There has been an awful lot of jerking off going on in this thread about Edith Stein, the Pope, flying saucers, blah blah blah, ad infinitum.
In the meantime, some very interesting material concerning Hoess's writings while in captivity has been ignored (perhaps because it was too complicated for some forum members, and did not provide an immediate opportunity to fling insults around).
The fact is that the material posted shows that Hoess did make statements in his writings in captivity that are
demonstrably false. Furthermore, he repeated those falsehoods, making them first in November 1946, in the reports prepared for Judge Sehn, and then again in February 1947 in his autobiographical manuscript written while he was awaiting trial.
Of course, the fact that certain statements made by Hoess are demonstrably false by no means invalidates the whole corpus of his writings in captivity as a historical source.
At the outset, let me thank Roberto for posting the two items, one a summary of the history of the deportation of Gypsies to Auschwitz and their eventual extermination here, and the other an excerpt from Hoess's memoirs dealing with the fate of the Gypsies at Auschwitz. Those items essentially supported what I had previously written on this issue.
In summary, the relevant claims made by Hoess in his memoirs concerning the Gypsies are:
1. In July 1942, Himmler inspected the Gypsy Camp at Birkenau in the course of his well-known and fully documented visit to Auschwitz in that month.
2. In the course of that visit, Himmler ordered the destruction of the Gypsies, after selecting out those capable of work.
3. The destruction order was suspended for two years, to allow the Criminal Police to sort through the persons held in the Gypsy Camp and remove those who had been sent to Auschwitz by mistake (ie they did not fulfil the criteria for deportation).
4. During that two-year period, until August 1944, the destruction order was known only to Hoess and the camp doctors.
5. By August 1944, about 4,000 Gypsies remained in the Gypsy Camp at Birkenau out of a (presumed) original 10,000, those capable of work having been removed to another camp (and, by implication, those who did not fulfill the deportation criteria having been rleased). These 4,000 were killed by gassing.
Comparison with the actual history of the Gypsies at Auschwitz demonstrates that much of the above is false.
First, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsis and part-Gypsies to Birkenau on 16 December 1942. The first of at least 23,000 Gypsies arrived there in February 1943.
Accordingly, Himmler could not possibly have inspected Gypsies being held in the Gypsy Camp at Birkenau during his visit in July 1942, since the Gypsies had not arrived there by that date, and did not arrive until seven months later. In July 1942, there was no Gypsy camp at Birkenau.
Therefore, Hoess has demonstrably lied, both in the account given in his November 1946 report "My Meetings with Himmler" and in his February 1947 autobiographical manuscript. At the very least, Hoess was confused or mistaken.
One possible way in which Hoess was mistaken is that he confused a visit to Auschwitz by Himmler in 1943 or 1944, when there was a Gypsy Camp in existence, with the July 1942 visit. And it is a fact that a number of survivor accounts allege that Himmler did make a visit to Auschwitz in 1943.
However, Hoess himself, in his November 1946 report "My Meetings with Himmler", states that Himmler made two visits to Auschwitz, in 1940 and 1942, and specifically states that the July 1942 visit was Himmler's second and
final visit.
Given Hoess's certainty that Himmler made no further visits to Auschwitz after July 1942, we must exclude the possibility that he confused two sparate visits by Himmler, and therefore has deliberately falsified history in claiming that Himmler inspected the Gypsy Camp during his second visit to Auschwitz and issued the extermination order during that visit.
The crucial question is why Hoess perpetrated that falsification in regard to the extermination of the Gypsies at Auschwitz. Did he perpetrate it for some reason of his own, or was he inducd to do so?
Other falsehoods in Hoess's account flow from the initial falsehood, that Himmler inspected the Gypsy camp in July 1942 and issued the extermination order at that date. For example, his claim that the extermination order, issued in July 1942, was postponed for two years until August 1944, is an obvious device to explain away the discrepancy between an extermination order issued in July 1942 and its actual, historically attested implementation on the night of 2-3 August 1944.
