How The Execution Of The Commandant Of Auschwitz Happened

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]On the 16th of April, 1947, 2 years after the Second World War had come to an end in Europe, one of the most disgusting and evil Nazis and war criminals was led throughout the concentration camp he once oversaw.

[00:00:14]He was led towards a gallows which had been specially made for him. And this wooden structure, which sat within a short walk from his former office, would be the final steps he would ever take.

[00:00:26]The execution of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, was planned expertly and every small detail was refined to ensure nothing went wrong, but also that Höss suffered.

[00:00:39]He was, after all, a man who had built a camp of death, and he was responsible for over 1.1 million people's demises and exterminations.

[00:00:48]Höss himself apologized for his actions and crimes, and he was somewhat repentant, but no one could excuse him for what he had done and what suffering he had caused to Polish people and European people during World War II.

[00:01:03]Rudolf Höss was a man who had the blood of millions of people on his hands, and he was a terrible criminal who even murdered in his teenage years.

[00:01:13]But how was his execution so expertly planned and what threatened to make it go wrong?

[00:01:20]Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz, and he had a long history associated with death and murder.

[00:01:28]Following the First World War, of which he served as non-commissioned officer in the German army, he joined the right-wing paramilitary groups, and he got involved in the violence of these groups such as the Freikorps.

[00:01:40]Höss said of his moments with the group that, I quote, "The fighting in the Baltic states was more savage and more bitter than any I had experienced in the First World War. There was no real front, for the enemy was everywhere.

[00:01:55]When it came to a clash, it was a fight to the death, and no quarter was given or expected. Houses were set on fire and burned the occupants to death.

[00:02:05]On innumerable occasions, I came across this terrible spectacle of burned-out cottages containing the charred corpses of women and children."

[00:02:14]He took part in armed attacks on Polish people. In 1923, he was arrested by the police after he and other members of the Freikorps had beaten a local schoolteacher to death.

[00:02:26]The man who had ordered this hit was no other than Martin Bormann, who would later go on to become the private secretary of Adolf Hitler.

[00:02:33]Höss was relatively well-behaved behind bars and was released from prison 4 years after being sentenced. And after meeting his wife, Hedwig, and having children, Höss began searching for a new career.

[00:02:46]He joined the SS, the paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, which was at the time overseen by Heinrich Himmler.

[00:02:53]Höss and Himmler would become acquaintances and later close friends, and he rose through out the ranks and took a job in December 1934 in Dachau concentration camp.

[00:03:04]Höss was promoted and then was placed in charge of the firing squad at a different camp, Sachsenhausen.

[00:03:11]And he was actually the man who gave the order to fire upon the first conscientious objector of World War II who was executed, and Höss also fired the finishing coup de grâce gunshot to his head.

[00:03:22]His reputation for being a barbaric and brutal guard continued, and Höss was then sent to inspect the site in Poland that would become Auschwitz.

[00:03:32]Himmler gave him the authority to run this camp as the commandant, and he then developed the site to become a ruthless place of mass murder.

[00:03:39]Höss was determined to do things differently, and he wanted to make the most efficient site of slaughter that he could, all whilst he lived in a villa next door with his family.

[00:03:50]It was he who introduced the torture blocks and medical experimentation centers where doctors like Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, operated. And also, it was he who introduced gassings to the camp and personally oversaw the tests in which Soviet POWs were gassed in the basements of Block 11.

[00:04:09]Höss also implanted the Death Wall firing range based upon his previous experiences running the firing squads at other camps.

[00:04:17]Himmler, the head of the SS, selected Auschwitz to be one of the sites for the extermination of Europe's Jewish people, as it had been set up with relatively good railway access, and it was also quite isolated, too.

[00:04:30]Höss then developed the gas chambers, and these were created along with crematoria in which the bodies of the deceased were then burned in.

[00:04:38]Gassing operations saw thousands of people being killed every single day, and the victims were selected from the railway yards after they had disembarked from the trains.

[00:04:49]Men were separated from women, and those suitable for slave labor were allowed to live for a brief time.

[00:04:55]The elderly, the ill, the struggling, and children with their mothers were usually sent straight to the gas chambers by Höss's ruthless guard force who used extreme violence to drive them there.

[00:05:07]He later said of his killing process that he personally implemented that, I quote, "Technically, it wasn't so hard.

[00:05:14]It would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers. The killing itself took the least time.

[00:05:20]You could dispose of 2,000 heads in half an hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. The killing was easy.

[00:05:28]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. The whole thing went by very quickly."

[00:05:41]It was also Rudolf Höss who specifically introduced the Zyklon B pesticide into the camp, and he was actually shockingly replaced from his work in Auschwitz in November 1943 as it had been discovered that he was actually having an illegal relationship, an affair, with a communist political prisoner who was locked up inside of his camp.

[00:06:02]But Rudolf Höss was brought back the following year to oversee Operation Höss, the mass killing of 430,000 Hungarian Jews who were all exterminated in just 56 ruthless days.

[00:06:15]At the end of the war, Höss spent time at Ravensbrück, an all-female camp, and he oversaw the creation of the gas chamber there and was personally responsible for killing 2,000 women prisoners.

[00:06:27]But he was warned by Heinrich Himmler that the end of the war was coming, and with that, he went on the run.

[00:06:34]He had been provided with a cyanide capsule to bring his life to an end if he was ever captured, but he knew that he would be strung up for his crimes eventually.

[00:06:43]Höss split up from his family, and he was later arrested in 1946 after his wife gave the British a tip-off to where he truly was.

[00:06:52]He had been hiding as a gardener under a false name, and he was then battered badly and beaten by the British during his arrest.

