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Rudolf Höss Quotes
1901–1947 Germany
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß (in English commonly Hoess or Höss; November 25, 1901 – April 16, 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp (from 4 May 1940 to November 1943, and again from 8 May 1944 to 18 January 1945).
Also known as: Höss, Rudolf
Random Rudolf Höss quote
9 quotes
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.
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.
You become hard when you carry out such orders.
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity.
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.
Believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the perpetual burning.
The prisoners [transferred to labor camps] would have been spared a great deal of misery if they had been taken straight into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
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.
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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