1 September 1939.
Nazi Germany invades Poland, marking the beginning of the Second World War.
In May of the following year, the Germans establish Auschwitz concentration camp, located around 60 kilometres west of Kraków.
The camp is initially created because mass arrests of Poles exceed the capacity of existing prisons, forcing the German occupation authorities to establish a new site for political prisoners and other perceived enemies of the Nazi regime.
In October 1941, the Nazis begin construction of
Birkenau, which will become the largest section of the Auschwitz camp complex.
From March 1942 onward, Auschwitz-Birkenau plays a central role in the German effort to murder the Jews of Europe, and more than 1.
1 million people, most of them Jews, will die there.
Just outside the camp fences, beside the commandant’s office and within sight of the crematoria, stands a spacious villa surrounded by gardens, flowers, and children’s toys.
While thousands perish each day behind the villa’s high concrete wall,
a German family lives a comfortable life only a few meters away from the machinery of mass murder.
One of the residents of this villa is the wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, a woman who once described Auschwitz as “paradise on earth.
” Her name is Hedwig Höss.
Hedwig Höss was born as Hedwig Hensel on 3 March 1908 in the small town of Oberneukirch, then part of the German Empire.
She grew up during the turbulent years that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War and became attracted to radical nationalist ideas that promised national rebirth and racial unity.
In her early adulthood, Hedwig joined the Artaman League, a radical nationalist rural movement that was absorbed into the Hitler Youth in 1934.
Hedwig embraced the movement’s racial ideology and hostility toward Jews and Slavs.
It was within the Artaman League that she met Rudolf Höss in the spring of 1929.
Only a few months later, in August 1929, the two married and the marriage produced five children.
The couple later worked on an agricultural estate near the city of Breslau, today’s Polish Wrocław, with the intention of purchasing their own farm.
Hedwig was curious, talkative, and eager to know everything around her, while Rudolf Höss appeared reserved and disciplined.
She accepted her husband’s political beliefs, supported his growing SS career, and praised his dedication to duty.
After her husband was assigned to Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Hedwig moved there with the children in January 1935, and later, following another transfer, to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near the German capital.
The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
After the defeat of Poland, Rudolf Höss was assigned by the SS to establish a new concentration camp in German-occupied southern Poland near the town of Oświęcim, known to the Germans as Auschwitz.
In May 1940, the Höss family relocated there.
Their new home was a spacious villa near the Auschwitz camp complex, close to the commandant’s office building.
The property had been confiscated from the family of Polish sergeant Józef Soja.
A concrete wall and rows of thickly planted trees shielded part of the villa’s grounds, preventing the Höss children from seeing the distant crematoria chimneys.
Inside the household, Hedwig Höss oversaw domestic affairs and the upbringing of the couple’s children.
She raised the children according to strict Nazi ideological principles.
With her approval, they mocked religious people, while former members of the household later recalled that the eldest son, Klaus, a member of the Hitler Youth, behaved sadistically toward others.
A few months after the family’s arrival in Auschwitz, Hedwig Höss began employing prisoners from the camp and civilian forced labourers inside the villa.
Political prisoners were ordered to paint the walls and renovate the kitchen and bathroom.
The villa itself was decorated with tapestries, furnishings, and paintings taken from prisoners deported to Auschwitz.
Hedwig also employed a gardener, cook, governess, tailor, seamstress, barber, and chauffeur to maintain the household.
On the camp grounds, she established and ran a sewing workshop where female prisoners produced clothing for the wives of SS personnel.
After the villa was renovated in 1941, Hedwig organized gatherings for SS officers and their families.
She also wore clothing and jewellery confiscated from Jewish prisoners deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
She displayed these valuables during visits to the casino, theatre, and cinema, while some of the stolen property was sent to relatives in Germany.
The villa was surrounded by a large garden, and Hedwig Höss devoted considerable effort to transforming the property into a comfortable refuge for herself and her children.
She built a greenhouse filled with exotic plants, while a small swimming pool stood in the backyard.
Nearby, the children played in a sandpit and rode their bicycles around the grassy grounds surrounding the villa.
From the second-floor windows, Hedwig could see the raspberry bushes climbing along the garden wall.
Beyond them stood the Auschwitz camp complex itself: the commandant’s office where her husband worked, the prisoner barracks, and the crematoria where mass murder was taking place.
Hedwig even used ashes from the crematoria to fertilize the soil in the garden.
