Perhaps 'enjoy' is not the best word for me to put in front of this review of the book 'Commandant of Auschwitz' by Rudolph Hoess, first published in 1951. But I live in praise of Primo Levi, a writer of incomparable humanity given the inhumanity he wrote about, who by writing the forward led me to this book... ...endure where you can't enjoy, it is what Primo Levi did.
My laptop made me aware of this book, by picking up on my interest in the writings of Primo Levi. The copy I am reading is a UK/Belfast library copy. I am proud to be a user of public libraries and supporter of public service values, not least for the library having books that I would not want to own, like this one.
Primo Levi's introduction to the book is both terse and generous, particularly given that it is written by somebody, Levi, who would have been an arch enemy of Hoess when both of them were alive. But for Levi his enemies, the Nazis, did a lot that they needed to be forgiven for. After the Nazis had been defeated Levi could carefully choose what generosity of spirit there should be in his words, and his work. Any and all generosity he showed towards his former enemies came at great price to him personally, and was scientifically weighed and calibrated.
On a point of enquiry, I wonder what Levi would make of the politics of 2024, when the Nazis are either film footage or somebody else's memory and today's generation know decreasing amounts about the world as it was before they were born, and this year between a quarter and half of the world will be going to the polls ignorant of the past. This means practically a new generation of right wing parties and candidates standing, and relying on refreshed misinformation about the past to get elected in the present.
In the original German this book is 114 pages long, in the English edition the page numbers run to 181, discounting the nine appendices and index after the main text, whilst before the book proper there is a translator's note and the Primo Levi introduction. Who knows how long and what extras the original Polish edition contains....
In the English version that I am reading, Hoess initially comes across as an okay writer who is somewhat workaday in his approach. He relies on the story to be the driver of the book, rather than any of his phrasing. Some of the plus side of that limitation surely comes down to the translator's work. The credit for this book being so readable should partially go to the translator Constantine Fitzgibbons, a man whom I found a lot more out when I put his name into google and read his wikipedia entry. Fitzgibbons was a high flyer. I'll leave it at that.
As was Hoess, given the heights of authority that he reached in The Third Reich. But to begin with Hoess's beginning he was born into a prosperous middle Class Catholic family who encouraged the young Rudolph to seek his vocation of priesthood in the Catholic Church. This conditioning held with the young Rudolph until WW1, when he saw saw action at the front and was later betrayed by his family; with his parents dead and himself away from home with the war, his extended family set aside the money to make young Rudolph a priest and his sisters nuns and sold the family property, dividing among themselves the proceeds from the sale of the house. This was the end of Young Rudolph's affections for Catholicism and of his trust in his family.
If there was one thing that I would change with this book, then I would amend the lay out so that there were subject headings as signposts for the readers of the one long text design that the publishers went with. The book is relatively easy to read for the first 110 pages or so. But from there, where the side header would be 'Reflections On Different Types Of Prisoners' the book goes up a several gears, with Hoess's reflecting on the different types of prisoners that he legislated over when he was made sole leader of Auschwitz as he ran it, and the conflicting aims of commands of the hierarchy above him. By this time he is well past making arguments where the underlying premise is that he is a good Nazi who tries to be fair among bad Nazis who are plain Cruel with a capital C. Any such argument and reflection of attempted fairness is stretched beyond all credibility or explanation by about page 114, where the side header would be 'Camp Management'. There, besides his being the highest authority in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hoess is given production targets that he has to meet and given limited resources to meet them where production targets are not just mismatched with the resources he is given, but they make the targets impossible to meet.
From page 125, where the side header would be 'Slide Towards Chaos' Hoess describes a scale of loss of human life that is not beyond human imagination. Nor is the suffering beyond description. But if there is a De Sade-ian scale of pointlessness to the quantifiable human suffering that is detailed here, then the book goes beyond that scale. The accounts of thousands of people dying due to a bureaucracy that has achieved a previously impossible combination of detachment with language, descriptions of aims in terms of absolute power, and the exposure through denial of completely shambling incompetence are truly astonishing here. If De Sade had written anything like these pages then they were among the papers that the lunatic asylum he lived in for twenty seven years destroyed well within his lifetime.
When Hoess cannot fight the orders and targets set for him, he too becomes a hapless commentator on the tide of insanity and inhumanity that he is supposedly in charge of administering. His haplessness becomes notably malign when he writes about the relative merits of the social categories of prisoner he had to extract work from, homosexual vs Jew vs Roma. It seems he was almost forgiving of the Roma. Even when he is killing the Roma he lies to the relatives of those he killed, and explains that he disliked lying to the surviving relatives about who he had followed the orders to murder, because he 'liked them'.
But with the Jews Hoess's text makes plain to the reader that in his view they both deserved to be murdered, and deserved the manner and reason for their death to be worth lying about, to the nth degree. Beneath the bile about the Jews there was a hysteria, and clinically insane level of detachment, and that was where he presented himself as half well reasoned.
So where can the author go beyond bile and hysteria? He descends into multiple sequential contradictory statements of why a Jew's life is so worth lying about, and worth nothing else. How much these views were his own views and not him simply absently subordinating himself to 'The Fuhrer Principle' was difficult to distinguish as he proceeded into the section after that where the maltreatment of those under his watch, particularly women, is described in term that are even more off-hand and 'It wasn't me' toned than previous descriptions of cruelty. But he says he must obey the orders given to him whilst also blaming the inconsistency of those orders for the mass maltreatment of the women under his control.
Nowadays we write and talk about 'doom loops' as a shorthand to describe the logic with which some express their thoughts and ideas when the ideas have become both depressing and circular, where the circularity reinforces the projection of being depressed. The Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Homosexuals, Communists, Roma, prostitutes, criminals and anarchists etc in the work/death camps were all caught in a doom loop far more deathly than most situations that get called doom loops today. There the more they suffered and died, the more detached, depressed, and desperate to escape and deny the consequences of their thoughts and actions their killers became. The logic and consequences of the anti-semetic doom loop is the central argument portrayed in this book, it is what is behind every false defence by Hoess, behind every false comparison of relative virtue or worthiness for damnation he implies, behind every pseudo-moral statement he makes.
It was the Allied Forces that broke the doom loop by destroying the German economy which, amongst other things, preyed upon the Jews it killed by removing their gold fillings after it had murdered them by gassing. I'll not go on, but one footnote is telling. When Hoess is transferred to a desk job in 1943 the footnote tells of his replacement as manager of Auschwitz-Birkenau being notably more humane than Hoess was, perhaps implying that Hoess was mentally ill or was suffering from exhaustion when he ran the camp.
In conclusion, whatever the explanation for Hoess's actions and orders, and of the actions of any other similar thinking persons where the idea is couched in terms of 'being dutiful', or renewed patriotism, but the orders and actions elide with obedience to a higher, and more cruel and absolute, authority, then here we have the warning-like Primo Levi says-in this book about the folly of surrendering ourselves to ideas that invite cruelty, whether random or systematic, to lead us in the culture that we are part of. This book is good as a warning to take notice of, in ourselves.
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