style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">In the months before his trial in 1947, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss wrote a memoir that told of his apprenticeship in Nazi obedience and the immense pride he took in the smooth running of the gas chambers. The book, for all its self-justificatory intent, remains a key to understanding the atrocity.