Bernard Clarke on torturing Rudolph Hoess | Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

[Note: As this article is reconstructed from a copy some content/layout may vary from the original posting.]

Bernard Clarke on torturing Rudolph Hoess

In April 1944 a Slovak Jew escaped Auschwitz-Birkenau and told the world of the cyanide gassings there.

Almost a year later (by sheer coincidence), his cousin's daughter was in-charge of the British Intelligence team (coincidently containing many Jews), who captured the former commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoess, father of five young children, and encouraged him to confess to gassing 2,500,000 people in just 19 months.

Following are extracts of Chapter 19, of Legions of Death. The 1983 book by Rupert Butler, who had interviewed "Bernard Clarke, a British Jew" who had led the Jewish sergeants in Hoess's capturing party, how they had threatened to kill his family, and tortured him.

(click pages to enlarge)

Legions of Death
19

There was a burning thirst for revenge on those who had executed Hitler's notorious eastern policy. But it could not be slaked immediately. In the case of Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, it was to take over a year from the war's end.[...]

Hoess had first been arrested in may 1945, along with hundreds of thousands of other Germans. But he had not been recognised and was soon relased to go and work on a farm. Not that he was in any way forgotten. Britain's Field Security section of Counter Intelligence stepped up the search. Soon its personnel were showing close interest in one particular apartment block in the Schleswig-Holstein town of Heide.

Bernard Clarke, a British Jew and a sergeant in the 92 Field Security Section who had already been involved in a fruitless search for the elusive former Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann and is today a sucessful businessman working in the south of England, explains:

'We knew that frau Hannah Hoess, her son and daughter had an upstairs apartment in this block, furthermore that Hoess was in the habit of sneaking in once a month to see them. A round-the-clock watch, however, produced not so much as a shadow of him.

'Nonetheless, Hoess had somehow got in and somehow seen his family. The news came from the army of informers at our disposal — wretched Germans who were keen to keep on the right side of the occupation authorities and were quite prepared to betray neighbours and friends for a few tins of bully-beef and a packet of cigarettes.

'The time to act had obviously arrived . . .'

At 5 pm on 11 march 1946, Frau Hoess opened her front door to six intelligence specialists in British uniform, most of the tall and menacing all of then practised in the more sophisticated techniques of sustained and merciless investigation.

No physical violence was used on the family; it was scarely necessary. Wife and children were separated and guarded. Clarke's tone was deliberately low-key and conversational.

He began mildly; 'I understand your husband came to see you as recently as last night.'
Frau Hoess merely replied; 'I haven't seen him since he asconded months ago.'
Clarke tired once more, saying gently but with a tone of reproach: 'You know that isn't true.' Then all at once his manner had changed and he was shouting: 'If you don't tell us we'll turn you over to the Russians and they'll put you before a firing-squad. Your son will go to Sibera.'

It proved enough. Eventually, a broken Frau Hoess betrayed the whereabouts of the former Auschwitz Kommandant, the man who now called himself Franz lang. Suitable intimidation of the son and daughter produced precisely identical information.

A heavy snowstorm carpeted the roads out of Heide as around midnight the convoy of some thirty men, comprising officiers of the military government, reinforced with medicial personnel and troops, began the journey to the lonely farmhouse standing in its own grounds at Gottrupel. [...]

Clarke recalls vivdly: 'He was lying on top of a three-tier bunker wearing a new pair of silk pyjamas. We discovered later that he had lost the cyanide pill most of them carried. Not that he would have had much chance to use it because we had rammed a torch into his mouth.'

Hoess screamed in terror at the mere sight of British uniforms.

Clarke yelled 'What is your name?'

With each answer of 'Franz Lang', Clarke's hand crashed into the face of his prisoner. The fourth time that happened, Hoess broke and admitted who he was.

The admission suddenly unleashed the loathung of the Jewish sergeants in the arresting party whose parrents had died in Auschwitz following an order signed by Hoess.

The prisoner was torn from the top bunk, the pyjamas ripped from his body. He was dragged naked to one of the slaughter tables, where it seemed to Clarke the blows and screams were endless.

Eventually the Medical Officer urged the Captain: 'Call them off, unless you want to take back a corpse.'

A blanket was thrown over Hoess and he was dragged to Clarke's car, where the sergeant poured a substanial slug of whisky down his throat. Then Hoess tried to sleep.

Clarke thrust his service stick under the man's eyelids and ordered in German: 'Keep your pig eyes open, you swine.'

For the first time Hoess trotted out his oft-repeated justification: 'I took my orders from Himmler. I am a soldier in the same way as you are a soldier and we had to obey orders.'

The party arrived back at Heide around three in the morning. The snow was swirling still, but the blanket was torn from Hoess and he was made to walk completely nude through the prison yard to his cell.

It took three days to get a coherent statement out of him. But once he started talking, there was no holding him.

The man who suffered most during the interrogation, however was not the prisoner but Bernard Clarke.

He recalls:

'Prior to the capture, my hair was jet black, After the three days, a white streak suddenly appeared in the centre, which stayed until the rest of my hair went white as well.

'It was not due to the strain of events. I could cope with that. But Hoess had repeated with pride the instructions that he had given to prisoners to dig pits in which they were subsequently shot. He revealed how the bodies were ignited and how oozing fat from them was poured over others.

'He admitted without a trace of remorse that he had been responsible for around twon million deaths and that killings had frequently been carried out at the rate of 10,000 a day.

------------------------------

Back to the Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

Back to our section on W.W. II Revisionism