initialling in the margin next to these corrections, and no summary at the end of the document of the words struck out. The Allies assigned this document the number PS-3868.

In order to hide the fact that Höss had signed an affidavit that was in English when it ought to have been in his own language, and in order to make the crossed-out words and the additions and corrections disappear, the following trick was used at Nuremberg: the original text was recast and presented as a "Translation" from German into English! But the person responsible for this deception did his work too quickly. He thought that a handwritten addition to paragraph 10 (done in an English handwriting style) was an addition to the end of paragraph 9. The result of that misunderstanding is that the end of paragraph 9 is rendered totally incomprehensible. There are, therefore, two different documents that bear the same file number, PS-3868: the document signed by Höss and the "remake." It is the "remake," really a glaring forgery, that was used before the Nuremberg tribunal. One historical work that claimed to reproduce document PS-3868 by Höss in fact reproduced the "remake" but omitted (without saying so) the end of paragraph 9 as well as all of paragraph 10: see Henri Monneray, La Persécution des Juifs dans les pays de l'Est présentee à Nuremberg, Paris, Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation,1949, pp.159 - 162.

Höss appeared before the Nuremberg Tribunal on April 15, 1946 at the request of the defendant Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s council, Dr. Kurt Kauffmann (Kauffmann wanted to establish that Himmler, rather than his client, was responsible for the presumed extermination).  When the US prosecutor read from Höss’s April 5^th affidavit, he did so using the above “remade” copy.  Höss testified that NO-1210 and PS-3868 were accurate. 

The fourth of Höss’s “confessions” was allegedly written while in Polish custody before he was executed on April 16, 1947, but was not published until 1958.  According to Faurisson, Martin Broszat, the editor of Commandant of Auschwitz, “went so far as to suppress several fragments which would have too clearly made it appear that Höss (or his Polish jailers) had offered outrageous statements which would have called into question the reliability of his writings in toto.”  Thus we will not focus on this item.

What Did Höss Confess To?

Rudolf Höss "confessed" to the homicidal gassing of 2.5 million individuals at Auschwitz from 1941-1943. The following discourse took place between Höss and Dr. Kurt Kauffmann:

DR. KAUFFMANN: And after the arrival of the transports were the victims stripped of everything they had? Did they have to undress completely; did they have to surrender their valuables? Is that true?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: And then they immediately went to their death?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: I ask you, according to your knowledge, did these people know what was in store for them?
HOESS: The majority of them did not, for steps were taken to keep them in doubt about it and suspicion would not arise that they were to go to their death…
DR. KAUFFMANN: And then, you told me the other day, that death by gassing set in within a period of 3 to 15 minutes. Is that correct?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: You also told me that even before death finally set in, the victims fell into a state of unconsciousness?
HOESS: Yes. From what I was able to find out myself or from what was told me by medical officers, the time necessary for reaching unconsciousness or death varied according to the temperature and the number of people present in the chambers. Loss of consciousness took place within a few seconds or a few minutes.

The following discourse took place between Höss and American prosecutor Col. Amen:

COL. AMEN: I ask that the witness be shown Document 3868-PS, which will become Exhibit USA-819.
COL. AMEN: You signed that affidavit voluntarily, Witness?
HOESS: Yes.

COL. AMEN: And the affidavit is true in all respects?
HOESS: Yes.

COL. AMEN: I will omit the first paragraph and start with Paragraph 2:
"I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachsenhausen from 1938 to 1 May 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate 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…”
That is all true, Witness?
HOESS: Yes, it is.

COL. AMEN: "6. The 'final solution' of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek [see below]…”
Is that all true and correct, Witness?
HOESS: Yes.

 

Anomalies in Höss’s “Confessions”

There are several items on Rudolf Höss’s “confessions” that taint his entire testimony.

1.      Höss claimed that 2.5 million people were killed via homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz.  Today, mainstream historians generally agree that only about 1 – 1.5 million were killed in the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz. 

2.      In NO-1210, Höss claimed that there was an extermination camp called “Wolzek near Lublin”—such a camp never existed.

3.      He claimed that Himmler told him in June 1941 that exterminations were taking place at Belzec and Treblinka—these camps did not exist until 1942. 

4.      Höss claimed to visit Treblinka in the spring of 1942 and examined the extermination process (“Small chambers were used equipped with pipes to induce the exhaust gas from car engines.”)—This camp was not operational until July of 1942.  

The brutal methods that were used to obtain the Höss “confessions” coupled with the obvious falsities in the testimony indicate that they are highly questionable, at best.  However, the question remains, why did Höss not repudiate the confessions that he was pressured into signing?  Why did he confirm at Nuremberg that the statements were accurate?  Robert Faurisson cites a document given to him by Mark Weber that includes testimony from a senior assistant to Joseph Goebbles, Moritz von Schirmeister.  According to the source, von Schirmeister and Höss were able to talk freely during transport to Nuremberg on March 31, 1946 where Höss confided to him regarding the apparent confession: "Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not."  In my opinion, by confessing to the homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, Höss was made to believe that he was saving his wife and children from an appalling fate.