Here's a quote from wikipedia:
I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000.
Wouldn't inflating the number be against his own personal interests, especially when facing trial? Or was he truly that ignorant about the amount of deaths at his camp?
I must admit that I am rather ignorant on the subject, apart from what I was taught at school and saw in documentaries.
Thanks
Quick answer: Robert Jan van Pelt's The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (pp 98f) briefly mentions that Höss actually gave a number of different, sometimes contradictory figures ranging from the 1.1 million you suggest up to 3 million. According to van Pelt, in his subsequent memoirs Höss settled for the lower figure and said he had overestimated the higher ones: "I regard the figure of 2.5 million as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capacities"; elsewhere he said he had taken the higher numbers from Eichmann and only calculated the lower ones himself later. Based on this the likelihood is that he was in fact trying to give an accurate account, and simply made a human error.
e: Misspelt the title of the book!