Dan Snow's History Hit - Auschwitz Commandant: Rudolf Höss

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Every day Rudolf Höss oversaw the killing of thousands of people at the death camp and then went home and acted like a doting father to his family. Höss was brought in by top Nazis to pioneer the industrialisation of the mass murder of Europe's Jews and others. He lived in a house that shared a wall with Auschwitz, metres from the crematorium, where he and his family enjoyed a happy domestic life - his wife once described their life at the house as 'paradise'.The house was home to a Polish family until last year when it was taken over by the Counter Extremism Project who invited History Hit to explore the house, which is largely as it was when the Hoss family lived there. Dan travels to Poland with historian and best-selling author Thomas Harding to discover more about Höss' role in the Holocaust and what the house teaches us about 'the banality of evil'. They learn about what went on there, what Holocaust artefacts were recently found in the attic and the future of the house as a centre to combat hate.Warning: this episode contains descriptions of human suffering and genocide which some listeners may find upsetting.With special thanks to the Counter Extremism Project, Dr Hans-Jakob Schindler, Keith Burnet and Thomas Harding.You can see the History Hit film about the house here:You can find out more in Thomas' book 'Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz'. He also has a new book out for children. It's called 'The House on the Canal: The Story of the House that Hid Anne Frank.'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Max Carrey and Dougal Patmore

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the snow is white on the ground. But all that is at odds with what I'm looking out over now. The beauty of the day is in sharp contrast to the buildings that lie in front of me. I'm looking out over a series of red brick barracks. Three stories high, neatly laid out behind double barbed wire fences. I'm in southern Poland, just outside Krakow, and this is Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp, the place where millions of people were murdered during the Second World War.

I'm here on Holocaust Memorial Day, the 27th of January. That is the day on which Auschwitz, this camp, was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. That happened 80 years ago to the day. What they found as they came into this camp seemed like a vast industrial complex. There were a series of partially demolished crematoria and next to them, these chambers. They looked like enormous shower rooms. It quickly became clear their true purpose. They were the gas chambers.

The Soviets learned this and other facts from the few shattered, starving survivors that shuffled around the ruins of this camp. The vast majority of inhabitants here, the guards and the inmates, had been forced to march west into the heart of the ever-shrinking Third Reich as the Soviets approached. But a few people hid out here and were able to tell the Soviets what had occurred. 80 years on, we're still trying to learn, remember and share the things that those survivors spoke of. If you listened to the previous episode of the podcast, we told the story of Auschwitz from beginning to end.

One of the most terrible places in the Nazi empire. One of the most terrible places in history. And that's up against some pretty stiff competition. Today, Team History Hit is here because we've been extended a very interesting invitation. We're filming at this extraordinary site, Auschwitz, but also the building in front of me, one that few people have ever seen. It's the house of the man in charge. It's the house of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hus. Now, I'm outside the house. It looks like a handsome,, pre-war house, red tiled roof and a nice garden with a hedge that gives it a bit of privacy from the main road as traffic

bustles by. I've been told that house has hardly changed since he lived here during the war and many of the features in the house are still as they were when Hus and his family lived here. The reason we're visiting today is because of a very remarkable organisation, the Counter Extremism Project. They have bought this house and they intend to turn it into a space to hold exhibitions,

to help make sure that we never forget and we chart a different and better future. I'm going to go and have a look at this house. I'm going to stand in the rooms that Huss and his family occupied, not out of morbid curiosity, but because I think it's such a powerful reminder of absolute evil that can live next door

in seemingly blissful domestic settings. It's a reminder that ordinary people with happy family lives committed these atrocities. It's the starkest example of what Hannah Arendt, the term she memorably coined whilst watching senior Nazis put on trial, the banality of evil. Arendt believed that this evil was a banal kind of evil,

that of an office manager or bureaucrat, rather than that of an obvious devil. This is so true of Huss. So on the podcast today, we're going to hear about the life of huss who he was what he did and we're going to be hearing from the historian the best-selling writer thomas harding he's got a family link to huss he tracked down huss's daughter who lived at this house and he conducted a remarkable interview with her he wrote the book hans and rudolph the german jew and the hunt for the commandant of Auschwitz.

Then afterwards I'll be able to tell you a bit more about the house and what we find inside it and some of the extraordinary work being done here. This is a podcast about evil and the normal people who perpetrate it. It contains discussion of lots of things that may be deeply unsettling so proceed with caution on this one. But it's also a story that needs telling and sharing and remembering. This is the tale of Rudolf Huss, from farmhand to genocidal mass murderer. Thomas, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Predictably enough, I just want to start with this man's childhood, because every time we talk about these particular perpetrators of monstrous crimes against humanity on the podcast, we always ask the historian, was there anything in the upbringing, anything in childhood or student years that signalled that this might be in the future? Or was his backstory pretty mundane? I mean, Rudolf Huss, who we're talking about today, definitely has a backstory. And we should start by saying the reason why we know his

backstory is because he wrote a form of memoir when he was prison, after he'd been arrested, and he was in Poland awaiting trial. He wrote down his life story. So you have to take some of what he says with a pinch of salt. This is the prime source we have for his childhood. And when I was researching my book, Hans and Rudolf, I tried to double check everything I could and verify. And everything that I could check, I was able to confirm. So all that to be said, yes, he had a lot to be shared about his backstory. For example, he grew up in very Western Germany in Baden-Baden, and then later on the small town of Mannheim. His father was a draconian character. He'd been in Africa. He'd been actually injured

by an arrow in Africa, and then later on became a merchant. And Rudolf describes him as very distant, very unaffectionate, very cold. And his mother was also very removed. And so he grew up, I think, very lonely. I think that's probably the primary thing that we could learn about his childhood. And then on top of that, there was a series of events which he identified as being of consequence to his later life. Do we know what he wanted to be as a young man? Well, we know that his father wanted him to be a priest. And his father was, by all accounts, a very religious priest, so much so that he took Rudolf, his son, to Lourdes. L-O-U-R-D-E-S.

