Who tracked down and arrested the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp?
Rudolf Höss Rudolf Höss (also Höß, Hoeß or Hoess; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a Nazi German "SS"-"Obersturmbannführer" (lieutenant colonel) and the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in World War II. He tested and carried into effect various methods to accelerate Hitler's plan to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the "Final Solution". On the initiative of one of his subordinates, SS-"Hauptsturmführer" (captain) Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced pesticide Zyklon B containing hydrogen cyanide to the killing process, thereby allowing SS soldiers at Auschwitz to murder 2,000 people every hour. He created the largest installation for the continuous annihilation of human beings ever known.
Sobibór extermination camp Sobibór (or Sobibor , or , ] ) was a Nazi German extermination camp built and operated by the SS near the railway station of Sobibór during World War II, within the semi-colonial territory of General Government of the occupied Second Polish Republic. The camp was part of the secretive Operation Reinhard, which marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. The camp was situated near the rural county's major town of Włodawa (called "Wolzek" by the Germans), 85 km south of the provincial capital, Brest-on-the-Bug (Brześć nad Bugiem in Polish). Its official German name was "SS-Sonderkommando Sobibór". Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union (including Jewish-Soviet POWs), were transported to Sobibór by rail. Most were suffocated in gas chambers fed by the exhaust of a large petrol engine. Up to 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibór and possibly more. At the postwar trial against the former "SS" personnel of Sobibór, held in Hagen two decades into the Cold War, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler estimated the number of murdered Jews totalled a minimum of 250,000. This would make it the fourth worst extermination camp, after Bełżec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.