He was captured in 1945, was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, and was tried and hung in Poland in 1947. While in prison, he wrote a memoir that is much more chilling than "the banality of evil" of the dumb fuck Eichmann variety.
The history of the Nazi Germany has become so Disneyfied. No one reads or really knows much about it anymore. Everyone vaguely knows (if that!) that the Nazis did camps and that was bad, but that's all. But when you read that text, I think it becomes clear that not only such atrocities can be repeated very easily today, they will be repeated precisely in the name of all that is "good."
Anyway. Höss was the only SS officer at the Nuremberg trials who testified to everything that he'd done. During his own trial he confessed, admitted his guilt, and refused the opportunity to appeal. You will see from the memoir he was a smart, and not even particularly callous man. AND FUCKING YET. That's the point. It is chilling to the bones, and is all the more chilling because of how lucid that memoir is. The only reason he admitted his wrongs was because the Nazis were defeated. It will make you think about those yet undefeated and the atrocities they commit in the name of what they may genuinely consider to be "good."
Links, huge trigger warning obviously :
The memoir (skip to page 118, that's where his tenure at Auschwitz starts)
A kind of condensed article about Höss , with some quotes from the memoir + the trial in Poland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6ss
People are forgetting this shit. It is not enough to know that Nazis = bad. We'll fucking repeat it without learning what actually happened. Look at Ukraine where an SS division has recently been celebrated in the capital because some people there hate the USSR legacy more than they hate fascism, treating these death squads as "liberators."
They are unique, though (although I didn’t say and would not say) that only Nazi POVs were unique. You’re not going to get a first person account of the administration and inner workings of the fascist death machine by reading victim testimonies. They weren’t there when the decisions were being made. You have to examine both if you want a complete picture. Maybe the “general’s diary” from your analogy would have some valuable insight into the tactics used when conducting a war of extermination, insight that might be useful when opposing those tactics in the future.
If you see no value in that, I don’t know what to tell you.
Just threw up a little, thanks. This is completely fictional for you, how about you actually talk to those affected by the genocide today? I don't get how much energy you spend in defending "one has the free speech to talk about unique nazis", when you do know NOTHING about the genocid vs Ovaherero and Nama and could've used the time to read about it