Mother Matylda died in 1968 and was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from Nazi extermination.

Rudolf Höss

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was born on November 25, 1901, in Baden-Baden and grew up in a strict extremist family that emphasized the central role of duty in moral life. During World War I, at age fourteen, he enlisted in the German Army’s Twenty-First Regiment of Dragoons. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, he joined the Freikorps (German military volunteer unit), then joined the Nazi Party in 1922 after listening to Hitler speak in Munich.

Höss joined the SS in 1934, then the Totenkopfverbände, and served at Dachau and Sachsenhausen before joining the Waffen-SS in 1939 after the German invasion of Poland. He was appointed commander of Auschwitz on May 1, 1940. He served for three and a half years and was responsible for the Auschwitz-Birkenau expansion. In June 1941, Heinrich Himmler told Höss that Hitler had ordered the “final solution of the Jewish question” and that Auschwitz had been chosen for a mass extermination site, so Höss began testing extermination techniques. According to his autobiography and eyewitness testimony, Höss accepted anything, even violence and brutality, as long as it was ordered by an authority figure.

Höss was described as cold and unemotional, though in his autobiography he claimed that he’d hoped to lead by example to encourage prisoners to work hard but that his “good intentions” were dashed by “the inadequacy and sheer stupidity” of the men posted to him. He thought it “. . . might have been possible to control men and bring them to my way of thinking if those in charge of the prison camp”—i.e., men such as Karl Fritzsch—“obeyed my wishes . . . this neither they could nor would do, owing to intellectual limitations, obstinacy, and malice.” Höss constantly emphasized that he was the only one competent enough to get anything done, but prisoners were left in the hands of Fritzsch and other “distasteful persons” who didn’t run the camp the way Höss wanted.