This is a holy place. His father specifically said that he wanted him to be a priest when he grew up. And Rudolf at first was himself, he described himself as being quite religious. But then later on, he had an experience which he said led him to disavow, I guess, or to lose faith in the church. He and some buddies, some friends were playing around and one of his friends fell down the stairs and hurt his ankle, broke his ankle. And Rudolf felt guilty about this and told his Catholic priest during confession. And despite the sanctity of the confession, the priest then told his father, who then punished Rudolf. And Rudolf felt this is a big betrayal. And he said this was the cause of his separation

from religion, but specifically the Catholic Church. Right. He, like everybody in Europe, World War I, First World War, must have changed his trajectory completely. It did. He was born in 1901. Later, he actually said he was born in 1900 to pull the wool over the eyes of the military administrators, but he was born in 1901. So he would have been what, 13, 14 at the beginning of the First World War. So very young, but at the age of 15, incredibly, he signed up. He was able to enlist. I think this was not totally uncommon in both Germany and in England, where children, let's call them children, joined the army. And he was accepted and he was sent with very limited training, first to Turkey and then to

Mesopotamia. I guess we call that Iraq today. That's where he saw his first conflict, his first encounter with violence. And he killed a man using his own gun, which he describes as being very difficult. It was life-changing. And then he was then sent to Jerusalem. He was part of an operation to protect the railways in Syria. So he saw a lot of action and he was promoted as a very young man. I guess he was 16 by then to being an officer. And when the war ended in 1918, he had to find his own way back. It took him three months to find his own way back to Germany. And after this life-changing experience that was First World War, he left as a child and he came back, he says himself, a much more mature young man, battle-hard hardened. He came back to Mannheim to discover

his father had died before the war, his mother had died during the war. Both his sisters had been sent to a convent by his uncle. His uncle had sold the family home and all of Rudolf's personal possessions. So he came back to nothing. You can imagine what that was like, coming back. And of course, Germany had lost the war. There was a real sense of being betrayed by the German government amongst the soldier class. A lot of the territories were given up. They felt that the veterans weren't taken care of. And he became quickly embroiled in the post-war period, or First World War we're talking about, in these paramilitary groups. of First World War we're talking about, in these paramilitary groups. In his case,

it was called the Freikorps, I guess the Free Corps, which were these veterans who came together and essentially they kept the war going into the late teens, into the early 20s. You say kept the war going. They were a sort of direct action against socialism, wherever they found it, whether it's in Bavaria or Poland or on the Polish border? I mean, what are they doing, these guys? What's he doing in particular? Well, I mean, a combination of street battles with people on the left, the socialists, the communists. He was part of a group who was sent to Latvia to try and get back some of the land that was taken from them. They went on this incredibly long march, hundreds of hundreds of miles to Latvia and back. And there he said incredibly, he saw violence that was so extreme that it went far beyond anything he'd seen in

the Middle East. You were seeing civilians tortured and murdered and tactics used that he'd never witnessed before. Again, this was part, I think, of his hardening process, his alienation process during that period. But at the same time, he said that he had an extraordinary fondness for his comrades. And so you have these two things going on at the same time. He's becoming hardened and, I guess, distanced from his emotions. On the other hand, he's becoming closer and more united with this peer group, this military group. And he meets some people during this period who would become incredibly important later on as his life developed. Yeah, toxic combination, traumatized, but clinging to the only thing that gives him meaning in life, which is political violence.

Exactly right. And at the same time, again, this is all written after the fact. He wrote his memoirs in 1946. We're talking about what? The 1920s. However, if you take what he says at face value, absolutely. And also, he still had an emotional response. He was still disgusted by the behavior. He was still shocked by the violence. He was still attracted by the violence. He was still attracted by these friendships. So you see this emotional sophistication at the same time. He moves from, like many, from the Free Corps to the Nazi party early on. I mean, incredibly early on. I mean, Hitler, Adolf Hitler was going on his speaker's tour, if you like, in the early 1920s. And he heard,

Rudolf heard him speak at one of these kind of beer hall rallies. And he was very impressed by Hitler. And he signed up, I think in 1922. And his number, his party number was 3,240, which is incredibly low. And actually, these are the kind of things which meant a lot later on. People who joined the Nazi party early were typically given more prestige, more power, more access later on. And that was definitely the case of Rudolf. And then it was around that time in 1923, 1924, that he became pals with this guy called Martin Bormann, who was incredibly important. He became, I guess, deputy to Adolf Hitler later on. He was one of those who was tried at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, 45, 46. Actually, in absentia, they couldn't find him later on.

It was discovered that he died, probably during the Russian occupation or liberation of Berlin after the war, at the end of the war. But he became pals with this guy, Martin Bormann, another early adopter of Nazism. And these two plus two others organized a plot against this man who they thought, another member of the Freikorps, who they believe betrayed one of their buddies in the Freikorps. And they tracked him down, found him, took him out to the woods and killed him. They murdered him. And one of these four then snitched on them to the authorities. And Martin Borman and Rudolf had this trial. And somehow, we don't know how, but somehow it was agreed that Rudolph would take the fall. He would take the blame. And so as a consequence, Martin Bormann was given a very short sentence, I think about a year or less. And Rudolph was given a sentence of 10 years. And again,

this becomes really important later on because he's considered a trusted ally, somebody who'll get things done, somebody who could keep a secret. And it was at that stage, 1924, that Rudolf was sent to prison for the first time. He'd never experienced prison. And he believed he was going to be sent away for 10 years. In the end, he was actually released after four years in 1928, and ended up coming back to Berlin with absolutely no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. And what did he find to fill that void? Well, many of his friends said, you know, you should join the army, you should get involved with politics, and he'd had enough by then.

