Crime of the Century

COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ (285 pp.) --Rudolf Hoess, translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon--World ($4.50).

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, Nazi SS captain, may have been the most monstrous executioner in human history. By his own accounting, 2,000,000 Jews were gassed and cremated at the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland during his term (1940-43) as commandant. While awaiting trial in a Polish prison in 1946 (he was condemned and hanged in early 1947), he wrote this autobiography, now published in the U.S. for the first time.

Hoess offers no new facts on the grisly mass murders. What he achieves is the imagination-defying portrait of a monster, a man who approached killing and torture with the zeal of an efficiency expert and counted corpses with the cool dedication of a trained bookkeeper. It was his special form of insanity--widespread in Nazi Germany--that he regarded himself as a sane, ordinary man with an ordinary but difficult job to perform, and he secretly craved recognition for the efficiency with which he carried it out under unteutonically chaotic conditions.

The Good Soldier. Like many of Himmlers SS men, Hoess was devoted to his wife and children, loved animals and dreamed of farming as a livelihood. He had a bucolically innocent boyhood in southern Germany. Burning with adolescent patriotism, he saw action in World War I before he was 16, was decorated with the Iron Cross, First Class, and wore a noncom's stripes when he was 17. A restless postwar rebel, he joined the Freikorps, a kind of guerrilla band that refused to accept the peace of Versailles. He was an accessory in a political murder, served six years in prison, during which ''I nearly went raving mad."

Although he became one of the early Nazi party members with reserve status in the SS, Hoess still planned to work a farm. But in 1934, when Himmler asked for volunteers for the concentration camps, Hoess could not resist what he thought of as a soldierly return to the colors.

In 1940 Himmler handpicked him to head up Auschwitz and a year later told him the camp's exact purpose: The Fuehrer had decided on "the final solution of the Jewish question." Translation: the Jews were to be massacred. Hoess did not quibble or quake. He even contributed a euphemism of his own: "The removal of racial-biological foreign bodies."

Bureaucracy of Death. Except for the record of horror they unfold, the chapters that follow might serve as codicils to Parkinson's Law on bureaucratic IN-box fighting. One bureau wanted to save able-bodied Jews for munitions work; another wanted to slaughter them to the last man, woman or child. Bales of barbed wire were stacked in supply depots; yet Hoess finally had to send out scavenging patrols to filch what he needed.

As the death trains piled up at the Auschwitz sidings and Hoess's gassing and cremation schedules went hours awry, he pleaded with Himmler for more guards and materials. Himmler suggested using more dogs to herd the prisoners, but otherwise told Hoess that he would have to make do with what he had. Somehow, Hoess did--and he is as methodically informative as a suburbanite fighting crab grass as he discusses the relative merits of poison gasses and the superiority of threeretort crematory ovens to four-retort ovens. Hoess remembers with almost nostalgic pride a date of peak efficiency when the camp gassed and cremated "rather more than 9,000" in a 24-hour period.

Still, as Hoess recalls, there were "scenes which affected all who witnessed them," when mothers gave unearthly screams and vainly tried to throw infants to safety before the gas-chamber doors slammed shut. At times he breaks into spasms of self-pity: "I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business. I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench ... I had to look through the peephole of the gas chambers and watch the process of death . . ."

The Murder Box. Near book's end, Hoess says reflectively: "I see now that the extermination of the Jews was fundamentally wrong," not because it was morally monstrous, but simply as an error in tactics that brought "the hatred of the entire world" on Germany. Another statement of Hoess's makes it more difficult for the Germans who claim that they saw, heard or knew no evil of the murder camps. Says he: "When a strong wind was blowing, the stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of Jews." Near another camp, children could identify the special bus loaded with victims and used to say, "There comes the murder box again."

An entire generation of German--and U.S.--youngsters knows next to nothing about the murder boxes. For them, Commandant of Auschwitz should be an eye-opening account of the crime of the century. For their elders, it will be an equally revealing introduction to the seemingly average man who became the criminal of the century.

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