It is also possible that Hoess made the claim about the two-year delay in the implementation of the extermination order so as to paint himself in a favourable light as having saved the lives of many Gypsies by insisting that an investigation be made to identify those who did not fulfil the deportation criteria and had been sent to Auschwitz by mistake. But that motivation would not explain the original, underlying falsehood about Himmler's visit in July 1942 and the date of issue of the extermination order.
The claim that until August 1944 the existence of the Gypsy extermination order was known only to Hoess and the camp doctors is also patently a device to explain away the fact that no other former member of the camp staff had testified to the existence of that order prior to that date (which is a good indication that Himmler's order to exterminate the Gypsies was given in the summer of 1944, in the context of the Hungarian deportations).
About the only true element in Hoess's account is that there were about 4,000 Gypsies left in the Gypsy camp by August 1944 (some 4,297 according to the USHMM figures in the material posted by Roberto), and that the majority of them were killed when the Gypsy Camp was liquidated.
As stated, the original falsification was made in the document "My Meetings with Himmler", dated November 1946. My own feeling is that Hoss must originally have reported an order given by Himmler in the early summer of 1944 in the context of the Hungarian deportation, presumably when Hoess was in Berlin, to exterminate both the Gypsies remaining in the Gypsy camp and the Jews assessed as unfit for labour, in order to create space in the camp for holding the incoming Jews pending their transfer to labour camps. The whole tone of Hoess's description of what Himmler said on that occasion, with the emphasis on the transfer of Jews out of Auschwitz to other camps for work related to armaments production places it in the context of the Hungarian deportation.
The falsification involved bringing the date of issue of the extermination forward to years to 1942, and placing it in the context of Himmler's visit to Auschwitz in July of that year. Why Hoess did that is unclear. It is possible that he was pressured to do so by Judge Sehn or other interrogators. A credible motive for such pressure being applied (if in fact it was) would be that the interrogators could not understand why an order to exterminate Jews unfit for labour would have been issued in the Summer of 1944, given that they were convinced that the comprehensive extermination of all Jews had been ordered by Hitler in 1941.
The falsification is repeated in Hoess's own autobiographical manuscript, written in February 1947, and in fact is expanded, both to give it further underpinning and also to attempt to paint Hoess in a more favourable light. Why the repetition occurred is unclear. It may that Hoess felt that once he had made a false statement he could not go back on it. But it might also indicate that Hoess was still subject to suprvision and pressure from his Polish captors in February 1946, when he was writing his memoirs in pencil.
For the information of readers, the items posted by Roberto are reproduced below.
Quote:
[…]In a decree dated December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz--Birkenau. At least 23,000 Gypsies were brought there, the first group arriving from Germany in February 1943. Most of the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Germany or territories annexed to the Reich including Bohemia and Moravia. Police also deported small numbers of Gypsies from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, officials set up a separate "Gypsy family camp" for Gypsies in Section BIIe of Birkenau: From the wooden barracks, the gas chambers and crematoria were clearly visible. During the seventeen months of the camp's existence, most of the Gypsies brought there perished. They were killed by gassing or died from starvation, exhaustion from hard labor, and disease (including typhus, smallpox, and the rare, leprosy-like condition called Noma.) Others, including many children, died as the result Of cruel medical experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele and other SS physicians. The Gypsy camp was liquidated on the night of August 2-3, 1944, when 2,897 Sinti and Roma men, women, and children were killed in the gas chamber. Some 1,400 surviving men and women were transferred to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps for forced labor.[…]
Source of quote:
http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource ... aSBklt.pdf
Rudolf Höß (autobiography, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, Phoenix Press, London, pages 128 and following) wrote:
[…]The next largest contingent were the gypsies.
Long before the war gypsies were being rounded up and put into concentration camps as part of the campaign against a-socials. One department of the Reich Criminal Police Office was solely concerned with the supervision of gypsies. Repeated searches were made in the gypsy encampments for persons who were not true gypsies, and these were sent to concentration camps as shirkers or a-socials. In addition, the gypsy encampments were constantly being combed through for biological reasons. The Reichsführer SS wanted to ensure that the two main gypsy stocks be preserved: I cannot recall their names. In his view they were the direct descendants of the original Indo-Germanic race, and had preserved their ways and customs more or less pure and intact. He now wished to have them all collected together for research purposes. They were to be precisely registered and preserved as an historic monument.