Photographs taken during the war show the Höss family living what appeared to be an ordinary middle-class life only meters away from suffering and death.
While prisoners were being murdered inside the camp, Hedwig organized picnics in the garden and watched as her children played outside.
She later described Auschwitz as ‘paradise on earth,’ adding, ‘I want to live here until I die.
’ Indeed, when her husband was relocated for several months, Hedwig chose to remain at the Auschwitz villa rather than join him in Berlin.
During the winter, the family travelled by sledge through the snow-covered countryside surrounding Auschwitz.
In summer, Hedwig accompanied the children to the nearby Soła River, where they swam, played in the grass, and cared for their pet tortoises.
Brigitte Höss, the daughter of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, described after the war her mother as loving and attentive.
She recalled Hedwig as “wonderful” and “the nicest person in the world.
” According to Brigitte, Hedwig occasionally gave food to prisoners working near the villa and spoke to them kindly.
Some prisoners reportedly referred to her as the “Angel of Auschwitz.
” Yet testimony from former prisoners revealed a different reality.
A Polish prisoner named Stanislaw Dubiel worked as a gardener at the Höss villa.
Before arriving there, Dubiel had been marked for execution inside Auschwitz, but the Höss family intervened to prevent his death.
According to Dubiel’s later testimony, Hedwig reminded him that her intervention had spared his life, implying that if he failed to work hard enough, he might not be so fortunate the next time.
Dubiel also recalled Hedwig openly expressing antisemitic views, reflecting the radical ideological fanaticism she shared with her husband.
In his testimony he stated: “Frau Höss often used to say to me that all Jews had to disappear from the globe, and that there would even come a time for English Jews.
” Hedwig fully supported her husband, but she became so deeply distressed after learning details about the mass murder taking place inside Auschwitz that she stopped having sex with him.
As a result, the marriage between Rudolf and Hedwig was beginning to unravel.
In May 1942, Rudolf Höss started an affair with Eleonore Hodys, an Austrian communist political prisoner, who worked at the villa.
Hodys became pregnant by Rudolf Höss and, in order to avoid the scandal, he sent her to be starved in a standing prison cell, with orders to gas her if necessary to avoid discovery.
Eventually, she was forced to have an abortion in the camp hospital instead of being executed.
Meanwhile, Hedwig herself was having an affair with a prisoner named Karola Bohnera, a German kapo who worked in the villa kitchen.
One day, Rudolf Höss unexpectedly returned home and discovered Hedwig and Bohnera together inside the greenhouse.
Realizing what was happening, he reportedly “made a scene” but Hedwig later calmed her husband after agreeing that her lover would no longer return to the villa.
Despite this, the affair between Hedwig and Bohnera continued whenever Rudolf Höss was away from Auschwitz.
At the end of November 1944, as the Red Army approached Auschwitz, the Höss family left the villa and relocated to the area near the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps in Germany.
In a letter to relatives dated 26 November 1944, Eduard Wirths, the camp physician at Auschwitz at the time, complained that the family’s move required two railway wagons and “countless crates,” suggesting the enormous quantity of possessions the family had accumulated during their years at Auschwitz.
The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.
After the war, Hedwig Höss and the children hid in the town of Sankt Michaelisdonn in northern Germany, staying inside a sugar factory while Rudolf Höss worked on a nearby farm disguised as a sailor.
Hedwig was arrested by the British in March 1946 and after several days of interrogation told investigators only that her husband was “dead.
” In the end, she revealed his hiding place after Allied investigators threatened that a train was waiting to take her children to Siberia.
Rudolf Höss was subsequently captured by British forces, sentenced to death in Poland, and executed in April 1947 on the grounds of Auschwitz I main camp.
Shortly before his death, Rudolf Höss apologized for his crimes.
No comparable expression of guilt ever came from his wife.
In some ways, Hedwig appeared even worse than the commandant of Auschwitz himself — because while he eventually acknowledged guilt, she showed no remorse at all.
From the 1960s onward, Hedwig regularly travelled to Washington, D.
C.
to visit her daughter Brigitte, since wives of Nazi war criminals were not restricted from international travel after the war.
Hedwig Höss was 81 years old when she died on 15 September 1989 while visiting her daughter in the United States.
She was cremated under a false name and buried in a cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
Her gravestone bears only the German word “Mutti,” meaning “Mommy.
” The false identity was intended to avoid attention to the fact that “Mutti” had been the wife of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, responsible for the murder of more than one million men, women, and children.
