According to several estimates the Nazi Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess was responsible for exterminating millions of people. He was a mild-mannered, happily married Catholic who enjoyed normal family life with his five children despite his view of the crematoria chimney stacks from his bedroom window.

He was s man of fine standing, a husband who morning and night kissed his wife, a father who tucked his children into bed. But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an everyday occurrence ...

By mid 1942, Rudolf Hoess started mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates running as high as 2,5 million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning ...

Rudolf Hoess was arrested by Allied military police in 1946 and handed over to the Polish authorities, who tried him in 1947. He was sentenced to death, and returned to Auschwitz to be hanged on the one-person gallows outside the entrance to the gas chamber.

At peak efficiency Auschwitz had the capacity to 'get rid of ten thousand people in 24 hours,' as Rudolf Hoess would testify during the War Crimes Trials after WW2. Witness after witness, document after document produced irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed, and no witness was more shocking than Rudolf Hoess, who calmly explained how he had come to exterminate 2,5  million people - among them the children of Izieu.

On the eve of his execution Rudolf Hoess, the Nazi Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote his final letter to his children.

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