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By Root 23121 0

—had been carried out either by shooting, which posed problems having to do with simple bloody mess, unhandiness and inefficiency, or by the introduction of carbon monoxide into an enclosed sealed space, a method which was also inefficient and prohibitively time-consuming. It was Höss who, having observed the effectiveness of a crystallized hydrocyanic compound called Zyklon B when used as a vapor on the rats and the other verminous creatures that infested Auschwitz, suggested this means of liquidation to Eichmann, who, according to Höss, jumped at the idea, though he later denied it. (Why any experimenter was so backward is hard to understand. Cyanide gas had been used in certain American execution chambers for over fifteen years.) Turning nine hundred Russian prisoners of war into guinea pigs, Höss found the gas splendidly suited to the quick dispatch of human beings and it was employed thereafter extensively on countless inmates and arrivals of whatever origin, although after early April, 1943, exclusively on Jews and Gypsies. Höss was also an innovator in the use of such techniques as miniature minefields to blow up wayward or escaping prisoners, high-voltage fences to electrocute them and—his capricious pride—a pack of ferocious Alsatians and Doberman pinschers known as the Hundestaffel that gave Höss mingled joy and dissatisfaction (in a fussy concern that runs persistently through his memoirs), since the dogs, though hounds of hell in savagery by which they had been trained to chew inmates to shreds, did become torpid and ungovernable at moments and were all too skilled at finding out-of-the-way corners to go to sleep. In a large measure, however, his fertile and inventive ideas were successful enough that it may be said that Höss—in consummate travesty of the way that Koch and Ehrlich and Roentgen and others altered the face of medical science during the great German efflorescence of the last half of the previous century—worked upon the entire concept of mass murder a lasting metamorphosis.

For the sake of its historical and sociological significance it has to be pointed out that of all of Höss’s codefendants at the postwar trials in Poland and Germany—those satraps and second-string butchers who made up the SS ranks at Auschwitz and other camps—only a handful had a military background. However, this should not be particularly surprising. Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a “liberal” fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk, a nurse, a locksmith, a fireman, a customs officer, a legal advisor, a manufacturer of musical instruments, a specialist in machine construction, a laboratory assistant, the owner of a trucking firm... the list goes on and on with these commonplace and familiar citizens’ pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

No real revelation in all this: in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As for Höss, he seems to be something of an anomaly, inasmuch as his pre-Auschwitz career straddled agriculture and the military. The evidence shows that he had been exceptionally dedicated, and it is precisely that rigorous and unbending attitude of spirit—the concept of duty and obedience above all which dwells unshakably in the mind of every good soldier