Customer Reviews
Everyone should read it - By: lexo1941, 17 Nov 2008 
The great majority of personal testimonies of the Holocaust have been written by people who were victims of it, & while all of it is fascinating, horrifying & essential reading, it must be admitted that not all of it is of the same literary quality. In general, the more truthful & better-written they are, the harsher & more disturbing they are likely to be, & the less likely they are to provide us with easy platitudes about the survival of the human spirit, or instructive little parables about saintly fools. This is why Primo Levi's books are, to my mind, far superior to Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", or even the works of Elie Wiesel.
Nevertheless, all Holocaust testimony should be available to us & it should all be read. There is, of course, another kind of Holocaust writing that is for obvious reasons less popular with the reading public, but which is still of crucial importance: that which was written by people who perpetrated the crimes. Most people would prefer to read about what it's like to undergo terrible experiences, than read about what it's like to inflict them. The trouble is that most of usin comfortable, relatively prosperous countries seldom have to undergo terrible experiences. We are more oftenin the position of allowing them to go onin our name, & with our tacit consent.
Most of the chief culprits of the Holocaust were dead or disappeared by the end of the war, but there is a still a very large amount of information written by former Nazi functionaries which is of considerable importance. The most substantial & important mass of material by a single person, other than trial evidence, is probably the written testimony of former Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss, all of which is collectedin this book.
This collection supersedes an earlier translation of Höss's memoirs by former British Army officer Constantine Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon's translation is good, but this edition is more complete & contains things like Höss's last letters to his wife & family.
Höss's character, as revealedin this book, is that of a man who seems to have been an almost perfect fit for his job. Obedient, diligent, hard-working & thorough, he seems to have taken no great pleasurein his job but it never occurred to him for a second to refuse to do it. He personally supervised the expansion of Auschwitz from a small concentration camp basedin an old Polish army barracks to, as he put it himself, the greatest extermination centre of all time. The Operation Reinhard death camps of Treblinka, Belzec & Sobibor were solely for the purpose of extermination, but Auschwitz was a multi-function camp & thousands died from illness & starvation as well as from execution. Nobody knows exactly how many people died at Auschwitz but I am inclined to accept the figure of approximately 1.1 million, suggested by the great Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg.
There are a couple of flawsin this edition. I personally think that the title "Death Dealer" is lurid & unnecessary, & prefer the earlier translation's plain title "Commandant of Auschwitz". The photographs are atrociously reproduced, murky & blotchy & almost impossible to figure out. It does have, however, the benefit of an excellent preface by Primo Levi (far more informed & perceptive than the earlier translation's rather silly preface by Bertrand Russell, which suffered from Russell not having enough access to the archives) & some very useful diagrams of the camp. Plus, as stated above it is more complete.
There is no inspiring tale of hopein this Holocaust story. Höss did his work, was arrested at the end of the war & apparently badly treated by his British captors, but was then handed over to the Polish authorities who behaved towards him with remarkable & exemplary kindness. This seems to have inspired him to finally feel guilt about his crimes, which is not expressedin his memoirs so much asin his mawkish letters to his family. He was hanged at Auschwitzin 1947. His book is a glimpse into the mind of a man who was one of the principle administrators of mass murder. Everyone should read it, because the truly frightening thing about Höss is that he wasn't a sadistic psychopath who enjoyed torturing people; he was a dull, unimaginative & ordinarily callous bureaucrat who was able, like most of us, to close his mind to the consequences of his behaviour for as long as he was allowed to get away with it. Höss is more like us than Hitler ever was, or Göring. That is why this book should be taughtin schools.
interesting but opens the door for questions - By: , 23 Aug 1999 The background information on Hoess' life is interesting but the details are lacking about the day to day details about how camp life really was. Reading this, you would say that Hoess cared a great deal about prisoners but that doesn't seem to be the case. Hoess provides interesting information about other SS figures. Well worth reading but one must read other material. The foreword goes a little overboard with emotion, just give us the facts please.
A doomed SS officer writes his memoirs for posterity. - By: , 25 Jul 1999 
Hoess reveals how a family man who loved horses could himself survivein charge of the Auschwitz complex. Is an authentic read as Hoess blunders here & there with a faulty memory & shows self doubt as the date of his execution nears. Holocaust deniers will find no comfortin the book, although it has to be said that Hoess left the campin 1943 & that prison memoirs are always suspect to some degree. Hoess seems to have realized all along that a death sentence was certain. The argument that he admitted mass gassingsin an attempt to obtain a lighter sentence is unlikely. But you have to read the book to get a feel for this particular nazi whose only aim was to please Berlin.
same old stuff - By: , 22 Nov 1998 
Hoess' "recollections" are nowin chronological retrospect, laughable. If the reader really wants to know happened, he will have to check all of Hoess' testimony against other sources. Hoess left Auschwitz long before the Holocaust was over & because of his complicityin a theft ring. Thus any numbers for the death ratein the the camp are suspect. This book is written for the unknowledgable & willin years hence prove to be a joke.
Inside the mind of a mad man. - By: , 06 Jun 1998 
Enter the mind of a mad man. LTC Rudolph Hoess, whilein prison awaiting trail for his rolein the systematic extermination of 2 million jews while kommandant of KL Auschwitz, spills his thoughts on to paper for the whole world to read. Although Hoess does makes numerous "I was only following orders" to excuse his wicked actions through out the book,it is his cold unblinking honesty about how a child destinded to become a priest instead became the self admitted "the greastest killer of all time" is what really grabbed me. He also provides glimes into his childhood, his experiencesin WW1, joining the Nazi party & his yearsin prison- plenty of imformation for pyschologist today to peek into the mind of a mad man. In short Hoess writes with the manial coolness of a real life Hannibal Lecter.
