Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess after he was tortured by the British and forced to confess to gassing the Jews
This quote is from a news article in a British newspaper, which you can read in full here:
When [the daughter of Rudolf Hoess] is told about an incident at the [Auschwitz] camp, when her father was spoken to by a pregnant Jewish woman on her way to the gas chamber with her children, she [the daughter of Rudolf Hoess] has had enough. “That’s it, I have heard enough,” she says.
“I heard everything I need to know. He [her father] did what he did.”
Unfortunately, the name of the “pregnant Jewish woman on her way to the gas chamber with her children” is not named in the news article. Who could it have been?
Maybe it was Miriam Rosenthal. I blogged about her in this previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/pregnant-at-auschwitz-the-story-of-miriam-rosenthal/
This quote from the news article explains why the daughter of Rudolf Hoess has been dragged into the news again:
Now she [the daughter of Rudolf Hoess] has told all to Stern Magazine from Germany: prompted to embark upon the painful journey of remembrance by the Oskar Groening trial which is currently going on in the country. Groening, 93, is charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944 when he worked there as an S.S. guard – an S.S. guard employed by her father [Rudolf Hoess].
This photo of child survivors of Auschwitz was taken about 4 weeks after the camp was liberated
This photo was taken on the same day as the previous photo
Note how the photo directly above, which is shown with the article, has been photo-shopped to increase the contrast in order to show how terrible it was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both of these photos are still photos from a film taken by the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz.
I have complained many times about the inappropriate use of photos to make the Holocaust look worse than it actually was. The photo of Rudolf Hoess, that is shown below, would be a better photo to use in an article about his daughter. This photo shows him before he was tortured by the British.
Rudolf Hoess the Commandant of Auschwitz
But I am getting ahead of myself. The news article actually starts with this misleading quote:
Born Ingebirgitt Hannah Hoess, she now lives under an assumed name in Washington, US, where her social life has brought her into contact with former US President Bill Clinton and his deputy Al Gore.
It is a long way from the banks of the Sola River in southern Poland, a tributary of the Vistula which, as she sat and played as a child, would turn grey then black before her eyes: the result of the human ash tipped into it from the crematoria ovens at the camp which her father Rudolf oversaw.
The Sola river where ashes from the Auschwitz cremoria were allegedly thrown
As a child, the children of Rudolf Hoess played at the Sola River which was close to the main Auschwitz camp, and close to the house where Hoess lived with his family.
Besides that, there was a place called Solahütte, which was a little known SS resort some 30 km south of Auschwitz on the Sola River. I don’t think that the SS men at Auschwitz would have polluted the river that ran through their vacation spot.
I previously blogged about the ashes from the crematoria at Auschwitz on this blog post:
Here is another quote from the news article:
Dad [Rudolf Hoess] was strict when it came to etiquette,” says Ingebrigitt. “At the dining table, the children were allowed to speak only if they were asked.
“But he was never angry. At the table he spoke of family things and what we would do on weekends for excursions. But never something next door, because we never knew anything. Never.”
Next door was the supreme killing plant of the Third Reich where vast gas chambers capable of “processing” 12,000 human beings every 24 hours were in operation night and day.
The house where Rudolf Hoess and his family lived at Auschwitz
In the photo above, the gas chamber (not shown) was to the left, and only a few yards from the house. On the right was the garden where the children of Rudolf Hoess played. The balcony (not shown) was on the back of the house.
The balcony was on what Americans would call the “second floor.” In German terms, the first floor of a house is called the ground floor and what we call the “second floor” is called the first floor in Germany.
This quote is also from the news article:
She [the daughter of Rudolf Hoess] says she sleepwalked and remembers now seeing the smoke from the crematoria, which consumed the bodies of the dead and turned them into ash to be fed into the [Sola] river, 100 metres away from a balcony on the first floor of the family house. She could see the floodlights and the watchtowers [in the Auschwitz main camp].
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