Heinrich Himmler, left, with Rudolf Höss during an inspection of Auschwitz, 1942.
The Höss family in the Auschwitz villa, 1943. Counterclockwise from
left: Inge-Brigitt (Brigitte), Hedwig holding Annegret, Hans Jürgen,
Heidetraud, Rudolf and Klaus.
Rudolf Höss with children on Sola River near the Auschwitz camp.
Brigitte Höss lives quietly on a leafy side
street in Northern Virginia. She is retired now, having worked in a
Washington fashion salon for more than 30 years. She recently was
diagnosed with cancer and spends much of her days dealing with the
medical consequences.
Brigitte also has a secret that not even her grandchildren know. Her father was Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz.
It was Rudolf Höss who designed and built Auschwitz from an old
army barracks in Poland to a killing machine capable of murdering 2,000
people an hour. By the end of the war, 1.1 million Jews had been killed
in the camp, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish
and Russian political prisoners. As such, Brigitte’s father was one of
the biggest mass murderers in history.
For nearly 40 years she has kept her past out of public view,
unexamined, not even sharing her story with her closest family members.
I discovered where she lived while doing research for “Hanns and
Rudolf,” a book on how Höss was captured after the war by my
great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled Berlin in the
1930s. It took three years to find her. She would be interviewed only on
the condition that neither her married name be revealed nor any details
that would disclose her identity.
“There are crazy people out there. They might burn my house down or shoot somebody,” she says in a thick German accent.
If the subject of the Holocaust comes up, she steers the
conversation in another direction. “If somebody asks about my dad,” she
says, “I tell them that he died in the war.”
But she has just turned 80 and wonders if it’s time to tell her
grandchildren her story. She was a young girl caught in epic historic
forces she could little understand, much less be responsible for. Is now
the time to process her family history? Does she pass on the fear of
discovery that she has lived with all her life? Or does she take her
story to her grave?
“It was a long time ago,” she says. “I didn’t do what was done. I
never talk about it — it is something within me. It stays with me.”
According to SS personnel records — held in the
National Archives in College Park — Inge-Brigitt Höss was born on Aug.
18, 1933, on a farm near the Baltic Sea. Her father, Rudolf, and mother,
Hedwig, met on this farm, which was a haven for German youths obsessed
with ideas of racial purity and rural utopia. Brigitte was the third of
five children, three girls and two boys.
Brigitte had an extraordinary childhood, moving from the farm to
one concentration camp after another as her father scaled the ranks of
the SS: Dachau from ages 1 through 5; Sachsenhausen from 5 to 7; and
from 7 to 11, in perhaps the most notorious death camp, Auschwitz.
From 1940 to 1944, the Höss family lived in a two-story gray
stucco villa on the edge of Auschwitz — so close you could see the
prisoner blocks and old crematorium from the upstairs window. Brigitte’s
mother described the place as “paradise”: They had cooks, nannies,
gardeners, chauffeurs, seamstresses, haircutters and cleaners, some of
whom were prisoners.
The family decorated their home with furniture and artwork stolen
from prisoners as they were selected for the gas chambers. It was a
life of luxury taking place only a few short steps from horror and
torment. Most Sundays the kommandant drove the children to see the
horses in the stables. They loved to visit the kennels to pet the German
shepherds.
Photographs show a pond in the garden and a large table for
picnics. The prisoners made giant toy airplanes for the boys, big enough
for them to sit in and push around the garden. The girls liked to flirt
with the handsome soldiers who guarded the camp entrance.
The children were aware that their father ran a prison camp. Men
with black-and-white striped uniforms worked in their garden. Once the
Höss children dressed up as prisoners, pinning black triangles and
yellow stars to their shirts, then chased each other until their father
saw them and told them to stop the game.
In April 1945, as the end of the war appeared in sight, Rudolf
Höss and his family fled north. They split up. His wife took the
children and found refuge above an old sugar factory in St.
Michaelisdonn, a village near the coast. The kommandant took on the
identity of a laborer and hid on a farm four miles from the Danish
border. The Höss family waited for the right moment to escape to South
America.
Hans Jürgen, Inge-Brigitt (Brigitte) and Annegret Höss on a slide in the Auschwitz villa garden.
(Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munchen/Rainer Höss)
We sit in a small, dark den to the side of her
house. Brigitte lies on an old couch, complaining that her feet hurt. I
sit on a plump loveseat next to a Christmas tree, upon which hangs a
star knitted by her mother, Hedwig, the kommandant’s wife.
I start by asking about the time she spent living next to
Auschwitz. “It is best not to remember all those things,” Brigitte says.
She is more willing to talk about when the British captured her
father. One cold evening in March 1946, Hanns Alexander, my great-uncle —
a German-born Jew but by then a British captain — banged on the
family’s door.