Later they were to be collected from all over Europe, and allotted limited areas in which to dwell.
In 1937 and 1938 all itinerant gypsies were collected into so-called habitation camps near the larger towns, to facilitate supervision.
In 1942, however, an order was given that all gypsy-type persons on German territory, including gypsy half-castes, were to be arrested and transported to Auschwitz, irrespective of sex or age. The only exceptions were those who had been officially recognized as pure-blooded members of the two main tribes. These were to be settled in the Ödenburg district on the Neusiedlersee. Those transported to Auschwitz were to be kept there for the rest of the war in a family camp.
But the regulations governing their arrest were not drawn up with sufficient precision. Various offices of the Criminal Police interpreted them in different ways, and as a result persons were arrested who could not possibly be regarded as belonging to the category that it was intended to intern.
Many men were arrested while on leave from the front, despite high decorations and several wounds, simply because their father or mother or grandfather had been a gypsy or a gypsy half-caste. Even a very senior Party member, whose gypsy grandfather had settled in Leipzig, was among them. He himself had a large business in Leipzig, and had been decorated more than once during the First World War. Another was a girl student who had been a leader in the Berlin League of German Girls. There were many more such cases. I made a report to the Reich Criminal Police Office. As a result the gypsy camp was constantly under examination and many releases took place. But these were scarcely noticeable, so great was the number of those who remained.
I cannot say how many gypsies, including half-castes, were in Auschwitz. I only know that they completely filled one section of the camp designed to hold 10,000. Conditions in Birkenau were utterly unsuitable for a family camp. Every pre-requisite was lacking, even if it was intended that the gypsies be kept there only for the duration of the war. It was quite impossible to provide proper food for the children, although by referring to the Reichsführer SS I managed for a time to bamboozle the food offices into giving me food for the very young ones. This was soon stopped, however, for the Food Ministry laid down that no special children’s food might be issued to the concentration camps.
In July 1942 the Reichsführer SS visited the camp. I took him all over the gypsy camp. He made a most thorough inspection of everything, noting the overcrowded barrack-huts, the unhygienic conditions, the crammed hospital building. He saw those who were sick with infectious diseases, and the children suffering from Noma [A cancerous growth, usually fatal, which appears mostly on the face, as the result of starvation and physical debility, editor’s note], which always made me shudder, since it reminded me of leprosy and the lepers I had seen in Palestine – their little bodies wasted away, with gaping holes in their cheeks big enough for a man to see through, a slow putrefaction of the living body.
He noted the mortality rate, which was relatively low in comparison with that of the camp as a whole. The child mortality rate, however, was extraordinarily high. I don’t believe that many new-born babies survived more than a few weeks.
He saw it all, in detail, and as it really was – and he ordered me to destroy them. Those capable for work were first to be separated from the others, as with the Jews.
I pointed out to him that the personnel of the gypsy camp was not precisely what he had envisaged being sent to Auschwitz. He thereupon ordered that the Reich Criminal Police Office should carry out a sorting as quickly as possible. This in fact took two years. The gypsies capable of work were transferred to another camp. About 4,000 gypsies were left by August, 1944, and these had to go into the gas chambers. Up to that moment, they were unaware of what was in store for them. They first realized what was happening when they made their way, barrack-hut by barrack-hut, towards Crematorium I.
It was not easy to drive them into the gas chambers. I myself did not see it, but Schwarzhuber told me that it was more difficult than any previous mass destruction of Jews and it war particularly hard on him, because he knew almost every one of them individually, and had been on good terms with them. They were by their nature as trusting as children.
[…]
I would have taken great interest in observing their customs and habits if I had not been aware of the impending horror, namely the Extermination Order, which until mid-1944 was known only to myself and the doctors in Auschwitz.
By command of the Reichsführer SS the doctors were to dispose f the sick, and especially the children, as inconspicuously as possible.
And it was precisely they who had such a trust in the doctors.
Nothing surely is harder than to grit one’s teeth and go through with such a thing, coldly, pitilessly and without mercy.[…]