The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there ( 2. 5 million gassed, and 500, 000 from disease and starvation ).

After discussions with Höss during the Nuremberg trials at which he testified, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote the following:

Gilbert testified on 29 May 1961, describing how both Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Rudolf Höss tried in their conversations with him to put the responsibility for the extermination of the Jews on each other's doorstep.

" Höss first met Himmler in 1929.

Himmler told Höss that Hitler had given the order for the physical extermination of Europe's Jews.

Himmler told Höss that he would be receiving all operational orders from Adolf Eichmann.

In the last days of the war, Höss was advised by Himmler to disguise himself among German Navy personnel.

Eichmann, Höss said, visited the camp and observed its operations frequently.

There he met Rudolf Höss, who was later commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and Walther Darré, whose book, The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, caught Hitler's attention, leading to his later appointment as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture.

* 1946 – Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, is captured by British troops.

She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child.

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss ( also spelled Höß, sometimes spelled in English as Hoess ; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947 ) was an ( Lieutenant Colonel ), and from 4 May 1940 to November 1943 the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, where it is estimated that more than a million people were murdered.

That same year, Höss moved to the SS-Totenkopfverbände ( Death's Head Units ) and in December he was assigned to the Dachau concentration camp, where he held the post of Blockführer.

On 1 May 1940, Höss was appointed commandant of a prison camp in western Poland, a territory Germany had incorporated into the province of Upper Silesia.

Höss commanded the camp for three and a half years, during which he expanded the original facility into a sprawling complex known as Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

After visiting Treblinka extermination camp to study its methods of human extermination, Höss, beginning on 3 September 1941, tested and perfected the techniques of mass killing that made Auschwitz the most efficiently murderous instrument of the Final Solution and the most potent symbol of the Holocaust.

According to Höss, during standard camp operations, two to three trains carrying 2, 000 prisoners each would arrive daily for periods of four to six weeks.

On 8 May 1944 Höss returned to Auschwitz to supervise the operation, known as Aktion Höss, by which 430, 000 Hungarian Jews were transported to the camp and killed during 56 days between May and July of that year.

Even Höss ' expanded facility could not handle the huge number of victims ' corpses, and the camp staff had to dispose of thousands of bodies by burning them in open pits.

Höss was commandant of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, whilst Eichmann is generally regarded as a key architect of the Nazi's Endlösung ( Final Solution ) policy in which Auschwitz played so major a role.

Further, his testimony agrees with that of other contemporary written accounts by Auschwitz officials, such as Pery Broad, an SS man stationed at Auschwitz while Höss was the commandant and the diary kept by SS physician at Auschwitz Johann Kremer, as well as the testimony of hundreds of camp guards and victims.

As an example, he cites Nazi state official Rudolf Höss who organized the infamous death camp in Auschwitz.

Nonetheless, he went on to investigate Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss on charges of having " unlawful relations " with a Jewish woman prisoner, Eleanor Hodys ; Höss was, for a time, removed from his command and these proceedings incidentally saved Hodys ' life.

* Rudolf Höss ( 1900 – 1947 ), German Nazi commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp

Most of the senior leaders of the camp, including Rudolf Höss, the longest-standing commandant of the camp, were turned over to Polish authorities in 1947, following their participation as witnesses in the Nuremberg Trial, at which time they were tried in Kraków and many sentenced to death.

Höss said he kept that secret until the end of 1942, when he told one person about the camp's purpose: his wife.

Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, said that the use of Zyklon-B came about on the initiative of one of his subordinates, Captain Karl Fritzsch, who used the substance to kill some Russian POWs in late August 1941.

Those inside died within 20 minutes ; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höss, who estimated that about one third of the victims died immediately.

In 1923, after one of the killers gave the tale of the murder to a local newspaper, Höss was arrested and tried as the ring leader.

Höss explained how 10, 000 people were exterminated in one 24-hour period:

During his trial, when accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, " No. Only two and one half million – the rest died from disease and starvation.

Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss was overall commandant of the Auschwitz complex from May 1940 – November 1943 ; Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel from November 1943 – May 1944 ; and Sturmbannführer Richard Baer from May 1944 – January 1945.

Höss later introduced hydrogen cyanide ( Prussic acid ), produced from the pesticide Zyklon B to the killing process, after his deputy Karl Fritzsch tested it on a group of Russian prisoners in 1941.

Pinkard has many parallels with Rudolf Lang, the protagonist of Death Is My Trade by the French author Robert Merle, who in turn is derived from Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss.

During the Doctors ' Trial Brack testified from the witness stand that after 1941, when the extermination of Jewish population by Nazis was at full capacity, Heinrich Himmler ordered him to contact physicians involved previously in the Euthanasia Program to find out a way of sterilizing young and strong Jews capable of labour for use in the German war effort.

Many sources have testified that he taught for decades the philosophy of Avicenna in Nishapur where Khayyám was born and buried and where his mausoleum today remains a masterpiece of Iranian architecture visited by many people every year.

Several of them testified that on their first night in jail, Bokassa visited the prison and screamed at the children for their insolence.

The report also claimed that Clinton falsely denied under oath ever meeting with Lewinsky alone at times, despite the fact that Clinton did admit to this when he testified, and that Clinton obstructed justice by concealing gifts he gave to Lewinsky and destroying an intimate note that was left in a book he claimed Lewinsky gave him when she visited the White House on January 4, 1998.

Bamber testified that he visited the farmhouse on the evening of 6 August, and loaded the gun, thinking he heard rabbits outside, then left it with a full magazine and a box of ammunition on the kitchen table.

Stevens later testified that Ratu Inoke Takiveikata, the Qaranivalu, a senior chief of Naitasiri Province and a Senator and former Cabinet Minister, had visited the barracks during the mutiny to offer moral and practical support, which included supplying the mutineers with cellphones.

De Marigny testified that he had not visited Westbourne, Oakes's home and the murder site, for the previous two years before Oakes's death, because of ongoing conflict with Oakes.