“I remember when they came to our house to ask questions,” she
says, her voice tight. “I was sitting on the table with my sister. I was
about 13 years old. The British soldiers were screaming: ‘Where is your
father? Where is your father?’ over and over again. I got a very bad
headache. I went outside and cried under a tree. I made myself calm
down. I made myself stop crying, and my headache went away. But I have
had migraines for years after that. These migraines stopped a few years
ago, but since I received your letter, they have started again.”
The story continues. “My older brother Klaus was taken with my
mother. He was beaten badly by the British. My mother heard him scream
in pain from the room next door. Just like any mother, she wanted to
protect her son, so she told them where my father was.”
Alexander assembled a team and headed to the barn in the night.
Höss was awakened. He denied he was the kommandant. Certain he had his
man, Alexander demanded to see his wedding ring. When Höss claimed it
was stuck, Alexander threatened to cut his finger off until the
kommandant passed the ring over. Inside was inscribed “Rudolf” and
“Hedwig.”
The kommandant was the first person at such a senior level to
admit the extent of the slaughter at Auschwitz. He was handed over to
the Americans, who made him testify at Nuremberg. Then Höss was passed
to the Poles, who prosecuted him, then hanged him on a gallows next to
the Auschwitz crematorium.
Hedwig Höss (woman in center) with, from left: Inge-Brigitt
(Brigitte) Höss, Joachim Caesar’s daughter, Heidetraud Höss, Caesar’s
son, Hans Jürgen Höss and the wife of Caesar.
(Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munchen/Rainer Höss)
Hedwig and the children scraped by. They stole
coal from a train to heat their home. Shoeless, they tied rags around
their feet. As a family connected to the Nazi regime, they were shunned.
It was only when Klaus found a job in Stuttgart that the family’s
fortunes improved.
In the 1950s Brigitte managed to leave Germany and make a new
life in Spain. She was a stunning young lady, with long blond hair, a
slender figure and a “don’t mess with me” attitude. She worked as a
model for three years with the up-and-coming Balenciaga fashion house.
And she met an Irish American engineer working in Madrid for a
Washington-based communications company.
The couple married in 1961. They had a daughter and a son. His work took them to Liberia, then Greece, Iran and Vietnam.
The engineer says Brigitte told him about her father and her life
in Auschwitz while they were dating. “I was at first a little bit
shocked,” he says. “But then as I discussed more and more with her, I
realized that she was as much a victim as anybody else. She was just a
child while this all happened. She went from having everything to having
nothing.”
He says they had an “unspoken and unwritten agreement” not to
talk about her family background. He remembers telling her: “It was a
terrible thing — let’s not carry it any further. Let’s get on with our
lives, live happily and leave it all behind. It is not your
responsibility. There is no reason to carry the guilt of your father.”
In 1972 they moved to Washington. Brigitte’s husband took a
senior job with a transportation company, and they bought a house in
Georgetown. It was a chance for Brigitte to start over.
Brigitte struggled — she didn’t know how to write a check, spoke
little English and was without friends or family. After some searching,
she found a part-time job in a fashion boutique.
One day a short Jewish lady visited the boutique. She liked
Brigitte’s style and asked her to come work in her fashion salon in the
District.
Soon after she was hired, Brigitte says, she got drunk with her
manager and confessed that her father was Rudolf Höss. The manager told
the store’s owner. The owner told Brigitte that she could stay, that she
had not committed any crime herself. What Brigitte did not know, at
least not until later, was that the store owner and her husband were
Jewish and had fled Nazi Germany after the Kristallnacht attacks of
1938.
Brigitte was thankful for being seen as a person, rather than her
father’s daughter. She worked at the store for 35 years, serving
prominent Washingtonians, including the wives of senators and
congressmen.
The store owner returned Brigitte’s loyalty and hard work by
keeping her secret. With the exception of one other manager, none of the
other staff knew the truth about Brigitte’s family history.
After Brigitte retired a few years ago, the store owner called
every month to see how she was doing. “She is very nice,” Brigitte says.
Then about a year ago, she stopped calling. Brigitte knew the store
owner had visited Israel and wondered if she had, after all the years,
become angry. “People do change,” she said.
That Rudolf Höss’s daughter lives in Northern
Virginia is not the only family story kept secret. Starting in the
1960s, Hedwig visited her daughter in Washington every few years.
By this time, Hedwig had moved to a small house near Stuttgart,
where she lived with one of her daughters. Unlike other widows of German
soldiers, she was not granted a state pension, nor did she receive any
other income from the government.
Although Hedwig had played a prominent role in Auschwitz, even
appearing as a witness at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1965, there
were no travel restrictions on the spouses of Nazi war criminals. While
in Washington, Hedwig spent her time watching the grandchildren while
her daughter worked. They didn’t talk about the past.
Hedwig’s last visit was in September 1989. She was 81 and frail.
She was due to fly back to Germany but told her daughter it was too cold
and she preferred to remain longer. After dinner on Sept. 15, Hedwig
said she was tired and headed for bed. The next day Brigitte knocked on
her mother’s door and, after no answer, went in. Hedwig had died in her
sleep.
