8. Commandant of Auschwitz
Auschwitz was a small and nondescript prison camp when Rudolf Hoess became its commandant in May of 1940. He transformed it into the biggest industrial-scale killing factory ever created, where more than a million people were murdered. By the autumn of 1941, Hoess had expanded Auschwitz by adding to it an annex: Birkenau, which served as a pure extermination camp. In the resulting hybrid Auschwitz-Birkenau establishment, Auschwitz served as a concentration camp in which labor was squeezed out of brutalized slave workers. Birkenau served as a pure murder factory, capable of “processing” up to 10,000 victims a day, from their arrival at its train platform, to their murder, then cremation.
Crimes Against Humanity
Hoess so impressed his superiors with his diligence, that in 1943 he was transferred back to Germany as an inspector of all concentration camps. He would temporarily return to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May to June of 1944, to oversee the extermination of Hungary’s Jews. Hoess’ enthusiasm for his work was in jarring contrast to his private life. A mild-mannered and happily married man, Hoess enjoyed a normal family life with his five children, notwithstanding the view of the camp crematoria’s smoke stacks from his bedroom windows. After the war, he was tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, and hanged next to the death camp’s crematorium.