An “Average” Monster

THE EXTRAORDINARY THING about Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, is that he was a very average man. So were his colleagues— planners and administrators of deathcamps, among them Adolf Eichmann. His autobiography (Commandant of Auschwitz, World, $4.50) reads like the monotonous account of, let us say, an engineer with average talent who slowly climbs the ladder to a position of responsibility in some giant corporation. The comparison with an engineer is not out of place since Hoess cites production quotas (of gassed Jews, Russians and gypsies) with an obvious effort to be accurate, explaining the reasons why the corpse-output often lagged, and blaming his superiors and subordinates for hindering his efficient organization. “I always believed in a job of work well done,” he declares.

For those who knew concentration camps from the inside, it is fascinating to read the story as told by the outsiders, the guards, the torturers, the visiting inspectors. David Rousset called the world of camp inmates univers concentrationnaire, indicating thereby that starvation, brutality, humiliation and the other techniques of debasement create an atmosphere of their own. The prisoner remains a lucid human being, but his personality is somehow shrunk by the gnawing tyranny of three ambitions: to eat, to avoid the blows, and to survive (in that order). He looks at his masters, from the lowliest guard to Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, as superhuman creatures living in a magic world of abundant nourishment, beds with sheets on them, streets and shops and cars.

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Thomas Molnar

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THE EXTRAORDINARY THING about Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, is that he was a very average man. So were his colleagues— planners and administrators of deathcamps, among them Adolf Eichmann. His autobiography (Commandant of Auschwitz, World, $4.50) reads like the monotonous account of, let us say, an engineer with average talent who slowly climbs the ladder to a position of responsibility in some giant corporation. The comparison with an engineer is not out of place since Hoess cites production quotas (of gassed Jews, Russians and gypsies) with an obvious effort to be accurate, explaining the reasons why the corpse-output often lagged, and blaming his superiors and subordinates for hindering his efficient organization. “I always believed in a job of work well done,” he declares.

For those who knew concentration camps from the inside, it is fascinating to read the story as told by the outsiders, the guards, the torturers, the visiting inspectors. David Rousset called the world of camp inmates univers concentrationnaire, indicating thereby that starvation, brutality, humiliation and the other techniques of debasement create an atmosphere of their own. The prisoner remains a lucid human being, but his personality is somehow shrunk by the gnawing tyranny of three ambitions: to eat, to avoid the blows, and to survive (in that order). He looks at his masters, from the lowliest guard to Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, as superhuman creatures living in a magic world of abundant nourishment, beds with sheets on them, streets and shops and cars.