Brigitte found a local crematorium to take care of the body. She
didn’t want anyone to find her mother’s remains — least of all neo-Nazis
who might pay homage — so she gave a modified version of her mother’s
name to the cemetery administrator. She delayed the memorial service to
allow family members from Germany to attend.
At 11 a.m. on March 3, 1990, to coincide with her mother’s
birthday, a short service was held in a small stone cloister in an
interdenominational cemetery. Prayers were said, then the urn was
interred.
Hedwig’s final resting place was among the graves of Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Jewish Women and children walk toward gas chambers in Auschwitz
in May 1944. Brigitte does not deny that atrocities took place or that
Jews and others were murdered in the camps, but she questions that
millions were killed. “How can there be so many survivors if so many had
been killed?” she asks.
(U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum)
Brigitte’s life is now full of doctors, hospitals and pills. She and her husband divorced in 1983. He has since married twice and lives in Florida.
Her son lives with her. He knows about his grandfather but has
not expressed much interest in looking into his family’s history. Her
daughter has died. Brigitte is visited often by her grandchildren.
Once a year she flies to Florida to spend time with her sister
Annegret, who flies in from Germany. Klaus died in the 1980s in
Australia. Her other brother, Hans Jürgen, and elder sister, Heidetraud,
both live in Germany.
None of the siblings talks about their childhood — it’s as if
their history started in 1947, after Rudolf Höss was executed.
Brigitte’s nephew, Rainer Höss, son of Hans Jürgen, is the one
family member who has asked questions about the past. In 2009 I traveled
with him to Auschwitz. At one point he turned to me and said
matter-of-factly, “If I knew where my grandfather was buried, I would
piss on his grave.”
Brigitte kept her husband’s last name after they divorced. She
doesn’t talk about the past to friends, has steered clear of other
German families, and doesn’t talk about her background to her family.
She has not spoken to her grandchildren about her father (though
her ex-husband says he has given Höss’s autobiography to the older two).
She doesn’t want to “upset them,” she says, and she is worried that
they might tell people, which could put the family at risk. “I am still
scared here in Washington,” she says. “There are a lot Jewish people,
and they still hate the Germans. It never ends.”
Yet, she thinks about it, about sharing her story with her
family. “I will eventually, maybe when I read your book,” she tells me.
Perhaps one consequence of keeping the past so private is that it
remains insufficiently examined. Brigitte tells me she has never
visited the National Holocaust Museum. And while she understands the
value of a museum to remind us of the horrors of the past, she says it
should be in Auschwitz or Israel, not Washington. “They always make
things worse than it is,” she says. “It is so awful, I can’t stand it.”
She does not deny that atrocities took place or that Jews and
others were murdered in the camps, but she questions that millions were
killed. “How can there be so many survivors if so many had been killed?”
she asks.
When I point out that her father confessed to being responsible
for the death of more than a million Jews, she says the British “took it
out of him with torture.”
“And your father, how do you remember him?” I ask.
“He was the nicest man in the world,” she says. “He was very good
to us.” She remembers them eating together, playing in the garden, and
reading the story of Hansel and Gretel.
Brigitte is convinced that her father was a sensitive man and had
guessed that he was involved with something bad. “I’m sure he was sad
inside,” she recalls. “It is just a feeling. The way he was at home, the
way he was with us, sometimes he looked sad when he came back from
work.”
Brigitte struggles to reconcile her father’s dual nature. “There
must have been two sides to him. The one that I knew and then another.
...”
When I ask how he could be the “nicest man in the world” if he
was responsible for the deaths, she says: “He had to do it. His family
was threatened. We were threatened if he didn’t. And he was one of many
in the SS. There were others as well who would do it if he didn’t.”
After a long interview, Brigitte shows me around her house. Upstairs, she points to a photograph above her bed.
It’s her mother and father’s wedding photograph, taken in 1929.
They look young, happy, carefree. She in a white frock, hair tied up; he
in three-quarter-length trousers and light shirt.
The 80-year-old Brigitte sleeps every night under the watchful eye of her beloved father, Rudolf Höss.
Hanns Alexander, the German Jew who tracked down and caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, seen in 1945.
(Courtesy of Alexander Family)
Sometime afterward, I call the son of the salon
owner. He tells me that the reason his mother had stopped calling
Brigitte was that she had simply grown too old to make the calls. “My
family holds Brigitte as close as we always have,” he says.
When I ask him why his parents had decided to employ her all
those years ago, despite knowing that her father had been a senior
member of the Nazi leadership that had driven their own family out of
Germany, he told me that it was because of “humanity.”
His parents had seen her as a person, in her own right, apart
from her father. “The one has nothing to do with the other. She is a
human being,” he says. “She was not responsible for her father.”
Reflecting on his parents’ decision, he says, “I am proud to be their son.”
Thomas Harding is the author of “Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz” (Simon & Schuster Hardcover; September 2013). To comment on this story, e-mail wpmagazine@washpost.com.
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