[00:07:01]Despite not being brought to the Nuremberg trials alongside other high-ranking Nazis, Rudolf Höss did testify as a defense witness for Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the most senior SS officer on trial.

[00:07:14]Höss admitted his crimes and inflated his death toll, almost as if he was boasting about what he had done during World War II.

[00:07:21]He claimed, and I quote, "I commanded Auschwitz until the 1st of December, 1943, and estimate that at least 2 and 1/2 million 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 around 3 million dead.

[00:07:42]This figure represents about 70 to 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries.

[00:07:55]Included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war, previously screened out of prisoner of war cages by the Gestapo, who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men.

[00:08:11]The remainder of the total number of victims included around 100,000 German Jews and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries.

[00:08:27]We executed around 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944."

[00:08:34]He was, in 1946, handed over to the Polish authorities, and he was tried for his crimes as the commandant of Auschwitz.

[00:08:42]He was sentenced to death for his crimes, but the execution of the commandant would be planned meticulously with the aim of ensuring that nothing went wrong.

[00:08:51]The judges were lobbied by the former prisoners of the camp to allow the execution to take place inside of Auschwitz, and this was permitted.

[00:09:00]The judges were concerned, to begin with, that securing the camp would be tricky and that there would be an angry mob who were there to lynch Höss on the way to the camp. Because of this, they ensured that they had a number of different execution dates ready for the action of bringing the Auschwitz commandant's life to an end.

[00:09:18]The first execution date was to have been the 14th of April, 1947, but there were concerns and murmurings in the local area that people were waiting to attack the convoy containing Höss, and the authorities then decided to postpone for a couple of days.

[00:09:35]On the 16th of April, 1947, Rudolf Höss, early in the morning, was taken from his prison cell to the gates of Auschwitz.

[00:09:43]There were only around 100 official witnesses, including court officials and also former prisoners of the camp, who had been given tickets to ensure that they were allowed in the camp to witness what was going to happen. All of them were checked for weapons and were patted down before they were given entry and some of them to ensure they had a good view even climbed up onto the roofs of nearby buildings to ensure they saw exactly the final last seconds of Rudolf Höss's life.

[00:10:11]The gallows had also been meticulously created. They were actually made by German prisoners of war who were working at dawn that morning and they made them with a trapdoor.

[00:10:21]Some have also theorized that these men may have actually acted as the hangmen and the executioners. So it was rather poetic that Rudolf Höss was being executed by his fellow former comrades and war criminals and those who were on his side in the Second World War.

[00:10:37]This may have been because many Polish executioners may have also refused the job as they didn't want to touch a man who they deemed to be so evil.

[00:10:46]Armed uniformed guards stood all around Auschwitz and around the site of the gallows to ensure that no one made a single move towards Rudolf Höss.

[00:10:56]Now Höss arrived at the camp at 8:00 a.m. and he was taken to the building that once housed his office.

[00:11:02]This was relatively close to the gallows which was made near to the crematoria and in a clearing.

[00:11:08]After Höss was given a cup of coffee as a final drink, he was then taken to the cell known as the bunker inside the punishment center of Block 11.

[00:11:17]This was also known as the death block and it was where Höss had ordered many prisoners to be tortured.

[00:11:23]At 10:00 a.m. he was led out through his former camp and he strolled calmly and energetically towards the gallows.

[00:11:30]He was paraded through the camp's main street and his hands and arms had been secured behind his back.

[00:11:37]A priest was also present, a man named Father Zaremba who was actually a local man, a local priest from the village of Osieczany next to the camp.

[00:11:47]As Höss approached the gallows, the death sentence was read and everyone looked on.

[00:11:53]He was helped onto a wooden stool which had been placed under the gallows and then the noose was thrown over the crossbeam.

[00:12:00]The hangman then placed the noose around his neck and Höss then adjusted the knot slightly and moved his head.

[00:12:07]Then the executioner was instructed to pull out the stool from underneath Rudolf Höss and then the trapdoor was sprung open and this then left Rudolf Höss struggling and kicking for air hanging from the gallows.

[00:12:20]There was a very little drop and his neck was not instantly snapped. This was also intended as the authorities wanted him to slowly strangle to death and to suffer a death which was not instant and quick but instead prolonged and painful.

[00:12:37]He struggled for a few minutes as the air was choked out of his lungs and the priest then began to pray at the foot of the gallows.

[00:12:45]The gallows had been sprung at 10:08 a.m. and by 10:21 a.m. the doctor who was present had pronounced that Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was in fact dead. There are even rumors that his body was cremated inside of Auschwitz inside the very ovens that he had many of thousands of people burned but this is debated as some would consider this disrespectful to his victims.

[00:13:11]The media were also instructed to not report at length about the execution and the proceedings.

[00:13:17]They only mentioned the execution briefly in newspapers and they were not allowed to print any eyewitness accounts either and this was actually the last public execution that ever took place in Poland.

[00:13:29]So everything about the execution of the commandant of Auschwitz was planned meticulously and to the minute by the Polish authorities who carried out the proceedings.

[00:13:38]They had everything relating to his execution burned but today the gallows which were used still stand as a haunting reminder of the brutality of the man who once oversaw Auschwitz.

[00:13:50]Höss was forced to be executed inside of his former camp for a very powerful reason.

[00:13:56]It was the very instrument and tool of death he built from the ground up and the prisoners wanted closure for their family members and also friends who had all suffered and died at the camp.

[00:14:07]The execution of Rudolf Höss today stands as a moment of profound importance for the people of Poland in the aftermath of World War II but only a very few select people saw the man who had brought such terror to the country and the war be condemned in front of their very eyes.

[00:14:26]Thanks for watching.

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