Rudolf Roess: History's Greatest Mass Murder

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The Holocaust was a tragic event that happened in our history. Hitler was making demands, putting people in high ranking positions to carry out his duties to Germany. One man that Hitler saw fit to carry out duties at Auschwitz was Rudolf Roess. Rudolf Roess was considered history’s greatest mass murder (Jewish Virtual Libary 1998). Some may question how someone could become such a great mass murder of all time; Rudolf Roess was just simply following orders that was given to him.
Rudolf was born on November 25, 1900 in Baden-Baden, a town in Southwest Germany. Rudolf was a catholic and he was going to school to become a priest. However, all his plans changed once his father died and the outbreak of WWI. Rudolf decided he wanted to join the army so in 1916 he did just that. …show more content…

At that time, the camp was not an extermination camp until he received orders from Hitler making Auschwitz the main extermination site. Roess assisted in the building of the camp once he received his orders, he built gas chambers, which were designed to kill 2,000 people every hour (Roess 2016). After a day of killing, he would go home to his family. Rudolf was married to Hedwig Hensel and had five children. He was an affection loving father who would kiss his wife every morning and night and tuck his children into their beds. Their house was on the camp site; they were close enough to see the smoke from the crematories. The next day it all started over again, Rudolf went to work to full fill his duties and execute his responsibilities that were given to him from Hitler and Himmler. His method of killing nearly 2.5 million Jews was the gas chambers; watching millions of innocent human beings dissolve in the gas chambers, burn in the crematoriums and their teeth melt into gold bars, Hoess wrote poetry about the “beauty” of Auschwitz (Hoess 2016). However, his reign must come to an end eventually; the Red Army in 1945 made he flee into