WAR CRIMES: It Was Only 2,000,000

Rudolf Francis Ferdinand Hoess, a stocky, 47-year-old Nazi, stood stolidly in Warsaw’s Supreme Court one day last week to hear his sentence. One of the court’s officials asked him: “How did it feel to run a murder plant which produced 4,000,000 corpses?” Blandly, Hoess replied: “It was only 2,000,000.”

Even by his own dilution of the blood on his hands, Hoess was history’s top killer, the master of mass atrocity. The number of lives he had taken in Germany’s horror camp at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) far exceeded the largest total in any historically accepted account of the world’s bloodiest massacres. The tolls of all the recorded pogroms did not add up to the 2,800,000 Jewish lives which ended at Auschwitz.

In his month-long trial Hoess denied none of Auschwitz’s horrors. He offered one sentence of defense: “All my actions resulted from orders which I received.” He was proud of having designed the gas chambers in which 2,000 persons could be put to death at one time. He was proud of his efficiency. Told of Hermann Göring’s remark at Nürnberg that Hoess could not possibly have taken 2,000,000 lives, the exterminator sputtered: “That shows how little he knows about how we worked. Why, I could have done twice as much.” Hoess’s beady eyes did not flicker as the sentence was read. It was death, by hanging. He got a few days of reprieve. Polish law forbids execution, even of such as Hoess, during Holy Week.