9. History’s Greatest Individual Mass Murderer?
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess (1901 – 1947) is often described as history’s greatest individual mass murderer. Born into a strict religious Catholic family, he reportedly had no friends in his early childhood, and socialized only with adults until he entered elementary school. His father, a former army officer who had served in German East Africa, wanted his son to become a priest and raised him with military discipline on strict religious principles. As a result, Hoess grew up with a fanatical belief that duty was the key to a good moral life.
In his autobiography, Hoess claimed to have been scarred in his youth, when he was abducted by Gypsies. It might not be true – a fanciful origin story he made, to try and explain the horrors he visited upon Gypsies, Jews, and others in later years. Whatever the truth about his childhood and early years, by the time he was a young man, Hoess was the kind of person who thought the Nazis were awesome. So in 1921, at age 20, he became a member of the Nazi Party, and in 1934, he joined the SS. In 1940, Hoess was appointed to command a then-little-known prison camp in western Poland: Auschwitz.