A first-person account by the SS captain who arranged the gassing of two million people at Auschwitz between 1941-1943.

The renowned WWII historian’s definitive biography of the notorious German SS officer convicted of war crimes for his role in the Holocaust. Described as one of the greatest mass-murderers in history, Rudolf Höss was the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. He was one of the chief architects behind Hitler’s Final Solution. In The Commandant of Auschwitz, Volker Koop details Höss’s military career, his conversion to Nazi ideology, and his ruthless commitment to the Nazi cause. At the age of fourteen, Höss joined the 21st Regiment of Dragoons and rose through the ranks to become the youngest non-commissioned officer in the German Army. After joining the Nazi party in 1922, he was convicted of participating in at least one political assassination, for which he spent six years in prison. In 1934, Höss became a Block Leader at Dachau concentration camp. By 1940, he would be given command of his own camp near the town of Auschwitz. Charged with carrying out the Final Solution of the Jewish question, Höss set about his task with relish. By his own estimation, he was responsible for the deaths of at least 3,000,000 individuals. Justice caught up with Höss after the German surrender. He was arrested on March 11th, 1946, after a year of posing as a gardener under a false name. He was found guilty of war crimes and hanged on April 16th, 1947.

By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Höss was history's greatest mass murderer, having personally supervised the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is the first complete translation of Höss's memoirs into English. These bone-chilling memoirs were written between October 1946 and April 1947. At the suggestion of Professor Sanislaw Batawia, a psychologist, and Professor Jan Shen, the prosecuting attorney for the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, Höss wrote a lengthy and detailed description of how the camp developed, his impressions of the various personalities with whom he dealt, and even the extermination of millions in the gas chambers. This written testimony is perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because it is the only candid, detailed, and (for the most part) honest description of the Final Solution from a high-ranking SS officer intimately involved in carrying out the plans of Hitler and Himmler. With the cold objectivity of a common hit-man, Höss chronicles the discovery of the most effective poison gas, and the technical obstacles that often thwarted his aim to kill as efficiently as possible. Staring at the horror without reacting, Höss allowed conditions at Auschwitz to reduce human beings to walking skeletons - then he labelled them as subhumans fit only to die. Readers will witness Höss's shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his increasingly disturbed, yet always ineffectual, conscience.

Rudolf Hoess was the first commandant at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Imprisoned and awaiting execution after the war, Hoess wrote a large-scale autobiography, which Jurg Amann has artfully edited to produce a monstrous monologue in Hoess's own words - The Commandant. In addition to Hoess's early childhood and ascent through the ranks of the SS, it presents the atrocities and mass executions at Auschwitz from the perspective of the camp's highest overseer. This firsthand account provides disturbing insight into Hitler's 'final solution' and into the nature of evil itself.

Chronicles the lesser-known story of an intrepid Jewish investigator who pursued and captured notorious Nazi Germany war criminal Rudolf Höss in an account that explains how the case continues to impact today's world.

An extraordinary and unique document: Hoess was in charge of the huge extermination camp in Poland where the Nazis murdered some three million Jews, from the time of its creation (he was responsible for building it) in 1940 until late in 1943, by which time the mass exterminations were half completed. Before this he had worked in other concentration camps, and afterwards he was at the Inspectorate in Berlin. He thus knew more, both at first-hand and as an administrator, about Nazi Germany's greatest crime than did any save two or three other men. Taken prisoner by the British, he was handed over to the Poles, tried, sentenced to death, and taken back to Auschwitz and there hanged. During the period between his trial and his execution, he was ordered to write his autobiography. This is it. Hoess repeatedly says he was glad to write the book. He enjoyed the work. And finally the most careful checking has shown that he took great pains to tell the truth. Here we have, painted by his own hand, a vivid and unforgettable self-portrait of one of the great monsters of all time. To this are added portraits of some of his more spectacular fellow-criminals. The royalties from this macabre but historically important book go to the fund set up to help the few survivors from the Auschwitz camps.

Rudolf Hoss has been called the greatest mass murderer in history. As the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, he supervised the killing of more than 1.1 million people. Unlike many of his Nazi colleagues who denied either knowing about or participating in the Holocaust, Hoss remorselessly admitted, both at the Nuremberg war crimes trial and in his memoirs, that he sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers, frankly describing the killing process. His "innovations" included the use of hydrogen cyanide (derived from the pesticide Zyklon B) in the camp's gas chambers. Hoss lent his name to the 1944 operation that gassed 430,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days, exceeding the capacity of the Auschwitz's crematoria. This biography follows Hoss throughout his life, from his childhood through his Nazi command and eventual reckoning at Nuremberg. Using historical records and Hoss' autobiography, it explores the life and mind of one of history's most notorious and sadistic individuals.