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."
Thanks for this. I also appreciate the other reading recommendations that have been posted here. I just want to add a few things that I've found helpful in understanding "this shit." To defeat the bug, we must know the bug.
The Nazi Party Platform —before they seized power, the Nazis were an actual political party and as such they had to operate in Weimar Germany. They used both legal and illegal methods, although I think their stormtroopers are much more famous than their legal attempts to win over voters. In looking at their platform, you can see that they pretty much promise all things to all people—except for Jews, of course. Understanding that National Socialism really is a (contradictory) combination of nationalism and socialism can help you see the same ideology today even as it tries to cloak itself in places like the American two-party system. This quote from Mussolini, the official inventor of fascism, is also useful: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Wherever corporatism exists, you will likewise see the same results as Nazism.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism—Wilhelm Reich was a star pupil of Freud's and psychoanalyzed members of the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat in central Europe during the 1930s. Also an activist member of the KDP (who was expelled I believe for criticizing the USSR when it turned against abortion and divorce), he sprinkles his most famous book with plenty of quotes from Marx and clearly views the world in a dialectical materialist way. (Reich is also despised by the kinds of idealist petite bourgeois shrinks many of us hate.) Basically, Reich's thesis is that when it's obvious that the workers and the petite bourgeois should overthrow capitalism—as it was obvious during the Great Depression—but they don't, something else is clearly at work. Yes, it's cultural hegemony, but propaganda doesn't work unless it falls on fertile ground, and Reich believed that sexual suppression during puberty transforms people into fascists during late capitalism, which is why we see the same material circumstances producing the same sorts of people today: a rural religious male living under late capitalism who owns or expects to own a house or a business (and who belongs to the majority ethnic group) has a strong chance of being a fascist / QAnon nut / voting for Republicans. This is not a dichotomy of course, but a dialectic: the capitalist system encourages this kind of suppression, which in turn encourages the capitalist system.
The Psychopathic God—really thorough history of Germany going back several centuries combined with a thorough analysis of virtually every aspect of Hitler's existence. To the surprise of very few, Hitler was an absolute shitstorm of a human being—abused and neglected by his father, coddled by his mother, and encouraged to rise to the top by a dying socioeconomic order.
The Reactionary Mind—I've only read the beginning of this book because it honestly was repeating itself a lot and looked like it needed an editor or possibly even a total rewrite, but until the author started repeating himself I found a lot of his analysis useful. Reactionaries seem incredibly sensitive to challenges to their power, which may help to explain why American Republicans constantly panic over every last little thing the Democrats do, while socialists typically view Republicans and Democrats as almost being indistinguishable in their evil/incompetence.