Over a million people were murdered in Auschwitz, most of them Jews. For three and a half years, Rudolf Höss commanded this largest extermination camp of the Third Reich and, as Himmler's assistant, implemented the planned Final Solution to the Jewish question: starting in 1942, he began the systematic murder of people using the poison gas Zyklon B and boasted that poison gas was a rational and hygienic improvement to mass murder. Höss was obedient to authority, ambitious, and emotionally numb. He obeyed orders blindly and unconditionally, and a sense of wrongdoing was foreign to him. His diligence in issuing and executing inhumane orders contrasts with his self-perception in his autobiographical writings, in which he describes himself as a rather sensitive person. After the war, Höss was sentenced to death by the Supreme Polish People's Court.