And so he joined this, I guess, a movement, this back to land movement. And he went to a farm and he'd always loved, as a kid, he'd always loved horses and dogs and other animals. He loved nature. I think that was his happy place was with nature. And he went to the farm and he had a great time. He met this woman called Hedvig, who then he married. They had a baby together and they were on this farm in Pomerania and he never wanted to leave. And later he wrote in his memoirs that actually he kind of wished he never had left. He'd had this amazing time on the farm. And it was only when his boss on the farm said, look, we should set up a stable. I know you love horses. Why don't we set up a stable as an economic opportunity? Because the SS by then,

we're talking the mid thirties now, we're moving forward, the early 30s, the SS had been created and they needed stables for their horses. And so, I mean, it's interesting how these things happen because of serendipity, right? Sometimes these big decisions in history don't necessarily happen because of well-thought-out plans. And this is an example. His boss said, let's set up a stable. Well, to set up a stable for the SS, you had to be a part of the SS. So Rudolf joined the SS, not because he wanted to go back in the military or get involved with politics, because he wanted to set up a stable. He went to the parade ground on the day that they become, I don't know, sworn in or they've given their insignia. And there he saw Heinrich Himmler, who he knew already from the early 20s, from the Freikorps days. And Himmler said, recognized him immediately because of the

Barton-Bormann connection and all that stuff. He's a very connected person. And Himmler looked at Rudolf and said, we need you. We need you back. We need you back in politics. So Rudolf goes to speak with his wife, Hedwig, who also loves being on the farm. And despite her nervousness, Rudolf agrees that he will actually leave the farm. And that's when he gets assigned to Dachau, which at the time was the first, what became known as concentration camps, basically for political prisoners. So the Nazis got into power, and now they're kind of trying to staff up the administration, and they're looking around thinking, God, here's an original loyalist, this guy, we can trust him. And suddenly they've got all this

opportunity for patronage. They're in charge. Yeah, it's jobs for the boys, isn't it, in a sense, but it's also a reliable set of hands. Now, he was very junior at this stage. He'd only been to prison as an inmate, but he'd never actually worked in a prison. I mean, he's never had a job really in any kind of government administration. And he worked at quite a junior level. And again, he describes his early exposure with quite a lot of distaste, the punishment beatings, the way the prisoners are treated. retreated. But again, he became very much attached to those in authority. He quickly rose up through the ranks and he was there for four years from 1934 to 1938. So you're right. So Hitler comes to power in 1933. Rudolf Hoss joins this Dachau camp very soon afterwards, 1934. He's there for four years during these formative period of the Nazi era when really Hitler's getting rid of all his enemies, right? Up to 1938. And then he gets a big promotion, again, from Himmler via his deputy Glucks,

who basically reassigns Huss to his first big job as adjutant, as second in command of Sachsenhausen, which is another camp, an important camp near Berlin. And the reason why it's so important is that was the center of the administration of the concentration camps inspectorate. These were the people who actually ran all the hundreds of camps. Some people actually think it may be as many as thousands of camps around Germany, then later on around occupied Europe. And it was this inspectorate of concentration camps that was based in this building that looked like a letter T. So they called it the T building just outside the camp. And he worked in the camp and he was actually in charge of punishments and discipline. So this is when he really steps in for the first time into this, I don't know if you could call it a persona,

but he adopts this set of behaviors, which were incredibly brutal, incredibly strong, so much so that he was asked to, and then he performed an execution of one of his former friends. Wow. So he really was somebody who could carry out orders despite, and again, he talks about this, despite his feelings. And another early indication that he was able to overcome his instincts, overcome his personal feelings in order to fulfill an order. So what's your understanding of this man? He's a good soldier. He does what he's told. Has he just been drilled in the loyalty and chain of command is everything. He's writing these things. He knows that these punishment beating things are

wrong and yet here he is carrying out this execution. What's going on? How does that happen? Well, this is the million dollar question, right? We could jump forward to some of those trying to answer that. But how does someone do this? How does somebody who clearly has emotional intelligence, who clearly has, and you can tell by his writing, clearly is affected by what he does and yet still does it. So during my research period, then afterwards, I was in touch with his daughter, Brigitte.

I spent a long time trying to find members of Rudolf Huss's family. And she actually happened to be living in Washington, DC. That's how I found where she was, which wasn't far from where I was living at the time. And it took me three years to persuade her to speak with me. And I asked her about her father and what he was like. And she loved him. It was clear she loved him. She said she loved him.

And she was somebody who described him as this emotionally complex human being who was capable of reading them stories at the end of the day, of taking them on trips to the church and singing carols on the sled, of playing music in the house, of asking about their day. An affectionate, a physically affectionate person, despite his own childhood, despite his own distance from his own parents. person, despite his own childhood, despite his own distance from his own parents. And yet he was capable of these atrocities. And I asked her, how is that possible? And she said, there must've been two sides to him. And I have to tell you, this totally freaked me out when she said this to me. She said, there must've been two sides to him, the side I knew and this other side.

the side I knew and this other side. And if that's the case, if that's true, that means we're all capable of doing these things. All humans are capable of carrying out appalling atrocities. And it becomes a question of choice. Do we do it or not do it? And in Rudolph's case, he kept on making a choice that he would do it again and again, day after day after day, with cataclysmic results. No, I think that's the true horror of the Nazi regime, is that they weren't bad people. They were like the rest of us. I think that it requires that level of honesty, I think, really. What does he do? Tell me. He goes to Auschwitz from Dachau, does he? Yes. So he gets an order from this guy Gluck, who's his immediate boss, who runs the concentration camp inspectorate, to go to what is now occupied Poland. We're in 1940. So the Germans occupied Poland, what, September 1939.

And Gluck says to Rudolf Hoess, you've done great. Go to occupied Poland to this town near Krakow called Oświesem, which the Germans called Auschwitz, but the Poles called Oświesem, and set us up a camp. And it's going to be for political prisoners. That's what it is. So Rudolf goes there with his family and he grabs a house next to the camp owned by a local family. And he sets about rebuilding this camp. It had been a barracks for the Polish army. It was in terrible shape. And the first prisoners who are a lot of Russian prisoners, Polish political prisoners, their job was to build the camp. This was the original Auschwitz. Later it became known as Auschwitz I. If anyone's been to Auschwitz, this is the old part of the camp where the big red brick buildings

