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Rudolf Höss citations

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss est un officier allemand de la SS, né le 25 novembre 1901 à Baden et mort exécuté le 16 avril 1947 à Auschwitz. Criminel de guerre, il occupe une fonction de premier plan dans le génocide des Juifs d'Europe.

Dès son enfance, Höss se montre peu sociable, préférant les promenades solitaires et les animaux à la compagnie des hommes. Il se détourne de l'éducation catholique que tente de lui donner sa mère. À seize ans, il s'engage dans l'armée impériale allemande et sert au cours de la Première Guerre mondiale sur le front du Proche-Orient ; il est décoré de la croix de fer. Après la fin du conflit, il s'engage dans les corps-francs ; il est condamné en 1924 à dix ans de prison pour le meurtre d'un militant communiste.

Affilié au parti nazi dès 1922, il entre dans la SS en juin 1934, et commence sa carrière au sein du système concentrationnaire nazi en novembre de la même année. Il est commandant des camps de concentration et d'extermination d'Auschwitz-Birkenau, le plus vaste complexe du système concentrationnaire nazi, du 1er mai 1940 au 1er décembre 1943, puis de nouveau entre mai et septembre 1944, période durant laquelle la déportation massive des Juifs hongrois a porté la machine de mort à son paroxysme.

Nazi convaincu, il fait preuve non seulement d'une totale obéissance aux ordres de Heinrich Himmler concernant l'extermination des Juifs, mais aussi d’initiative, afin d'augmenter les capacités exterminatrices d'Auschwitz, notamment en utilisant le Zyklon B dans un ensemble de chambres à gaz.

Höss est arrêté par les troupes britanniques le 11 mars 1946. Il témoigne lors du procès de Nuremberg, puis est jugé par le Tribunal suprême de Pologne du 11 mars au 2 avril 1947. Condamné à mort, il est exécuté par pendaison le 16 avril 1947 sur le lieu même de ses crimes.

Ses mémoires, intitulés Le commandant d'Auschwitz parle, popularisés en France par les pseudo-mémoires de l'écrivain Robert Merle dans le roman La mort est mon métier, constituent un document historique d'une importance reconnue pour la compréhension de la Shoah, de l'univers concentrationnaire et de la mentalité des bourreaux. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. novembre 1901 – 16. avril 1947
Rudolf Höss photo
Rudolf Höss: 11   citations 0   J'aime

Rudolf Höss: Citations en anglais

“There is a difference. If you kill to take money or rob, it is plain murder, but if you kill because of political reasons, that is a political murder.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“Not justified - but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: 'How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?' One old man, as he passed me, hissed: 'Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews.' His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber.”

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Rudolf Höss

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess" - Page 150 - by Rudolf Hoess, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Primo Levi, Joachim Neugroschel - History - 2000

“They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, after being asked about the invention of gas chambers, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“Those not able to work were marched to the farmhouses. These were a good kilometer from the side track. There they were made to undress. At first they had to undress in the open, where we had erected walls made of straw and branches of trees that kept them from onlookers. After a while we built barracks. We had big signs, all of which read 'To Disinfection' or 'Baths.' That was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order not to have any technical difficulty in the extermination processes.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“When in the summer of 1941 he (Hitler) gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or consequences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.”

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Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess" - Page 144 - by Rudolf Hoess, Constantine Fitzgibbon, Primo Levi, Joachim Neugroschel - History - 2000

“This mass extermination, with all its attendant circumstances, did not, as I know, fail to affect those who took part in it. With very few exceptions, nearly all those detailed to do this monstrous "work," and who, like myself, have given sufficient thought to the matter, have been deeply marked by these events. Many of the men involved approached me as I went my rounds through the extermination buildings, and poured out their anxieties and impressions to me, in the hope that I could allay them. Again and again during these confidential conversations I was asked; is it necessary that we do this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed? And I, who in my innermost being had on countless occasions asked myself exactly this question, could only fob them off and attempt to console them by repeating that it was done on Hitler's order. I had to tell them that this extermination of Jews had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries. There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler's order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the SS to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts.”

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Rudolf Höss

Quoted in "Commandant of Auschwitz" (1951)

“I believed that crematoriums could be erected fast and so wanted to burn the corpses in the mass graves in the crematory, but when I saw that the crematory could not be erected fast enough to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers exterminated, we started to burn the corpses in open ditches like in Treblinka. A layer of wood, then a layer of corpses, another layer of corpses, et cetera. To start the fire, we used a bundle of straw dipped in gasoline. The fire was usually started with about five layers of wood and five layers of corpses. When the fire was going strong, the fresh corpses which came from the gas chambers could merely be thrown on the fire and would burn by themselves.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“You become hard when you carry out such orders.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, when it was woven into special fittings for gaskets.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 8, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

“Burning 2000 people took about 24 hours in the five stoves. Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1700 to 1800. We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.”

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Rudolf Höss

To Leon Goldensohn, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

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