Your "could well have been" is hedging, at its purest and simplest.
If, instead of speculating, you were to read the actual trial records of the Kaltenbrunner trial Hoess's memoirs, you would know that Hoess, much to his surprise, was summoned to Nuremberg to testify as an expert witness at the trial of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had buttumed control of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) and Gestapo after the buttbuttination of Heydrich, in addition to being head of the RSHA, the bureacracy that designed, built, and administered the concentration camps and rest centers.
The purpose of the trial was not to determine whether the liquidates and gbuttings had taken place, neither side contested that. The issue at hand was to determine where the responsibility lay: with the bureaucrats at the top of the command line who had built, provided, and maintained the facilities, or with the functionaries at the bottom who had dutifully fulfilled the orders that came to them from above.
Hoess had no "bacon to save" at the trial of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, although in his memoirs he expressd doubt whether his testimony could have been beneficial to Kaltenbrunner's defense team in any way.
Regards, Eugene Holman
