"Just the heaven on earth!": Auschwitz commandant's wife liked life in a death camp

In an interesting video interview published on the DW website, a German resident Rainer Höss tells how, using a series of strange coincidences and eventualities, he learned only in his youth that he was directly related to one of the most terrible characters of World War II - the commandant of the legendary Auschwitz Rudolf Höss.

Auschwitz death camp is one of the most monstrous evidence of Nazi atrocities and one of the most famous symbols of the Holocaust, and its commandant is called the most terrible mass murderer of the twentieth century.

Rainer Höss turned out to be his grandson and told reporters shocking details from his family’s story.

Rainer's father, apparently by inheritance, turned out to be an extremely cruel person and often beat his son, so the authorities had to pick up the boy from the family and put him in a boarding school. Surprisingly, the former prisoner of Auschwitz worked as a gardener in this establishment! He found out whose grandson Rainer was, and began to take revenge, and the boy himself did not understand why? His family never talked about his grandfather. When the 15-year-old Rainer learned everything from books, he realized that he could no longer have anything to do with this family and left. Rainer is sure that neither the family nor the nation as a whole can be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors, they just need to know the whole truth about it.

He very hard to bear this news and began to drown his misfortune in alcohol and drugs, not knowing what to do next - the grandson of the terrible and world-famous executioner.

And only after his child was born, Rainer pulled himself together, began to work, and at the same time digging out a family history to find out everything. He recalls with horror his family, which did not at all repent of the crimes, his grandmother, who called Rudolf Höss "my good husband," and sincerely considered the concentration camp a paradise on earth, often repeating that she wanted to die there, it was so good there ... She very skilfully hid her past, continuing to meet with the former Nazis working in the death camp herself. And while speaking in court as a witness to those events, she claimed that she knew nothing about what was happening there! How can it be - Rainer exclaims, because every two weeks she came to the camp to pick herself something from the things confiscated from prisoners!

When he first saw Auschwitz with his own eyes, it was a terrible shock to him.

By the way, when the hotel staff next to Auschwitz found out his last name, they refused to settle him there. And such cases often happen to him: people are so afraid of dealing with the descendant of the executioner, although Rainer, just as they consider his grandfather a terrible criminal. And while the Germans do not really want to know the details of those terrible events, and this really scares Rainer, he is afraid of their repetition...