Auschwitz Read Online Free Page A

and experience life. One image stuck in my mind from the moment I heard it described. It was of a “procession” 11 of empty baby carriages—property looted from the dead Jews—pushed out of Auschwitz in rows of five towards the railway station. The prisoner who witnessed the sight said they took an hour to pass by.
    The children who arrived at Auschwitz in those baby carriages, together
with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts—all of those who died there—are the ones we should always remember, and this book is dedicated to their memory.
    LAURENCE REES

Laurence Rees is Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC and author of five books, including The Nazis: A Warning from History and Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II. He lives in London.

CHAPTER 1
    SURPRISING BEGINNINGS
    O n April 30, 1940, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Rudolf Höss achieved a great ambition. At the age of thirty-nine, and after six years’ service in the SS, he had been appointed commandant of one of the first Nazi concentration camps in the New Territories. On this spring day he arrived to take up his new duties in a small town in what had been, until eight months earlier, southwest Poland and was now part of German Upper Silesia. The name of the town in Polish was Oświęcim—in German, Auschwitz.
    Although Höss had been promoted to commandant, the camp he was to command did not yet exist. He had to supervise its construction from a collection of dilapidated and vermin-infested former Polish Army barracks, grouped around a horse-breaking yard on the edge of the town. And the surrounding area could scarcely have been more depressing. This land between the Sola and Vistula rivers was flat and drab, the climate damp and unhealthy.
    No one on that first day—and that certainly included Rudolf Höss—could have predicted the camp would, within five years, become the site of the largest mass murder the world has yet seen. The story of the decision-making process that led to this transformation is one of the most shocking in the whole of history and one that offers great insights into the functioning of the Nazi state.
    Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Goering—all these leading Nazis and more made decisions that led to the extermination
of more than a million people at Auschwitz. But a crucial precondition for the crime was also the mentality of more minor functionaries such as Höss. Without Höss’s leadership through the hitherto uncharted territory of mass murder on this scale, Auschwitz would never have functioned as it did.
    To look at, there was little exceptional about Rudolf Höss. He was of medium height, with regular features and dark hair. He was neither ugly nor strikingly handsome; he simply resembled—in the words of American lawyer Whitney Harris, 1 who interrogated Höss at Nuremberg—“a normal person, like a grocery clerk.” Several Polish inmates of Auschwitz confirm this impression, remembering Höss as quiet and controlled, the type of person you walk past every day in the street and fail to notice. Thus, in appearance, Höss was as far away as it is possible to get from the conventional image of the red-faced, saliva-spitting SS monster—which, of course, makes him all the more terrifying a figure.
    As Höss carried his suitcase into the hotel opposite Auschwitz railway station that would be the SS officers’ base until suitable accommodations had been arranged within the camp, he also brought with him the mental baggage of an adult life devoted to the nationalist cause. Like most ardent Nazis, his character and beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the previous twenty-five years of German history—the most turbulent the country had ever experienced. Born in the Black Forest in 1900 to Catholic parents, Höss was affected in his early years by