Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz
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Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.151092
EAN: 9780306806988
ISBN: 0306806983
Label: Da Capo Press
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 414
Publication Date: 1996-03-21
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Studio: Da Capo Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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SS Kommandant Rudolph Höss (1900–1947) was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss’s autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial. This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Testimony of the monster
Comment: I bought this book to see the "other side" point of view
The view from the hantchman eyes.
Well, I think this book is worth reading, not only to see see how cruel and perverse one can get but olso how hatred can lead to unimaganable crime.
Hoss writes this book from prison...
His writing is honest although he trys to "whitewash" his
actions and blames his subordinates for lots of attrocities which happened in Auschwitz.
I think this book is a very good source to see how quickly one can become a real monster, when following insane idiology.
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Summary: How badly the Germans hate the Jews!
Comment: This is the story about how badly the Germans hate the Jewish people. They hate them so much, that its OK to persecute them, beat them, drive them out of their homes, force them into boxcars and transport them to an extermination camp where they can be gassed and burned. Its so sick that a race of people like the Germans expended so much energy in an effort to exterminate the Jewish people. The memoirs of Hoss show how these Germans were cold and cruel to the Jews, how they treated these souls and turned them into disease bearing animals. Hoss claims he was just following orders from Himmler and the others and that he did nothing wrong because if he disobeyed the orders to exterminate the Jews, he would have been done away with as well. Hoss details the extermination process and gives numbers in the hundreds of thousands of people that were exterminated at Auschwitz, the number one killing center of the German government. Hoss explains how the transports of tens of thousands of Jews from all over Europe were tricked into believing they were getting a shower and how people were ignorant of their fate until the very end. Hoss profiles other high ranking SS officers and takes no blame for the horrible atrocities that took place while he was camp commandant. This book profiles the sickness of the German government and of the German people themselves, how could the German people claim ignorance of the stench of burning flesh. After 9/11 I was in Whitestone Queens miles away from the inferno and I could smell the burning flesh of 3,000 souls, imagine 300,000 souls, this book shows you the sickness of these people and of their mindset
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Summary: Rudolph Hoess (Auschwitz Kommandant) and the Clarification of Some Holocaust Misconceptions
Comment: I give this book five stars because of its historical value. This work not only gives insight into the mind of the leader of perhaps the greatest death factory ever built, but also allows a clearing-up of some errors that have accreted in the decades since that horrible time.
Hoess rejected God and the Church (p. 52-53, 57, 59, 72, 192), having rebelled against his father's wish that he become a priest. Like Himmler, he became an Artaman (pp. 202-203; a communal movement resembling the 1960's US communes, albeit Teutonic-centered) before switching to Nazism for his substitute religion.
Hoess wrote: "Until the beginning of 1942 the main body of prisoners was Polish." (p. 128). Many Poles were murdered secretly (the cause of death listed as natural), "...because of political and security reasons..." (p. 224).
During the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy, attempts were made to belittle the victimhood of Auschwitz Poles through the premise that they, unlike most Jews, were not generally killed upon arrival at Auschwitz. Hoess, in contrast, rejected any such dichotomy (if anything, praising the slow-death genocidal methods--as perfected by the Communists): "The Gestapo delivered the prisoners to the camps to be exterminated. It made no difference to them whether it happened by firing squad, gas, or by the horrible conditions in the camps. It was part of their plan not to improve conditions in the camps...Thus, the concentration camps were changed deliberately, and sometimes unintentionally, into large-scale extermination centers. The Kommandants received extensive composite reports from the Gestapo about the Soviet concentration camps. Escaped prisoners had made reports about the conditions and organization of these camps down to the smallest detail. They emphasized that by using forced labor methods the Soviets were annihilating entire nationalities." (pp. 168-169).
Holocaust-uniqueness advocates sometimes claim that the genocide of the Polish intelligentsia, unlike that of Jews, served a rational purpose--the elimination of resistance. Actually, the latter was, at most, a hoped-for byproduct of this nation-destroying act: "I want to add this, that the general opinion at SS headquarters was that the total annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia would also destroy the resistance movement. [SS Major] Thomsen was an ardent defender of this theory." (p. 322).
Initial plans to kill all Jews gave way to the sparing of some of them for forced labor (p. 34).
Hoess discussed the Jewish Sonderkommando in considerable detail. Those Jews temporarily got to save their lives by dutifully assisting in the deception, gassing, despoiling, and cremation of their fellow Jews. He also observed Jew-against-Jew behavior by some Jews who had no hope of postponing their own deaths. As they entered the gas chambers, they told Germans the addresses of fugitive Jews back home. Hoess commented: "I cannot explain what motivated them to reveal this information. Was it personal revenge, or were they jealous because they did not want the others to live on?" (p. 160).
In common with many Germans, Hoess attempts to rationalize his exterminatory conduct by equating it with the Allied bombings of German women and children. He estimates German civilian casualties in the several millions (p. 171), which is at least a 20-fold exaggeration.
As for lebensraum, Hoess belatedly concluded that Germany could have achieved it peacefully (p. 182).
Hoess suggested that crude propaganda such as Der Sturmer had hindered the development of scientific anti-Semitism (p. 140). He also came to believe that the extermination of Jews only brought hatred against Germany and increased Jewish power by discrediting anti-Semitism (p. 183).
This volume isn't limited to Hoess' memoirs. The entire Wannsee Protocol is printed in translation. It is obvious that the choice of Poland as the site of the German death camps was based solely on practical considerations (minimalized transportation) and had nothing to do with real or stereotyped Polish attitudes towards Jews: "State Secretary Dr. Buehler declared that the government of Occupied Poland would welcome it if the final solution to this question would be started in Occupied Poland. His reason: transport plays no important role here and the deployment of workers during the operation would not cause any problems." (p. 380).
Customer Rating:
Summary: A very good tranlation
Comment: My opinion is based on the comparison with the orginal publication in German, which I purchased in 1960 to provide essential information for the subsequent psychiatric evaluations of several thousand Holocaust survivors.
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Summary: Rudolf Hoess' Mistress Interviewed
Comment: After Dachau was liberated, Army intelligence interviewed a woman at the camp who claimed to have been Rudolf Hoess' mistress while at Auschwitz. What details they could check were confirmed, and her interview became part of a Seventh Army report issued a few weeks later, a report that has been republished as Dachau Liberated: The Official Report (ISBN: 1587420031). For those who want to understand the infamous Hoess, that interview of "E.H." provides a much-needed check on his obviously self-serving autobiography. Here's a short passage from her interview:
"According to my recollection, on December 16, 1942, about 11 p.m. I was already asleep, suddenly the C.O. appeared before me. I hadn't heard the opening of my cell and was such frightened. It was dark in the cell. I believed at first it was an SS man or a prisoner and said, "What is this tomfoolery, I forbid you." Then I heard "Pst," and a pocket lamp was lighted and lit the face of the C.O. I broke out "Herr Kommandant."
Hoess didn't mention this clandestine affair in his autobiography, but details she gave fit with his account and with conditions at Auschwitz.
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