Rudolf Höss, the former commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, proved to be a valuable witness in the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war crimes.

Höss claimed he had been summoned to Berlin in the summer of 1941, and was told then of the order for the "Final Solution" to be carried out at Auschwitz.

The testimony was shattering, as the defense well knew.

It shifted attention oddly to the witness Hoss — a dull, unimpressive, but methodical officer of the sort that had staffed the numerous offices and positions involved in the murder of European Jews.

Höss' account offered evidence of the timing and the chain of decision-making for the "Final Solution," however, these were not questions that were picked up at the time and have only since become matters of intense interest and debate.

How much did the defendants know about the murders in the East, the "Final Solution," the concentration camps, or Auschwitz?

Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi official tried at Nuremberg, insisted that he did not know, and probably neither did Hitler, about the Final Solution.

He would not even allow those atrocities to have occurred systematically; the most that he would concede was that there might have been "isolated cases" of liquidations.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS in Austria, who sometime after Reinhard Heydrich's assassination had taken over the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, maintained that he had not known of the "Final Solution" before 1943.

"Immediately after receiving the knowledge of this fact," he reported, "I fought, just as I had done previously, not only against the Final Solution but also against this type of treatment of the Jewish problem."

What did Kaltenbrunner do? He "protested to Hitler and the next day to Himmler," he maintained.

At various points in the trial, one would have to conclude that other defendants indicated that they had helped Jews at times — Schacht, Ribbentrop, Papen, Schirach, Funk, Seyss-Inquart and Speer.