are, where the gate is, where the work sets you free, you know, by Mein Freit, on the gate. You know, the very famous images. Quite small relatively to the later camps. And he spends the next few months driving these people to do that. The Germans hadn't given him any resources, so he had to literally go and steal bricks, steal barbed wire, use his resourcefulness to build this camp for political prisoners. And once it was complete, it then started housing tens of thousands of political prisoners now from beyond Poland and Russia to Germany and elsewhere. And that's how it continued. There was some dispute about the dates when this happened, but there was a meeting. Heinrich Himmler calls Rudolf Hoss back to Berlin. Rudolf Hoss says it was in the summer of 1942. Other people say it was earlier. Heinrich Himmler tells Rudolf that he's being ordered by Adolf Hitler directly to carry out what they were calling the final solution of the Jewish question, the elimination of Jewish people

in Europe. And to do that, the center of this would be the camp in Auschwitz, Rudolf Huss' camp. And it was up to Rudolf to actually find a way of implementing it. Himmler said they'd be sending transports, trains full of Jewish people from around Europe to the camp soon. He had to go and find a way of, in air quotes, solving this problem. It's a disgusting thing to say, solving this problem. It was passed down. So from Hitler to Himmler to people like Hoss to solve the problem, it was clear that he was supposed to get rid of these people. There was a technical problem, which is that up till then, there had been mass murder of the Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, using the Eisengruppen, where they would grab whole villages of Jews, line them up against a big ditch and shoot them.

And they found that, first of all, it was expensive because they had to use a lot of bullets. But worse, as far as the Germans were concerned, it had a psychological toll on the soldiers carrying out. I mean, it's disgusting even talking about it this way, the psychological toll on the soldiers. And so Rudolf Hoss was being tasked with a way of doing a different way. And he went back and they tried different things. And eventually what they found through experimentation was that if you use this

vermicide Zyklon B against... They first tried it on Russian prisoners, actually, political prisoners. It was a very cost-effective way of bringing about mass murder. They tried it in... There was this old crematorium in the old camp, the original camp, I guess, of Auschwitz. And that's where they started this out. And they succeeded in killing large numbers of people in very short periods of time with no contact between the killers and the victims, no visual contact. And it was very quick. And as it happens, the crematorium where this took

place was within eyesight of Rudolf Huss's own house. So again, if you've been to Auschwitz, the Huss family villa is just on the edge of the camp. The back wall of the garden of his house was about 150 foot from the crematorium. Clearly, Rudolf decided that the scale of what was coming their way wasn't going to be satisfied by this new mechanism. of what was coming their way wasn't going to be satisfied by this new mechanism. So that's when they built this new camp called Auschwitz II or Birkenau, which I've been there a few times. It's just devastating. It's so big.

It's incredibly big. And that's where they started building the first crematorium, then another crematorium, then another crematorium, these mass places of execution. And Rudolph created this industrial process of mass murder over the next months and years. Did he have any discomfort with these orders? This is a man who'd written down that he was worried about the punishment beatings he'd witnessed a few years before. Now he's trying to streamline genocide. What's happened? What's going on? Can I read you something in his own words? Would that be helpful?

Yeah. Okay. This is from what I'm calling his memoir. So this is what he wrote two or three years later. So this is Rudolf's own words. I had to see everything that was being done, day or night. I had to watch bodies being collected up and burned. I had to see teeth being broken out, hair cut off. I had to witness all these horrors for hour after hour. I had to stand there myself in the dreadful, sinister stench that arose when mass graves were dug and the bodies burnt. I also, at the request of the doctors, had to look through the peephole into the gas chamber and watch the inmates dying. I had to do all this because everyone looked to me and it was for me to show them that I not only gave the orders, I was also prepared to be present myself, just as I had to require the men I commanded to be present.

And then he later on goes on to say that he had profound psychological reactions to this. He started drinking a lot. He found it very hard to be around his family and children. By this stage, he had five children. He said that he was often thinking about his own family when he was in the middle of this mass murder. He spent nights by himself with his horses in the barns because he just couldn't cope. So this was somebody who absolutely was experiencing the horror. And yet every day, Dan, every day he got up and did it again. And then he encouraged others to do the same. It's mind boggling. He was running Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943. He was then assigned

to Berlin to work in this concentration camp inspectorate. It was like a promotion, although there were some allegations that he was involved with corruption, which were never proven. And then he was sent back in 1944 in the spring to oversee the mass killing of all the Hungarian Jews, over 400,000 Jews in about three or four months in Auschwitz. It was so much his thing that they called him Action Hoss. And then he went back to Berlin. So he was back in Berlin by, I think, the autumn of 1944, so that by the end of the war, when the Russians arrived in Berlin in April,

he was back in Berlin. So just to come back to Auschwitz, he's there with his wife. He's going home to see his family and he's reading. He's being the loving father that his father wasn't to him. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. So when I interviewed his daughter, Brigitta, she said that he would come back at the end. She called it his work. I mean, his work. I mean, incredible to call it work. He'd come back at the end of the work tired and sad, she said. And they would have dinners together. He would read them stories in bed, for example, Hansel and Gretel and other stories. He would ask about their day. He would play music on the gramophone. He'd smoke cigars.

He would take them on sled rides in the snow. They would go and visit the horses and the dogs. He took them on boat rides along the river behind his house. She described this whole period of her life as just being wonderful. His wife, Hedwig, remarkably enough, she loved living in this house so much. She had a greenhouse full of exotic plants. She had this incredible garden for her much. She had a greenhouse full of exotic plants. She had this incredible garden for her children. They had a slide into a pond. They had bicycles.

They had two tortoises. They had dogs. She called it paradise. Paradise. I mean, it's incredible to believe. And so they're having this so-called normal life next to this appalling horror just yards away. Where do we find him in 1945 in the last weeks and months of the war? Last weeks and months of the war, Rudolf Hoss is in Berlin.

