Rudolf Hoess - Commandant of Auschwitz

The “People’s Levy” called out at the very end of the war, roughly equivalent to the British Home Guard of 1940.

Heinrich Schmauser, an SS general, was Leader of the Southeast District (Silesia) and simultaneously senior SS and Police Leader in this province. As such he was responsible for the carrying out of Himmler’s orders for the evacuation of Auschwitz and of the Silesian Camps.

A peninsula in the Baltic, west of Rügen.

Professor Dr. Karl Gebhardt was a childhood friend of Himmler’s. He was in the Oberland Bund and took part in the abortive Munich Putsch of 1923. In 1933 Himmler took him into the SS. As head of the Hohenlychen Medical Institute in Brandenburg, which later became an SS hospital, he was one of the senior SS medical men in Germany. He was also Himmler’s principal adviser in medical matters. Shortly before the end of the war he was appointed President of the German Red Cross. During the so-called “Doctors’ Trial” at Nuremberg he was condemned to death for the part he had played in medical experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates.

A typewritten document of eight pages, which Hoess signed at 2:30 a.m. on March 14, 1946. It does not differ substantially from what he later said or wrote in Nuremberg or Cracow.

See page 16 of Lord Russell’s Introduction for details of this interview.

Hans Fritsche, a radio commentator and a close colleague of Goebbels, was one of the principal accused before the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Dr. Curt von Burgsdorff had served as Undersecretary of State for Administration in the Protectorate Bohemia-Moravia from 1939 to 1942. From December 1943 until January 1945 he was Governor of the Cracow District in the Government-General. Found guilty merely of participation in the “criminal fascist government,” he was given the minimum sentence by the Polish People’s Court, and, since he had already been in prison for three years awaiting trial, was immediately discharged and sent back to Germany.

The reference is apparently to Secretary of State, Dr. Josef Bühler, formerly deputy for the Government-General in Cracow. He was condemned to death in Warsaw on July 20, 1948.

Göth, an SS officer, had been dierctly responsible for the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto in March 1943. Later he was in command of the Jewish camp at Plaszow, near Cracow. In the autumn of 1944 proceedings for embezzlement were instigated against him in an SS court. On September 5, 1946, he was condemned to death by the Polish People’s Court in Cracow.

See Appendices 3 to 9.

Buildings in the base camp, where articles of clothing and equipment for the SS rank and file were stored.

After Auschwitz had been built, the German Armaments Works (DAW) built a branch factory inside the camp, where a labor force of up to 2,500 prisoners was employed.