Understanding a Perpetrator in Translation: Presenting Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz, to Readers of English

Summary

The Memoir Of Rudolf Höß, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May 1940 to November 1943, occupies a strange place on bookshop shelves in the German and English-speaking worlds. It is rare for a major Nazi perpetrator to be present in this way, namely as author of a memoir sold under his own name and purporting to offer insight into his actions and motivation on his own terms: Albert Speer is another, but his memoir was an attempt at self-exculpation published while he was still alive, rather than being a text by an executed criminal. Although there has been a shift in scholarly interest away from the Nazi elite to the history of everyday life under the regime, the study of popular opinion and mentality, and the biographies of “ordinary people,” interest in Höß’s memoir does not seem to have diminished, though it may have affected the way it is read. In this essay, I will explore the changing status of Hoß’s text, in particular how developing interpretations have affected the way it has been translated. I will ask how the ways in which the text is translated and edited reflect the kinds of knowledge that the text is seen to convey, how different translations of the text position the reader in relation to Höß’s narration, and what attitude towards the “Germanness” of the text is on display in each case.

The different editions that I discuss here make a variety of different claims to significance and relevance in order to justify their translation and editorial practices. I will be looking in detail at two English translations. The first, translated into British English by Constantine FitzGibbon, was published in 1959, a year after the first German edition, which was edited by the historian Martin Broszat, originally for the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich; the second is a US English translation from 1992 by Andrew Pollinger, which forms part of a collection of materials on Höß and Auschwitz edited for young readers by Steven Paskuly.

A key issue here is the status of the German language. These editions represent contrasting views about the relationship of the German language to National Socialism: the German edition stresses the linguistic uniqueness of the text, while the English editions work with ideas of universality.