My grandfather was a Nazi executioner at Auschwitz and I had no idea until 7th grade history class
In a Stuttgart classroom in the 1970s, seventh-grader Kai Höss learned something that would change his life.A teacher was reading from a history textbook about the Holocaust when the name “Rudolf Höss” came up.Kai went home and asked his mother if there was any relation.
She confirmed that Rudolf was his grandfather — and a Nazi SS officer and Auschwitz commandant who was responsible for the deaths of 1.1 million people, mostly Jews.“I just felt ashamed,” Kai told The Post of learning the horrible truth about his father’s father.Rudolf personally ordered subordinates to herd prisoners into the “showers” where lethal clouds of poison Zyklon-B gas were released.
He was captured in 1946 and confessed to killing 2,000 people hourly in gas chambers.Polish authorities executed him in 1947 at Auschwitz.
“[Our] name is synonymous with incredible crimes against humanity and atrocities and the Holocaust and antisemitism,” Kai said.Now 63 and a Christian pastor still based in Stuttgart, he has made it his mission to support Jewish communities, promote reconciliation and educate people about the Holocaust.The passage of 80 years since the end of World War II, he said, and a contemporary culture now saturated with violent video games has “desensitized” people, especially young adults, to the past, he believes.
“We need to bring people back to see what happened in Auschwitz and in Nazi Germany, what they did, how inhumane, how horrible this was,” Kai said. “People can study all the historical facts and the statistics, but they need to have tears.”His mother, Hedwig, only learned of Rudolf’s crimes five years into her marriage to one of his sons, Hans-Jürgen Höss.He dismissed it as “water under the bridge,” but his silence poisoned the home.
Hans-Jürgen left his mother when Kai was in his 20s for another woman, and they had a violent clash in which she stabbed him with a dagger-like letter opener that had belonged to Rudolf.�...