The first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, from 4 May 1940 to November 1943.Born into a strict Catholic family, raised on strict religious principles,turned against religion in his late teens.Höss formally renounced his membership in the Catholic Church in 1922 and joined the military after hearing Hitler's speech.
By his own admission in his autobiography Höss said that he disliked the corporal punishment carried out by the guards of the camps on the prisoners (he avoided them as much as he could), but when he saw his first execution it did not affect him as the corporal punishment had. In his autobiography, he could not explain why that was.
At the time when he was Blockführer Höss said that, because of the people he had met and the things he had experienced, he regretted leaving the chosen path that his parents had mapped out for him in the church
Höss wrote his autobiography while awaiting execution; it was published in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz; autobiographische Aufzeichnungen[16] and later as Death Dealer: the Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz (among other editions).
Four days before he was hanged, Höss sent a message to the state prosecutor, including these comments:
“ My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_H%C3%B6%C3%9F
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