Axar.az presents an article, "The Commandant​" by John Samuel Tieman.

I just read the autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. He was the commandant of Auschwitz. After the defeat of the Nazis, he lived under a false name until discovered by the British, who then turned him over to Polish authorities. Hoess was convicted and executed. But before he died, he wrote of his life, the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his role in the Holocaust. I find his memoir compelling. A simple question has long haunted me. How could anyone participate in the Holocaust? Hoess begins by confessing that he personally arranged to have 2,000,000 persons shot or gassed.

Decades ago, I heard about that autobiography. I never read it. I'd also heard it was bland in style, thoughtless in content, and emotionally detached. But is it?

It's worth taking a moment to talk about style. Hoess wrote 114 manuscript pages in just a matter of a few weeks. In essence, we're reading an unedited first draft. Nonetheless, it's a good first draft. I taught writing at a college for years. Some of the best students I had were cops. They're accustomed to writing detailed reports using concrete images and strict timelines. Hoess had that same talent. Many points of this book have been fact-checked and are accurate.

Rudolf Hoess is far from thoughtless in his reflections. He spends pages writing about the first executions in which he participated as a new lieutenant. In one case, he executed a fellow SS officer, a guy he had spent time with just the day before the execution. The condemned man's crime was that he was kind to a prisoner. Hoess is by no means without sympathy. Nonetheless, he put a bullet in the guy's head. He is many things. Thoughtless is not one. He agonizes over this one execution, this man Hoess, who, by his own admission, killed millions.

He's not detached. Time and again, there is his knowledge of all the pain he caused, and there are all his defenses against the fullest understanding of that pain. That struggle is right there on the page. He continually uses terms like “painful events”, “strange feelings”, “my guilt”, and “hard necessity”. He's not detached. He's emotionally defended. But that still doesn't answer my original question. How could anyone participate in the Holocaust?

On page after page, Hoess witnesses horror and comes close to an understanding grounded in compassion. A mother who, as the door of the gas chamber is closing, tries to save her children. She cries to Hoess, ”At least let my precious children live.” He describes the scene as “shattering”. He describes his troops asking a question he admits he constantly asked himself, whether or not it is “necessary that we do all this?” His answer? “Hitler's orders had to be obeyed regardless”.

Hoess is not detached. Nor is his mind complacent. He has a clear knowledge of what he is doing. But when the moment comes for understanding, he turns off his critical faculties. Instead, he substitutes variations upon “I'm just following orders.” Early in the memoir, when he shot his comrade, he remembers the letterhead of his commanding officer. “There is only one thing that is valid: Orders!” It's the Nazi universal, the fascist imperative.

It's this ability to turn off his critical faculties that is disturbing. And that's how Hoess could participate in the Holocaust.

There is much to be said for received wisdom. A person can live a good life if, at the center of that life, is the Golden Rule: to do to others as you would have them do to you. But a failure to interrogate received wisdom can also result in individual weakness and systemic decline. Hoess and his country failed to question Hitler's orders, which they took to be a kind of received wisdom. It weakened the man. It degraded the country. It led Hoess to the gallows and Germany to ruination.