I remember clearly the first time he guided me around the camp. He showed me everything, and at the end he took me to a grave where the corpses of the gassed Jews lay piled on a strong iron grill. Hoess's men poured some inflammable liquid over them and set them on fire. The flesh stewed like stew meat. The sight made such an impression on me that today, after a dozen years, I can still see that mountain of corpses in front of me.

Hoess may have seen disgust in my face, but I spoke to him sternly: "When I see your corpses, I think of those charred German bodies in the air-raid shelters in Berlin."

Once the deportations to Auschwitz were running smoothly, I turned to concentrate on negotiations with the Jewish political community officials in Budapest. In this I was carrying out the second basic objective of Reichsführer Himmler: to arrange if possible for a million Jews to go free in exchange for 10,000 winterized trucks, with trailers, for use against the Russians on the Eastern Front.