To superintend the new camp and the supply of slave labor for I. G. Farben there arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1940 a gang of the most choice ruffians in the S.S., among them Josef Kramer, who would later become known to the British public as the “Beast of Belsen,” and Rudolf Franz Hoess, a convicted murderer who had served five years in prison—he spent most of his adult life as first a convict and then a jailer—and who in 1946, at the age of forty-six, would boast at Nuremberg that at Auschwitz he had superintended the extermination of two and a half million persons, not counting
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