The Commandant: An Account by the First Commanding Officer of Auschwitz

Rudolf Hoess

Feb. 2012 · Abrams

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This chilling memoir presents “a graphic and compelling self-portrait” of the Nazi war criminal who oversaw Auschwitz concentration camp (Jewish Book World).

SS officer Rudolph Hoess was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. The amoral sensibility Hoess displayed regarding all that went on in the charnel factory where the industrialization of death was practiced—where probably three million people were literally worked to death, shot or gassed—is still almost beyond belief today.

Editor Jurg Amann has taken Hoess's text and produced a work of vital historical importance. The Commandant presents an excruciating insight into Hitler's Final Solution and the nature of evil itself through the prism of the Nazis' totalitarian system, one Hoess and so many others felt no need to question. Ian Buruma's introduction sets this frightening work within a both moral and historical context.

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Rudolf Hoess (1900-1947) was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. He was found guilty of murder and executed by hanging at Auschwitz on April 16, 1947. Jurg Amann was born in Switzerland in 1947, and his writings include plays, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. He has received the Ingeborg Bachman, the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and the Schiller Prize. Ian Buruma writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He lives in New York. He is the recipient of the international Erasmus Prize and the Shorenstein Journalism Award, and he was twice voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Foreign Policy/Prospect.