Höss, who had been given the task that spring of converting a former Polish artillery barracks at Auschwitz into a camp for 10,000 inmates, recalled after the war the inadequate human material he had to work with; junior officers and even the professional criminals sent to him as Kapos, or foremen, were not only incapable but displayed a ‘conscious negligence and malevolence that simply forced me to do the most important and urgent things myself’.[36]
