Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz

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Simon and Schuster, Sep 23, 2014 - Biography & Autobiography - 348 pages
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
The “compelling,” untold story of the man who captured and brought to trial Rudolf Höss—one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious war criminals and subject of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest—“fascinates and shocks” (The Washington Post).

May 1945. 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. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. As Kommandant of Auschwitz, Höss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children; he was the man who perfected Hitler’s program of mass extermination. Höss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg.

Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss’s capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day. Moving from the Middle Eastern campaigns of World War I to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, it tells the story of two German men—one Jewish, one Catholic—whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way. This is “one of those true stories that illuminates a small justice in the aftermath of the Holocaust, an event so huge and heinous that there can be no ultimate justice” (New York Daily News).
 

Contents

Prologue I
1
Rudolf BadenBaden Germany 1901
5
Hanns and Rudolf Gottrupel and Belsen
15
Hanns Berlin Germany 1917
17
Rudolf Berlin Germany 1918
29
Hanns Berlin Germany 1928
44
Rudolf Berlin Germany 1928
51
Hanns Berlin Germany 1933
72
Rudolf Oświęcim Upper Silesia 1942
131
Hanns Normandy France 1945
148
Rudolf Berlin Germany 1943
155
Hanns Brussels Belgium 1945
170
Rudolf Berlin Germany 1945
196
Hanns Belsen Germany 1945
203
Hanns and Rudolf Gottrupel Germany 1946
240
Notes
288

Rudolf Oświęcim Upper Silesia 1939
95
Hanns London England 1939
117
Family Trees
328
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

Thomas Harding is a former documentary filmmaker and journalist who has written for the Financial Times and The Guardian, among other publications. He founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. Hanns and Rudolf is his first book. He lives in Hampshire, England.

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