Some of the one-sided perfectionist pride of the expert comes out in Höss’s statement: ‘By the will of the Reichsführer of the SS [Heinrich Himmler], Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time,’ or when he points out with the satisfaction of the successful planner that the gas chambers of his own camp had a capacity ten times greater than those of Treblinka.
How is one to explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever excommunicated by the church? That Pius\xa0XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka? That among the S.S. a large proportion were believers who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between massacres? And that they all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?
Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. .\xa0.\xa0. Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day! .\xa0.\xa0. More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. .\xa0.\xa0. The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load.