He's working now at the concentration camp inspectorate in Sachsenhausen, which is the center for operations. He's in charge of supplies and other issues for the camps, including not just Auschwitz, but all the other camps. For example, Belsen, which he had visited and he thought was appalling. And in the last week of April 1945, the Russian army is sweeping towards Berlin from the east and then the north and the south. And at the very last minute, Himmler instructs everybody to flee Berlin and then to meet again in northern Germany, near the Danish border, in a woods near the town of Flensburg. And so Rudolf goes with his family, picks up his family and his kids, and they managed to evade the oncoming army and make it to Flensburg. And he settles his wife and kids in a small town called St. Miklosdon. And meanwhile, he then goes to meet Himmler and the others. And to his total surprise,

Himmler says, it's time to give up. Get rid of your military outfits, put on your civilian clothes and disappear. And Rudolf Houss writes that he was very disappointed by this. He thought they should keep fighting. But being a good soldier, he did what he was told. And he takes on the identity of a sailor called Franz Lang. And he's actually captured by the British who hold him for a while. They don't know who they've got, and then they let him go. And then for the next few months, we're talking the autumn of 1945 into the winter of 1945, he works on a farm in a tiny hamlet called Gotrupel outside of Flensburg, very near the Danish border, working as a farm laborer. And that's where he is in the spring of 1946.

and that's where he is in the spring of 1946. And this is the time when the Nuremberg trials are at their peak. And to the incredible frustration of the Americans, the French, the British, and the Russians, none of the senior Nazis who are on trial are willing to admit their culpability in what is probably the greatest war crime of all time, the Holocaust. The public is becoming aware that millions of Jews and others have been murdered as part of the final solution. There's a desperate call for justice in the media around the world. And yet this Nuremberg trial is failing because none of those who were at the center of the decision

making is willing to admit what happened, that they were responsible that the final solution took place, that it was all an enormous conspiracy. And it was at that time that Rudolf Hoss was in hiding just near the Danish border and actually trying to escape the country. Like so many other Nazis, he was trying to use one of the rat lines to escape the country, probably to South America with his family. And he was still trying to organize the passage in January, February 1946. But he doesn't make it because he's tracked down. Tell me about that. Well, this is where the story becomes very personal. In 2006, I was living, as I said,

in America, just outside of Washington, DC, where my dad calls me. And he says, Thomas, I've got some bad news. I said, oh yeah, it's never one of those kind of phone calls you want to get. And he says, well, your uncle, he's really my great uncle, your uncle Hunts has died. Now I knew uncle Hunts very well. I grew up with him. He was my grandmother's brother. He and his twin brothers were the comedians of the family. They're the ones who would tell us kids dirty jokes, and they were always doing pranks. He was a larger-than-life character. And I knew that he'd grown up in Berlin, that he and the rest of the family, including my

grandmother, had to flee Germany because they were Jewish in the 1930s. They made a new life in England. I also knew that he signed up for the British Army at the very beginning of the war and that he'd actually arrived in Belsen soon after its liberation in 1945. That's what I knew. what I discovered when I read the eulogy my dad sent me, was that my great uncle, when he was in Belton, he was part of what was called the number one war crimes investigation team. I mean, incredibly enough, Dan, they were the only unit in the whole of the British army whose task was to hunt down Nazis when the war ended. There was like seven or eight of them, of which two or three were interpreters. There was a couple of photographers, some former police officers, and a barrister called

Leo Genn. Really under-resourced. They had almost no equipment, almost no intelligence, no manpower. And it was their task to kind of solve the problem of all these former Nazis. Well, he was in Belsen. My great-uncle Hans was in Belsen. His first job was to help clear up the camp, this appalling disaster. I guess 80 years ago, the camp was liberated April 1945, and he was there. He had to help literally carry the bodies

to the mass graves. You can imagine what that was like. He was a young German Jew. It must have been absolutely horrific for him. And then his task was to interview the former SS officers who used to run the Belsen camp, but had formerly, as it happened, a lot of them had come from Auschwitz, including Josef Kramer, Irma Grese, Hostler, and he was interviewing them. And for the first time, he's hearing straight from those involved with firsthand experience what happened in Auschwitz, including the transports arriving with the Jews on the cattle carts, the selections on the platforms, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the punishment beatings. I mean, when I heard this, when I read this for the first time, because in the Imperial War Museum, you can actually find these statements, these affidavits that my great uncle took with some others. And I can only imagine what it was like for him to hear this firsthand. I mean, there'd been rumors in the British media. There'd been a few reports, but a lot of these reports weren't believed. And they were often buried in the back pages of the newspapers. But here,

And they were often buried in the back pages of the newspapers. But here he was hearing firsthand about the actual mechanics of the Holocaust, the scale of it. It must have been appalling. So it goes to his boss. He says, look, anyone can do the interpreting for you because that's what he was doing. Let me go and find some of these Nazis. And his boss said, no, no, we've got too much to do. We've got our own trials.

Because before the Nuremberg trial, there was something called the Belsen trial. It was the first war crimes trial. And it was for Joseph Kramer, the commandant of Belsen plus some others. And that was coming up. It was a British trial. They needed help from Hunt and others to prepare the affidavits. And so Hunt then, incredibly enough, in his own time, went hunting for Nazis. I know this because we have a letter to his sister, my grandmother, in which he says he

was hunting for the SS bastards in his spare time. I mean, it's really remarkable. He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't have power of arrest. He doesn't have any of the intelligence. He's never been a detective before, but he learns on the job how to do this. So much so that come the end of the year, his boss says, look, okay, you know what you're doing. We're going to ask you to go and actually hunt down the guy,

the Nazi who ran Luxembourg, a guy called Gustav Simon. And so he, through this remarkable three week journey, he actually does find Gustav Simon. It's very much day of the jackal stuff. He's taken on other identities, changed how he looks, he's colored his hair. He tracks this guy down, he brings him back for justice. And then there's a couple of stories about what happens to this guy. According to some, Gustav Simon hung himself when he was in jail after my uncle had arrested him. According to others, and this is a well-known theory in Luxembourg, my uncle took Gustav Simon with some partisans and shot him in the woods. So you have these two competing stories. Hans comes back and he's actually reprimanded by his boss who said, this guy has to testify

in trial. You've screwed up. However, you've proved your ability. And they gave him this next job, which was to hunt down the commandant of Auschwitz. So here you have this, I don't know, 26-year-old German Jew refugee in the British army who's been given the job of hunting down the greatest mass murderer of all time, Rudolf Huss. And he gets him. He gets his man. Yeah. He tracks him down through this remarkable journey to this hamlet in Gotrupel in Northern Germany by the Denmark border.

