After the war, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess was captured by the
British. Amazingly, he escaped, and spent eight months working as a farm labourer before military police found him again (perhaps deliberately, the arresting party was largely
jewish, and Hoess was brutally interrogated). Whilst in prison for final time, he wrote his autobiography, a book which is still in print nowadays. It is often rubbished by
Holocaust deniers, although the details appear to tally with physical evidence and the testimony of survivors, allowing for the fact that, as the memoirs were written in prison, he did not have access to paperwork. He repudiated the figure of 2,500,000 given above, for example, downgrading it to 1,100,000, something which tends to suggest that the book was not written under duress (in which case, the censors would certainly not have allowed Hoess to make himself look better, although admitting that you have the blood of over a million people on your hands hardly qualifies as 'looking better').
He was executed, in Auschwitz, in 1947. Not to be confused with Rudolf Hess.
From the transcript of his trial:
DR. KAUFFMANN (the prosecutor): Did you yourself ever feel pity with the victims, thinking of your own family and children?
HOESS: Yes.
DR. KAUFFMANN: How was it possible for you to carry out these actions in spite of this?
HOESS: In view of all these doubts which I had, the only one and decisive argument was the strict order and the reason given for it by the Reichsführer Himmler.
It is from this short exchange that the 'we were only following orders' defence became notorious.