Former prisoner at notorious Nazi death camp, who was forced to cut the hair of camp commandant Rudolf Höss, died in Krakow on Sunday

Jozef Paczynski, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz who became the personal barber to camp commander Rudolf Höss, has died. He was 95.

For much of the second world war, Paczynski was led to Höss’s home and ordered to cut the hair of one of the worst mass murderers in history.

For decades afterwards he was repeatedly asked why he did not use his tools to slit the throat of the man responsible for more than a million deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps.



His answer: it would not have stopped the killing, but would have meant certain death for himself and many others. “I thought about it,” Paczynski said in a speech in January in Krakow. “But when I realised what the consequences would be I simply could not do it.”

Paczynski died on Sunday in Krakow, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum announced on Thursday. Officials did not say what the cause of death was.

Paczynski was imprisoned at Auschwitz in June 1940 as punishment for trying to flee German-occupied Poland to join the Polish army in France. He was arrested after crossing into Slovakia and was taken in the first transport to Auschwitz, becoming prisoner number 121.

At the camp he was assigned to work in a barber shop where the SS men got their haircuts. One day Höss turned up and singled out Paczynski from other barbers to come to his family home at the edge of the camp to trim his hair.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest SS officers socialise near Auschwitz, Poland. From left: Dr Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss, Birkenau commander Josef Kramer, and unidentified. Photograph: AP

Paczynski recalled in a lecture in Krakow this year that he was terrified when he was brought to cut Höss’s hair.

“My voice was shaking, my hands were shaking and my legs were shaking,” he said. Yet Höss was apparently satisfied and asked Paczynski to return again and again, although he never said a word to him.

Paczynski, who remained at Auschwitz until 18 January 1945, was one of the prisoners who survived there the longest. He was among a group that the Nazis moved out just days before the Soviet army liberated the camp and was later freed by US soldiers in Germany.

Paczynski said he never witnessed any brutality by Höss, who developed and oversaw the implementation of gas chambers where more than a million Jews and others were murdered.

Höss was tried by Polish authorities after the war and was sentenced to death by hanging in 1947. The punishment was carried out at Auschwitz next to a crematorium.

After the war, Paczynski became a mechanical engineer and a teacher. In 2001 he was honoured with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Poland.