He does it by finding his family who British intelligence tabs on. He arrests the wife, Hedwig. Hedwig won't crack. So then Hans, my uncle, takes the eldest son who also refuses to divulge any information. He was like 18 or 19 by this time, Klaus. He was a real supporter of the Nazis. He was a Hitler youth, but also part of the Werwolf, the resistance, as it were, after the end of the war. Klaus refuses to crack. Then my uncle puts him in a next door cell to Hedwig and organizes a ruse. He brings an old steam train next to the cell and says to Hedwig, you hear that train, that train is off to Russia right now. And I'm going to put your son on that train. And you know what the Russians will do to

him unless you divulge what you know about your husband. What's his name? Where's he hiding? How can I find him? And Hedvig then writes down the name Franz Lang and the village, the hamlet called Truppel. So that night, Hans and a group of men, about 20 British soldiers get into some trucks, drive through the snow to this tiny hamlet of Cotrupel. At first, Hans can't find him. And then he sees that there's an old barn in the farmyard, knocks on the door. And this man opens the door. And immediately Hans puts his gun in the man's mouth because by this time, a lot of the Nazis had killed themselves with cyanide poisoning. For example, Himmler, they check him for cyanide poisoning, didn't have any cyanide capsule, didn't have a cyanide capsule. And Hans says,

well, who are you? What's your name? The guy goes, my name is Franz Lang, hands him his papers. And indeed it says Franz Lang. And then he points to the name next to the door and it says Franz Lang. And Hans says, no, I don't think you are. I think you're Rudolf Huss. And the guy denies it. They go backwards and forwards. And Hans is really frustrated because he thinks Hedwig probably didn't lie to him, but maybe she did. But then being German, he noticed that the man, Franz Lang, had a wedding ring on his finger. So he says, give me your wedding ring. Because in Germany, he knew this, in Germany, the men and the women often have their names inside the wedding rings, their initials and their full names. Franz Lang tries to pull the ring off. He can't get it off. He's yanking at the ring.

Hans says, give me the ring, give me the ring. And Rudolf is trying to get it off. Hans turns to his sergeant and says, go and get me a knife from the kitchen. So the guy goes off for a second, comes back with a big knife, a bread knife. And Hans says, look, you've got two choices. Either I'm going to cut your finger off you and get the ring, or you're just going to give it to me. So Rudolf puts the finger in his mouth, pulls off the ring. And of course it has his name, Rudolf Hossenet. So he captures Rudolf Hoss. He's got a choice. What does he do? Does he either just take him back to the prison, hand him over to the authorities, or does he let his men have a go?

A lot of the men he's with are Jewish as well, and they've lost family members in the children in the camps. And don't forget that Hans has already been involved in the death of Gustav Simon, this other Nazi, probably been involved with. And actually, I spoke to a family member who said that Hans told him later that he was involved with the killing of Gustav Simon. So he's got form. And he says to his men, have at it. So they then lay into him. And we know this because at the end of his memoir, Rudolf Hoss actually talks about the British beating him up. And he mentions this English captain, my uncle, who was responsible. And Hans lets them go on and go on and they tear off his clothing and they're beating him. They're smashing his nose. They've

got ax handles and they're smashing him with ax handles. And eventually Hans says enough. And he's decided that actually his own sense of personal revenge isn't as important as what Rudolf has to say in terms of history, in terms of the trials. And so he takes Rudolf back to the prison, and he's then taken to Nuremberg. This is Rudolf. He's not put in trial in Nuremberg, but if you remember, they were having real problems having anybody admit what the Nazis had done. And he was put on trial as a witness. I actually went to speak to one of the prosecutors, the American prosecutors who was at Nuremberg, who explained to me, this was very, very late in the day. It was too late for the prosecution to call him.

It was only the defense who actually calling witnesses at that stage. And so they came up with a plan that they managed to persuade Kaltenbrunner, who's Heinrich Himmler's deputy, to call Huss as a witness to prove that Kaltenbrunner had never been to Auschwitz. So it was in Kaltenbrunner's favor to call Rudolf Huss, who then... You can Google this. This footage is actually online. It's amazing, this black and white footage. And Rudolf Hoss then is cross-examined after he then says, Carlton Britten never been to Auschwitz. And Carlton Britten, of course, is delighted by this, of course. But then it makes no difference. He's still found guilty and hung. But then the American prosecutors then cross-examine Rudolf Hoss. And in a slightly weird high-pitched voice,

I don't know whether that was his voice or whether that's just a recording, he does this extraordinary thing. He starts blow by blow explaining exactly how Auschwitz worked, how they organized the transports, the selections, the gassings, the killings, the experiments, the medical experiments, and so on. I mean, it's chilling, chilling to hear it from him himself. That actually turned the course of the trial. Hans Frank, who was in charge of occupied Poland, who was on trial, said that that testimony changed the course of the trial. And then he, Hans Frank, admitted his knowledge, and then the others did

as well. And because of Rudolf Hoss's testimony, basically almost all of them were found guilty, crimes against humanity, genocide, this new crime of genocide. Rudolf Hoss was then transported to Poland because what had been agreed between the allies was that the war criminals would be tried in the places that they actually committed the crime. So in Rudolf Hose's case, this would be occupied Poland. So he was then held in prison in Poland. That's when he wrote his memoirs. And then he was then tried and found guilty. And in April 1947, he was taken back to Auschwitz, and they built a gallows. And there he was hanged on the gallows between his old house

and the crematoria when he had first experimented with Zyklon B. You've looked into this so closely, you've got personal ties to people involved in it. And then you built personal ties with members of Hoss's family. You met his daughter. What have you learned about the nature of evil and the evil things that we do? Those are some pretty big questions. So, I mean, in terms of what I learned about him and the process, I think one of the hardest things I wrote or the hardest experiences I had was when I read his letters to his children. While he was in Polish prison, he wrote this series of letters to his children and to his wife. And to my shame, when I read those letters, which expresses his love

for his children, giving them advice and counsel, suggesting they look after the mother. And they were quite hopeful in some ways. I actually started crying, Dan, and I was so disgusted with myself because if anyone's evil, this guy's evil, right? I don't know if I believe in good and evil, but if there is such a thing as evil, this guy must be evil. And yet here I was, I was responding emotionally to this guy. I found that so disturbing. As I said earlier, I met the daughter, his daughter, Brigitte, in Washington, D.C. I also went with his grandson to Auschwitz and also his daughter-in-law to Auschwitz. I've spoken to the daughter for more

