SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß

So, the victorious allies sentenced lots of Germans to death. Eisenhower killed an estimated 1 million in his Rhineland meadows camps. Irma Grese never confessed to anything and remained defiant up til the moment she was executed. What the hell does that have to do with the validity of Hoess' so-called confession?

Nessie wrote:
Lemme' see if I got this straight. The allies executed a bunch of Germans so that proves that there were gas chambers.

For the Zeireis confession just search "Franz Zeireis confession". There's lots of hits.

Wrong.



OK, so he was not tried at Nuremberg and he said;

www.giottoulivi.edu.it/progetti/progettididattici/progettididattici2002_2003/DachauMathausenEbensee/Confession%20of%20Franz%20Ziereis.htm

"Altogether, as far as I know, 65,000 inmates were murdered in Mauthausen."

Which is different from your claim he said they were gassed. Will you apologise for lying?

Testimony of Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz

[Testimony on Monday, April 15, 1946]

Morning Session

[continued]
DR. KAUFFMANN: ...from 1943 until the end of the war, you were one of the chiefs in the Inspectorate of the Main Economic and Administrative Office?

HOESS: Yes, that is correctly stated.

DR. KAUFFMANN: Do you mean by that, that you are particularly well informed on everything occurring in concentration camps regarding the treatment and the methods applied?
HOESS: Yes.

DR. KAUFFMANN: I ask you, therefore, first of all, whether you have any knowledge regarding the treatment of internees, whether certain methods became known to you according to which they were tortured and cruelly treated? Please formulate your statement according to periods, up to 1939 and after 1939.

HOESS: Until the outbreak of war in 1939, the situation in the camps regarding feeding, accommodations, and treatment of internees, was the same as in any other prison or penitentiary in the Reich. The internees were treated severely [strictly]  but methodical beatings or ill-treatments were out of the question. The Reichsfáhrer gave frequent orders that every SS man who laid violent hands on an internee would be punished; and several times SS men who did ill-treat internees were punished.
Feeding and billeting at that time were on the same basis as those of other prisoners under legal administration.
The accommodations in the camps during those years were still normal because the mass influxes at the outbreak of the war and during the war had not yet taken place. When the war started and when mass deliveries of political internees arrived, and, later on, when prisoners who were members of the resistance movements arrived from the occupied territories, the construction of buildings and the extensions of the camps could no longer keep pace with the number of incoming internees. During the first years of the war this problem could still be overcome by improvising measures; but later, due to the exigencies of the war, this was no longer possible ' since there were practically no building materials any more at our disposal. And, furthermore, rations for the internees were again and again severely curtailed by the provincial economic administration offices.
This then led to a situation where internees in the camps no longer had the staying power to resist the now gradually growing epidemics.
The main reason why the prisoners were in such bad condition towards the end of the war, why so many thousands of them were found sick and emaciated in the camps, was that every, internee had to be employed in the armament industry to the extreme limit of his forces. The Reichsfáhrer constantly and on every occasion kept this goal before our eyes, and also proclaimed it through the Chief of the Main Economic and Administrative Office, Obergruppenfáhrer Pohl, to the concentration camp, commanders and administrative leaders during the so-called commanders' meetings.
Every commander was told to make every effort to achieve this. The aim was not to have as many dead as possible or to destroy as many internees as possible; the Reichsfáhrer was constantly concerned with being able to engage all forces available in the armament industry.

DR. KAUFFMANN: There is no doubt that the longer the war lasted, the larger became the number of the ill-treated and tortured inmates. Whenever you inspected the concentration camps did you not learn something of this state of affairs through complaints, et cetera, or do you consider that the conditions which have been described are more or less due to excesses?

HOESS: These so-called ill-treatments and this torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners that were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual leaders, subleaders, and men who laid violent hands on internees.

DR. KAUFFMANN: Do you mean you never took cognizance of these matters?
 
HOESS: If in any way such a case came to be known, then the perpetrator was, of course, immediately relieved of his post or transferred somewhere else. So that, even if he were not punished f or lack of evidence to prove his guilt, even then, he was taken away from the internees and given another position.

DR. KAUFFMANN: To what do you attribute the particularly bad and shameful conditions, which were ascertained by the entering Allied troops, and which to a certain extent were photographed and filmed?

HOESS: The catastrophic situation. at the end of the war was due to the fact that, as a result of the destruction of the railway network and of the continuous bombing of the industrial plants, care for these masses--I am thinking of Auschwitz with its 140,000 internees--could no longer be assured. Improvised measures, truck columns, and everything else tried by the commanders to improve the situation were of little or no avail; it was no longer possible. The number of the sick became immense. There were next to no medical supplies; epidemics raged everywhere. Internees who were capable of work were used over and over again. By order of the Reichsfáhrer, even half-sick people had to be used wherever possible in industry. As a result every bit of space in the concentration. camps which could possibly be used for lodging was overcrowded with sick and dying prisoners.