On Saturday, The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about Kai Höss, the grandson of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. Kai Höss is now a pastor, who speaks to groups about the horrors of that camp.
The article reports:
Just the other day, a local technical college near Stuttgart, Germany, rang Kai Höss with alarming news. Someone had been etching swastikas on the doors of the loos.
This followed a number of student protests against Israeli operations in Gaza. Might Kai give a talk to the students?
He did not hesitate. Days later he was addressing a packed assembly, reading a first-hand account of scenes from the death camp at Auschwitz.
Of two small boys, newly arrived off a cattle truck and so engrossed in a game of tag that they failed to heed the command to follow the rest into the gas chamber until the commandant ordered two guards to pick them up and throw them inside.
Of a frantic mother trying to wedge the doors open and force her children out, screaming: ‘Why don’t you at least let my precious children live?’
‘People were in tears – including me,’ Kai tells me. ‘And so they should be. If this stuff doesn’t get you from here to here [he points from his head to his heart], then it hasn’t sunk in. It’s just another history lesson.’
The college has asked him to come back and give the same talk to those who could not be accommodated last time.
He is happy to oblige. Germany never takes the appearance of swastikas lightly, of course. But Kai speaks with a unique authority. The author of those accounts was not some terrified witness. He was Kai’s grandfather Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and one of the most brutal criminals of the Second World War.
…Tracked down by the British after the conflict, he laid it all out in the chillingly clinical memoir he wrote as he awaited his date with the gallows in April 1947.
‘No one wants to be Rudolf Höss’s grandson,’ Kai, 62, tells me over a cup of tea at his home near Stuttgart. ‘Every day I must face the fact that I am descended from the worst mass-murderer in history.’
While some might want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and such a dark family past, Kai takes the opposite view.
A hotel manager turned evang-elical pastor, this father-of-four wants to ensure future generations never forget the horrors committed by his grandfather’s generation. In particular he wants to do what he can to stem the Gaza-fuelled rising tide of anti-Semitism in Western democracies.
He is determined to debunk any attempts to use moral relativism to compare Israel to the Nazis, let alone accuse the Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and thereby demand the dismantling of Israel.
‘You hear those demonstrators shouting ‘from the river to the sea’, but they don’t even know which river – or which sea,’ he says, shaking his head.
‘There’s all this emotional energy but they don’t understand what it’s really about. Hamas’s strategy was to bring Israel to the point where they get mad and hit hard so the world rises against Israel.
Please follow the link to read the entire article. This is a man who knows what he is talking about.