interesting but opens the door for questions
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The background information on Hoess' life is interesting but the details are lacking about the day to day details about how camp life really was. Reading this, you would say that Hoess cared a great deal about prisoners but that doesn't seem to be the case. Hoess provides interesting information about other SS figures. Well worth reading but one must read other material. The foreword goes a little overboard with emotion, just give us the facts please.
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A doomed SS officer writes his memoirs for posterity.
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Hoess reveals how a family man who loved horses could himself survive in charge of the Auschwitz complex. Is an authentic read as Hoess blunders here and there with a faulty memory and shows self doubt as the date of his execution nears. Holocaust deniers will find no comfort in the book, although it has to be said that Hoess left the camp in 1943 and that prison memoirs are always suspect to some degree. Hoess seems to have realized all along that a death sentence was certain. The argument that he admitted mass gassings in an attempt to obtain a lighter sentence is unlikely. But you have to read the book to get a feel for this particular nazi whose only aim was to please Berlin.
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same old stuff
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Hoess' "recollections" are now in chronological retrospect, laughable. If the reader really wants to know happened, he will have to check all of Hoess' testimony against other sources. Hoess left Auschwitz long before the Holocaust was over and because of his complicity in a theft ring. Thus any numbers for the death rate in the the camp are suspect. This book is written for the unknowledgable and will in years hence prove to be a joke.
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Inside the mind of a mad man.
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Enter the mind of a mad man. LTC Rudolph Hoess, while in prison awaiting trail for his role in the systematic extermination of 2 million jews while kommandant of KL Auschwitz, spills his thoughts on to paper for the whole world to read. Although Hoess does makes numerous "I was only following orders" to excuse his wicked actions through out the book,it is his cold unblinking honesty about how a child destinded to become a priest instead became the self admitted "the greastest killer of all time" is what really grabbed me. He also provides glimes into his childhood, his experiences in WW1, joining the Nazi party and his years in prison- plenty of imformation for pyschologist today to peek into the mind of a mad man. In short Hoess writes with the manial coolness of a real life Hannibal Lecter.
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It shows how ordinary men were transformed into monsters.
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I have read many books about Nazis and the holocaust, but this one is unique in that it is one of the few written in graphic detail by an SS man himself. I think Hoess definitely had qualms about his role, but was too much of a bureaucrat to openly challenge the regime. His credibility has been doubted, since he was often inconsistent about the number of deaths while at Auschwitz. I don't think Hoess was personally a cruel man; he seemed to have taken a dispassionate role in his work. He did emphasize, before his execution, that he still considered himself a National Socialist, and acknowledged his guilt for taking part in the Final Solution. Hoess seemed to place all the blame on Himmler. Hoess, in the first third of the book, wanted to portray himself as a normal, decent family man who simply ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. In short, this book conveyed a very powerful message and warning, despite some of the irrelevant personal details about Hoess's life. Especially interesting are the profiles of various SS members at the end of the book.
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