Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

The gripping true story of the tenacious soldier who tracked down Rudolf Höss, the infamous commander of the Auschwitz death camp and the murderer of 1.3 million men, women, and children. For three and a half years, Rudolf Höss served as commander of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. During that time, he painstakingly tested and perfected the techniques of mass killing that made Auschwitz the most efficient tool of murder in the Nazi’s Final Solution. In the closing days of the war, Höss hid among German Navy personnel, but was finally captured in 1946—disguised as a harmless and humble farmer in the countryside—by Hanns Alexander and his team of Nazi hunters. Reading like a fast-paced thriller, Hanns and Rudolf reveals the full, exhilarating story of Höss’s capture as never before told. Delving deep into British Intelligence archives and those of the Auschwitz and Belsen Museums, and interviewing dozens of people, including Höss’s daughter, author Thomas Harding provides the first account of Höss’s life as well as Alexander’s critical role in spearheading the team that hunted down the nefarious war criminal. Both Höss and Alexander were born in Germany to middle-class families. Both had unexceptional childhoods. One, however, grew up to join the SS and orchestrated mass murder. The other fled with his family to London, returning to Berlin to combat the horrors of Nazi tyranny. Hanns and Rudolf powerfully re-creates and chronicles the lives of the first Nazi hunter and his target—two men whose paths eerily intersect until one brings the other to justice.