He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution.

On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers,[7][8] where more than a million people were killed.

During his imprisonment, at the request of the Polish authorities, Höss wrote his memoirs, released in English under the title Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess.

When the news of the armistice reached Damascus, where he was serving at that time, Höss and a few others decided not to wait for Allied forces to capture them as prisoners of war.

[16] After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Höss completed his secondary education and soon joined some of the emerging nationalist paramilitary groups, first the East Prussian Volunteer Corps, and then the Freikorps "Rossbach" in the Baltic area, Silesia and the Ruhr.

After hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler in Munich, Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 (member number 3240) and renounced affiliation with the Catholic Church.

[17] On 31 May 1923, in Mecklenburg, Höss and members of the Freikorps attacked and beat to death local schoolteacher Walther Kadow on the wishes of farm supervisor Martin Bormann, who later became Hitler's private secretary.

There he led the firing squad that, on Himmler's orders on 15 September 1939, killed August Dickmann, a Jehovah's Witness who was the first conscientious objector to be executed after the start of the War.

[34][35] On 18 January 1940, as head of the protective custody camp at Sachsenhausen, Höss ordered all prisoners not assigned to work details to stand outside in frigid conditions reaching −26 °C (−15 °F).

[36] Höss was dispatched to evaluate the feasibility of establishing a concentration camp in western Poland, a territory Germany had incorporated into the province of Upper Silesia.

According to Höss, Himmler had selected Auschwitz for the extermination of Europe's Jews "on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation".

Those found fit for labor were marched to barracks in either Birkenau or one of the Auschwitz camps, stripped naked, shorn of all hair, sprayed with disinfectant, and tattooed with a prisoner number.

Later, four large gas chambers and crematoria were constructed in Birkenau to make the killing process more efficient, and to handle the sheer volume of victims.

The killing was easy; you didn't even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas.

Höss later introduced hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), produced from the pesticide Zyklon B, to the process of extermination, after his deputy Karl Fritzsch had tested it on a group of Russian prisoners in 1941.

"[50] In an interview at Nuremberg after the war, Höss commented that after observing the prisoners die by Zyklon B, " ...this gassing set my mind at rest for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon.

"[51] In 1942, Höss began a forced sexual relationship with an Austrian communist political prisoner at Auschwitz, Eleonore Hodys[52] (or Nora Mattaliano-Hodys).

[56] Even Höss' expanded facility could not handle the huge number of victims' corpses, and the camp staff were obliged to dispose of thousands of bodies by burning them in open pits.

Adopting the pseudonym "Franz Lang" and working as a gardener, Höss lived in Gottrupel, Schleswig-Holstein, with his family and evaded arrest for nearly a year.

[citation needed] In his affidavit made at Nuremberg on 5 April 1946, Höss stated: "I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead.

In his essay on the Final Solution in Auschwitz, which he wrote in Kraków, he revised the previously given death toll:[70] "I myself never knew the total number, and I have nothing to help me arrive at an estimate.

The first commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, who was tried and sentenced to death after the war by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal, was hanged here on 16 April 1947."

Höss wrote his autobiography while awaiting execution; it was published first in a Polish translation in 1951 and then in the original German in 1956, edited by Martin Broszat.

[72] It later appeared in various English editions and consists of two parts, one about his own life and the second about other SS men with whom he had become acquainted, mainly Heinrich Himmler and Theodor Eicke, among several others.

He saw himself as "a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich".After discussions with Höss during the Nuremberg trials at which he testified, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote the following: In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter-of-fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn't asked him.

One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.

[75]Four days before being executed, Höss' acknowledgement of the enormity of his crimes was revealed in a message to the state prosecutor: My conscience compels me to make the following declaration.

[82][83][84] Hans-Jürgen's eldest son, Kai-Uwe, an evangelical pastor, who had previously kept out of the public eye, said, "I just want him [Rainer] to stop defrauding people using the names and ashes of millions of Holocaust victims.

"[86][39] Nonetheless, she criticized Rainer's actions, saying he had not been born at the time, could thus not know what had happened, and so must be "a lying, drug-addicted, fame-seeking, money-hungry, evil young man".

[87] In a 2021 interview to Harding, her last before her death in 2023, then 88-year old Inge-Brigitt, while condemning the atrocities committed at the Auschwitz camp, seemingly defended her father, stating: "It was not my dad's fault.