By his own admission, SS Kommandant Rudolf Hoess 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 Hoess'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, Hoess 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, Hoess 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, Hoess allowed conditions at Auschwitz to reduce human beings to walking skeletons - then he labelled them as subhumans fit only to die. Readers will witness Hoess's shallow rationalizations as he tries to balance his deeds with his increasingly disturbed, yet always ineffectual, conscience.
- ISBN10 0879757140
- ISBN13 9780879757144
- Publish Date 1 June 1992
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Prometheus Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 414
- Language English