In 1947, Rudolf Höss, commandant of German KL Auschwitz in the years 1940-1943, was sentenced to death by the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland.
Two weeks later, on 16 April, he was hanged next to the crematorium of the former concentration camp.
Rudolf Höss did not fear death. What he feared was torture, which he believed was inevitable at the hands of his Polish captors.
After all, Auschwitz had been located in German-occupied Poland, and it was the Polish people who had suffered so terribly under his command.
What he encountered instead left him stunned.
He was not met with hatred or violence, but with decency and restraint.
“I have to confess that I never would have expected to be treated so decently and so kindly in a Polish prison,” he later wrote.
That unexpected mercy opened something within him.
Several of the Polish guards, themselves former prisoners of Auschwitz, quietly showed him the tattoos burned into their arms.
Rather than seek revenge, they treated him with dignity.
It was an act that brought him shame.
If those he had helped torment could offer him humanity, then perhaps, he began to wonder, God might offer him mercy as well.
Apathy gave way to guilt. Recognition replaced denial.
He began to grasp the weight of what he had done.
For the first time, his soul responded to a flicker of love.
The ideology he had once followed so blindly had taught him that Poles were inferior, little more than cattle.
But now, through their compassion, he saw clearly the humanity of those he had dehumanized. And in that realization, he began to understand the true gravity of his crimes.
“In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity,” he wrote. “I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness.”
By all accounts, his repentance appeared genuine.
On April 4, 1947, which was Good Friday that year, Höss asked to make a confession. The prison guards struggled to find a priest who spoke fluent German. That is when Höss remembered Father Władysław Lohn, a Jesuit he had once saved from execution.
The guards located him in Łagiewniki, Poland, where he was then serving as chaplain at the Shrine of Divine Mercy.
Father Lohn heard his confession on the Thursday of Easter week. The next day, he gave him Holy Communion and Viaticum. Witnesses said that as Höss knelt in his prison cell, he appeared like a small boy. The man who had once been trained to suppress all weakness now wept openly.
Five days later, on April 16, 1947, as the noose was placed around his neck at Auschwitz, Father Tadeusz Zaremba stood beside him and recited the prayers for the dying.
Whether or not he deserved forgiveness is something each person must decide for themselves. But the crimes committed against the Polish people must never be forgotten.
And neither should the quiet strength of those who, even in the face of unimaginable suffering, chose mercy.
This is also why the Polish people, despite their profound heroism and the scale of their suffering were left behind in the telling of history.
They did not turn their pain into politics or profit
They did not build monuments to themselves and demand all the world bow to their wounds.
They endured in silence behind the Iron Curtain.
Many showed mercy when they had every right to hate.
And in doing so, they were forgotten by a world that rewards those who shout the loudest, not those who suffer with dignity. But the truth remains.
It was not only the victims who showed humanity - it was the forgotten Polish guards, the priests, the villagers, the mothers, the resistance fighters.
They gave the world a quiet, sacred kind of courage.
The kind that history has yet to fully honor…
