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."