Death Dealer: The Memoirs Of The Ss Kommandant At Auschwitz

by Rudolph Hoss

Overview

SS Kommandant Rudolph Höss (1900–1947) was history's greatest mass murderer, personally supervising the extermination of approximately two million people, mostly Jews, at the death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. Death Dealer is a new, unexpurgated translation of Höss's autobiography, written before, during, and after his trial. This edition includes rare photos, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference (where the Final Solution was decided and coordinated), original diagrams of the camps, a detailed chronology of important events at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Höss's final letters to his family, and a new foreword by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Death Dealer stands as one of the most important—and chilling—documents of the Holocaust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306806988
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	03/22/1996
Pages:	414
Sales rank:	301,419
Product dimensions:	6.05(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

Editorial Reviews

This first complete English translation of a senior Nazi officer's account of the Final Solution describes in cold, stomach-churning detail the program of genocide as an administrative procedure. Written during the six months before his 1947 execution in Warsaw for ``crimes committed against the Polish people,'' Hoss's memoirs are filled with specific recollections, from his fervently religious boyhood in Mannheim, through a prison term in Liepzig (for having killed a fellow soldier), to marriage and induction into the SS in 1934. Particulars of his roles in the concentration camp system include his ordering of ``the first execution of the war'' at Sachsenhausen in 1938 and his 1941 assignment to establish and manage Auschwitz as ``the largest human killing center in all of history.'' Personal squabbles with other SS leaders are interspersed with chilling descriptions of prison conditions and gassing procedures. This compelling historical document, from which Hoss emerges as a classic model of the bureaucratic middle manager, is expertly edited by Paskuly, a history teacher in New York; Pollinger's translation is seamless. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The man who presided over the expansion and lethal functioning of Auschwitz concentration camp, which surely earned him the distinction of being ``the greatest destroyer of human beings in history,'' left behind this memoir before he was executed by the Poles at the end of World War II. A dedicated bureaucrat, Hoss smothered his feelings and devoted his talents to the killing of millions, even though he ``personally never hated the Jews.'' The work was hard, and he ``was no longer happy at Auschwitz once the mass annihilation began.'' An editorial glossary of terms and personalities enhances the usefulness of this valuable addition to Holocaust studies, a chilling self-portrait of an all-too-typical servant of totalitarianism.-- R.H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario

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