Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess: The Father Of The Holocaust

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess was forty six years old at the time of his trial at Nuremburg in 1946. Born in the year 1900, Hoess joined the Schutzstaffel at age thirty three, and joined the Waffen-SS in 1939. From May 1, 1940 to December 1, 1943, Hoess was established as the Commandant of Auschwitz, with roughly three million people being murdered under his rule. As the commander of the concentration camp Auschwitz, Hoess was put on trial for the atrocities that had taken place at the facility. Seventy to eighty percent of all prisoners sent to Auschwitz were killed, with the remainder being of those who were to be used for slave labor. Two and a half million victims were murdered by means of gassing and burning, while another half million were killed by starvation and disease. Twenty thousand war prisoners from Russia, one hundred thousand Jews from Germany, and over four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were all among the dead at Auschwitz by 1944. From summer 1941 to fall 1944, thousands of mass executions had taken place under the supervision of Hoess. According to Hoess, every mass execution had taken place under the orders or direct supervision of the German Reich Main Security Office. Although Hoess was ordered by a higher power in command to do as he was told, he appeared to be completely content with the actions he …show more content…
If Hoess truly wanted the executions to stop, he would have tried to do so himself. As the leader of a major concentration camp, however, he took the initiative and put to death more people than any other Nazi facility in Germany. He did so not because of an order, but rather to fulfill his own sadistic needs. Rudolf Hoess was a monstrous human being, and deserved a fate much worse than that of which his prisoners endure. On April 16th, 1947, at forty six years old, Hoess was put to death by means of hanging in