The Commandant

An Account by the First Commanding Officer of Auschwitz

Rudolf Hoess, Jürg Amann

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781468300918
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This chilling memoir presents "a graphic and compelling self-portrait" of the Nazi war criminal who oversaw Auschwitz concentration camp ( Jewish Book World ). SS officer Rudolph Hoess was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. The amoral sensibility Hoess displayed regarding all that went on in the charnel factory where the industrialization of death was practiced—where probably three million people were literally worked to death, shot or gassed—is still almost beyond belief today. Editor Jurg Amann has taken Hoess's text and produced a work of vital historical importance. The Commandant presents an excruciating insight into Hitler's Final Solution and the nature of evil itself through the prism of the Nazis' totalitarian system, one Hoess and so many others felt no need to question. Ian Buruma's introduction sets this frightening work within a both moral and historical context.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Editor’s Note
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Chapter XVI
• Afterword
• About the Editor