2,500,000 Pieces

The gypsies used to ride gaily up to the grim gates, never suspecting where they were being taken. They sang their racy songs until the very last minute--when they suddenly realized, without understanding, that they were in a concentration camp and that they had to die.

Officially, Europe's gypsies were to be liquidated as a political and social menace to the German State. But to Rudolf Hoess* their innocent arrival at his camp was always excellent private entertainment. Life at Oswiecim had grown rather dull. True, Hoess had the satisfaction of having built up Oswiecim from a mere Polish artillery barracks to Germany's most up-&-coming death camp. And of course he could always find some amusement at the gas chambers, the first three of which he had constructed himself with great pioneering ingenuity.

But even the varied spectacle of death could grow awfully boring after a while.

The British finally caught Rudolf Hoess in a farmhouse near Lueneburg where he had been hiding. They would soon put him on trial as a war criminal. In some ways, perhaps, he was the greatest of them all. He told his story with quiet authority, as though lecturing to a class, underscoring his points with deliberate gestures of his well-kept hands. He still sounded rather bored; only occasionally did he show signs of nervousness--when he reached for his hip pocket, as though searching for a gun.

One of his questioners asked him whether he believed in God. Replied Hoess: "Most emphatically no." Then he calmly confessed to what was probably the largest mass murder in history. He admitted killing 2,500,000 out of the total of 4,500,000 with which the British charged him. With professional breeziness, he referred to them not as people but as pieces.

* Not to be confused with wit-wandering Rudolf Hess, now on trial at Nuernberg.

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