ARCHITECT OF DEATH AT AUSCHWITZ

A biography offers an analysis of the role played by the commandant of Auschwitz in the abuse and murder of its Jewish prisoners.

Not much in Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss’ youth presaged his infamous career as a Nazi—he grew up in a strict Roman Catholic household led by a father who wished him to become a priest. Nevertheless, he was the commandant of Auschwitz in southwestern Poland—a concentration camp that was central to Hitler’s plan to rid Europe of Jews—and “superintended the destruction of more than a million human beings,” becoming the “greatest mass murderer in history.” Primomo chronicles Höss’ early life and his ambitiously fast ascendancy up the SS ranks. The author focuses on the Nazi’s command of Auschwitz, which he turned, through ruthless efficiency, into a labor and extermination camp. When the Germans were finally defeated, Höss changed his name and fled, but he was eventually hunted down, captured, and testified in Nuremberg. His testimony, which the author meticulously examines, was invaluable to prosecutors. Höss was later tried for murder and executed in Poland. Primomo also assesses the commandant’s memoirs and his insistent claim that he never intentionally mistreated prisoners and even tried to stop whatever abuse occurred. But Höss relates with chilling impassivity the mass exterminations and refers to “the sight of the dead Jews scientifically as if they were nothing more than experimental lab rats.” The author scrupulously undermines Höss’ moral defense of himself and exposes him for the remorseless killer he was. Höss had intimate knowledge of Auschwitz’s barbaric conditions and how the “tormented life imposed on Auschwitz inmates was destroying their souls.” Primomo’s biography is unflinchingly painstaking and, while often disturbing to read, bears an important journalistic witness to some of the darkest atrocities in human history.

A marvelously rigorous account of a notorious war criminal, edifying and moving.