Hanns and Rudolf
The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz
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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE JQ WINGATE PRIZE 2015
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
'A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.' JOHN LE CARRÉ
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Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, becoming an investigator of war crimes.
Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children.
The hunt was on.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf Höss his most elusive target.
In this book Thomas Harding reveals for the very first time the full account of Höss’ capture. Moving from the Middle-Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s, to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, Hanns and Rudolf tells the story of two German men whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rudolf H ss (1900 1947), the coldly efficient lapsed-Catholic commandant of Auschwitz, the Third Reich's most notorious killing machine, oversaw the murder of more than a million men, women, and children. Hanns Alexander (1917 2006) was a German Jewish migr in the service of the British Army dead-set on hunting down Rudolf (throughout the book, Harding refers to them by their first names in order to humanize them) and bringing him to justice. In this gripping biography-based history, Harding, a former documentary filmmaker and journalist, profiles both men in chronological alternating chapters, starting with their births and childhoods, moving on to their experiences in WWII, and concluding when Hanns and Rudolf finally come face to face on a farm where the war criminal had been desperately trying to elude his pursuers. Rudolf emerges as a loyal, workaholic, career Nazi who, upon his capture, is chillingly candid about his role in the Final Solution, and readers will revel in Hanns's admirable determination to avenge the deaths of his countrymen and the years of vicious anti-Semitism that forced his family to flee Berlin. 8-page b&w photo insert, 47 b&w photos throughout.