than 30 hours or something. And when he was in Nuremberg, Rudolf Huss was evaluated by a team of American psychologists. And they all found that he was above average intelligence. Indeed, almost all the Nazis in Nuremberg were found to be above average intelligence. And what that says is they weren't psychopaths. Certainly with Rudolf Husserl's case, he was a man who was capable of emotional empathy. You could see that for his daughter's response. He's a man who had intelligence, who made choices every day. And for me, that was terrifying. And when I first realized that, that we're all capable of committing appalling acts,

for three days, I have to say my mind was really shaken up. Because this is now not just about Jews and Nazis. It's about humans everywhere in the world, which is why we see appalling things around the world, whether it be genocides in other countries or war crimes, because humans can do terrible things, but they could also do wonderful things, fantastic things. We can do both. I think that's my takeaway. When he was asked at the end of his life by the Polish prosecutor, does he have any regrets? Rudolf said, yes, I do. And even then I'm hoping, okay, okay, he's going to say this was a terrible thing. And I was hoping because, you know, I guess I'm, because I guess maybe I'm naive. I've learned my lesson. I should never have done it. But he doesn't say that. He said, my big regret, he said,

was that we committed these appalling things, these murders in Auschwitz. And the reason why he said it was a mistake was because they were so bad, it motivated the allies to fight harder to win the war. I mean, this was not a man filled with regret in any kind of normal sense. At the end of his life, also in his memoir, he wrote that, and I thought this was intriguing about him and about the kind of person he was. He asked people to remember him as a monster and not as an emotionally complex person, because he thought that would be easier for his family. Again, showing quite a sophistication, but also quite chilling.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is the story of Rudolf Huss, the man in charge of Auschwitz. More after this. To be continued... Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I've come into the house now. I've come right up to the top of the house and I've got a really expansive view over Auschwitz. This is the house where Hus and his family lived. This is the bedroom where his kids slept at night. And from here you can see

everything. You can see the barracks, you can see the barbed see everything you can see the barracks you can see the barbed wire you can see the fence and in fact you can see the chimney of a gas chamber that was number one that was the first experimental gas chamber they built here he built here and there's a crematorium next door and that's a hundred meters away from this window and tellingly he asked that these windows could be frosted so that his children would not be able to see what was going on. He knew that what he was doing, his job, was so barbaric, inhumane and criminal that he could not have his children even see the consequences

of what he was doing. 20 metres away was the worst place on earth, a place of starvation, beatings, separation from loved ones, rape and genocide. And here, it was a place of cuddles and story time and playing in the garden, playing with your siblings, food, plenty, happiness. And that concrete fence I'm looking down at now was all that divided those two worlds, and yet it was absolutely unbridgeable. Just coming down the stairs now, big original wrought

iron on the banisters, the balustrade, a big chunky piece of wood, all original. Now there's three floors that people lived on. There's a basement. It's one of those parts of the houses that their family that lived here after the war, after the Huss family avoided entirely. And it's down, down, down these stairs in the basement. I've come down now into the basement beneath the house. It's dark and I'm crouching.

There's a utility room here, big sink with some original tiles. There were forced labourers from the camp working as domestic staff in the house. This is where they would have cleaned Huss's linen, allowed them to live a life of leisure upstairs. But down here is a brick and concrete lined passage I've just entered now. And this takes you from the house underneath the barbed wire directly into the camp itself. There's some hooks on the wall there, which look like they have a sort of gruesome purpose.

But in fact, apparently it was where Huss hung the family kayaks. They used to love kayaking on the river that bubbles along just outside the house on the other side of the road. So just as with everywhere in this property there's a just a bizarre fusion a juxtaposition of the everyday the mundane the domestic and the genocidal and as i'm coming down to the end of the tunnel here it's been blocked up but it strikes me that as we heard in the podcast his daughter said her dad had two sides to him though he had two identities he He was the loving family man, but there was also the butcher.

And it strikes me that this corridor here is where he shook off one identity, crossed the threshold, and took on his other identity. I've gone as far as I can go down the tunnel now, so I'm going to head back upstairs and I'm going to meet some people from the Counter-Extremism Project

that bought this property to find out how they envisage its future. I can go down the tunnel now, so I'm gonna head back upstairs and I'm gonna meet some people from the Counter-Extremism Project that bought this property, to find out how they envisage its future. Now through here, I think, is Hurs' office on the first floor. And there's some artefacts that have been found in the attic since this organisation took the property over. And I'm heading in here to meet Dr Schindler, who is one of the senior team members in charge of renovating this extraordinary site.

So Dr Schindler, tell me how you secured this house. This house was a private house until a couple of months ago. It was owned by a Polish officer that was built for in 1937. Then it was taken over by Rudolf Hirst and then after the war given back to the Polish officer who sold it to a Polish family. So in this house for the last 80 years a family lived here who simply used this as their private home. So it was really obvious to us that if you have the keys to this house on the 80th anniversary where the last remaining survivors of Auschwitz are going to be in Auschwitz, this needs to be open.

This needs to be open to them if they have time, if they have the energy to come, so that at least they can one time go into this house which was a paradise for him while they were living in hell over there. You've got objects in here that give us a little sense of that paradise. Yeah, I call this room the mind of Rudolf Fuss and it's really the juxtaposition of the things that we found when we cleaned out the attic. So the family lived here but there were two spaces in this house where they really didn't go. One was the cellar because it really scared them. And you've seen the cellar. It's scary.

And the other one was the attic. They just didn't care to go to the attic ever. So when we cleaned out the house after eight years, we found some quite astonishing things. Let me show you. So when we went into the attic and cleaned out rubble that was in there, we realized there was something stuffed into a hole into the roof. And once we took the stuff off, this was actually plugging up the roof. It's a trouser of a Auschwitz prisoner.

