Rudolf Hoess was the notorious Commandant of Auschwitz. Imprisoned and awaiting execution after the war, Hoess wrote a long memoir, a self- serving account of his life and approaches to management. The amoral sensibility Hoess displayed regarding all that went on in the charnal factory where the industrialization of death was practiced--where probably 3 million people were literally worked to death, shot or quickly gassed--is still almost beyond belief today.

Jurg Amann has taken Hoess' text and produced a work imaginatively new, always using Hoess' own words; The Commandant is a book Hoess would certainly not have approved--an excruciating insight into Hitler's Final Solution and the nature of evil itself through the prism of the Nazis' totalitarian system, one Hoess and so many others felt no requirement to question. Ian Buruma's introduction sets this frightening work within a both moral and historical context.