You can see here still very clearly the red triangle, so it was a political prisoner. If you put black light on this, you can see a faint outline of the Star of David. And we just about, under specific lighting conditions, can read the beginnings of a number here. But we hope that the museum can be able to help us to read the rest of the number. If we have the number, we have the name.

So we could identify the person whose trousers these were? Yeah. The Germans were very good in writing lists. to read the rest of the number. If we have the number, we have the name. However, you could identify the person whose trousers these were. The Germans were very good in writing lists. If you have a number, you have the name. But what is really tragic about these trousers is not that it was in the attic. It was used to plug a hole in the roof. So this was the trouser of a living, breathing, crying, laughing, loving, hating human being and because it's now plucking a roof it means that human being being distinguished in the Holocaust and for him, for Huss, this was just a piece of cloth that could pluck up a annoying roof leak that he had. One other really

shocking aspect, so we assume the likelihood is high that it is a female Jewish prisoner who had that trousers. But the real, really sad story here is also that the last owner of this trousers sewed two pieces of cable on either end of the front of the trousers, because apparently the individual had lost so much weight that they had to make the trousers significantly tighter. So this is what happened. This is the Holocaust in a piece of cloth. For the Nazis, this is a piece of fabric, but it is actually the last testament of a living human being. So that's the first part of what we found. The second class of items that we found really shows the other side of the equation.

You have a Waffen-SS coffee mug, you have a coffee jar, Kaffee in German, you have German cigarettes, you have black boot polish for the officer's boots you have scraps of newspapers including from the beginning of December 1944 so just a month before the liberation and so what this makes clear is while he had a beer

had a coffee, smoked a cigarette, polished his boots or got his boots polished read some newspapers this was going on with the trousers right this is the ordinary life that he lived while he did this extraordinary industrial killing that he devised he is the mind behind the idea on how to most effectively most quickly, most quickly, and most cost-effectively kill the largest number of people. People died here all the time, but they died on schedule. You had a scheduled date where you are going to die so that the machinery can tack along. And while he has this really comfortable life here

and we are in the house and you feel it's warm If you go outside in January It can be minus 10 minus 12 and the trousers and a shirt is all the prisoners had so he is in this warm house having a cigarette while people starving and Freezing to death just five meters from here. So what are the plans for the house now? So if you look at these objects it tells one big warning. This must not become a memorial of Rudolf Hoess. This house must be a reminder and a stark warning. This house must scream jacuzzi. Right? So we are going to totally transform the interior of the house. This will not be a shrine to Rudolf Hoess.

are going to totally transform the interior of the house. This will not be a shrine to Rubeus. Dani Lipskill will help us to redesign the entire interior. We're gonna take the walls out, take the floors out. It's becoming a void and then in this void we are going to play music composed by prisoners in Auschwitz. So if you enter the void you will hear on a loop the music that Maestro Lottoro, an Italian musician who devoted his entire life to collecting this music from all of the concentration and death camps and the prisoner camps of the Second World War. His music that he found and he recorded will play because he always says this is the last time you hear the voice of the individual. You saw the trousers of the individual there, when you come into this house you will hear the last testament of these individuals through the music that was composed in this camp before they died. Adjacent to the house will be the

Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, ARCHA. The visitors will come here, hear the music, and then the center will provide them with six things that you need to do in your family, among your work colleagues, in your community, that you should and could do to counter extremism, antisemitism and terrorism. It's no longer the victory lap of democracy. It's at danger. And we all need to be more active. Thank you, Dr. Schindler. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Well I'm just walking through the garden now. The sun is at its zenith. It's actually quite

warm even though there's still snow on the ground. And here in the garden, it's Thomas Harding. How are you, buddy? We're here next to the Hoss house, which I've never been into before, even though I've been looking into this for about 16 years. And I'm feeling a bit wobbly about the whole thing. Have you learned things since being here? I really have. I mean, first of all, it's so much bigger inside than I was expecting.

I've always kind of slightly scoffed off this. You know, people use the word villa, the Hoss Villa. I always thought it was like pretentious. But going in there, I really, I totally get it. And these grounds are smart. And again, I've been here a few times before, but I never quite got the topography of the land. Like how, and now today I've actually worked out the grounds are, they're huge, right? It doesn't just go along the back of the camp.

It kind of wraps itself around and keeps going. And that's where Hedvig, the wife, had the greenhouse. It's where they had the pool, the slide. They used to have picnics out there. I'm really struck by just the scale of their luxury. And yeah, again, I didn't quite realise. I mean, you read about it it but we're talking meters two three four five meters from hell i mean you could hear the inmates across the the wire i mean we can see why what is that like a four meter high concrete wall then you've got

barbed wire being stretched above it you'd be able to hear them right you'd be able to hear the shooting on the punishment block that i mean there were gallows where people were killed, hanged, and you would have probably heard their shrieking. You would have heard all that stuff. You would have heard the rumbling of trucks going backwards and forwards, the assembly, the sounds of the assembly being called, where the prisoners had to stand for hours, all times a year. I mean, those sounds would have really been part of their life here.

So I'm guessing this trip hasn't brought any answers, just intensified your questions in some way. Like, how could he live between these two lives? I mean, I'm a very visual person, so I think it has actually brought answers, because now I've been inside the house, I can see the place that they used to have the Christmas tree or the place they slept.

I can see the proximity of it. How about you? What's your experience? I'm just stunned by the geography. I'm stunned by the proximity. From the windows, you see the barracks. I thought perhaps it might be kind of behind a leafy, ivy-clad wall or something, but no, it's right up in your face. I don't know how you could have a happy domestic life here. I've never been anywhere where the yawning gap between heaven and hell

is as profound, as as wide or as close but i think what i'm learning is we all live on that scale somewhere just that this place is the ultimate nth degree yeah i think that's really well put and it also kind of casts into quite stark light our everyday choices doesn't it Like how are we today making those choices? How are we choosing between heaven and hell and other choices we're making? Are they bettering our lives? Are they bettering other people's lives?

And how much are we aware of those consequences? Thomas, great to see you. Very special to finish our conversation right here in the garden. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much. And if you want to see this house for yourself you can head to our

history hit YouTube channel where our film all about the Hoss Villa is up now thanks for listening folks see you next time Thank you.