Book: Hanns and Rudolf by Thomas Harding

The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Commandant of Auschwitz

I found this a captivating account of two men. Rudolf Hoss was indeed the commandant of Auschwitz. (Just to avoid confusion, there was also a man named Rudolf Hess who was Hitler's secretary. )

Hanns Alexander grew up in an affluent German Jewish family, a family who came to understand fairly early that they would not be safe if they stayed in Berlin. One by one, the sisters, father, brothers and then mother fled to England, leaving a city and home they loved. As early as 1933, Hanns' father was told his twin boys would be no longer allowed in the school they attended. "He was told that the recent passage of the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities imposed strict limits on the number of Jewish students at any given institution…"

Rudolf's childhood was not as idyllic. His family was not wealthy, and he did he have the educational opportunities that Hanns had.  His father was a "fanatic and a bigot, and whom he therefore feared and despised, and [he had] a distant mother, who was either taking care of his two small sisters or in bed recuperating from some sickness." His father died at age 40, and Rudolf joined the army when he was 14 years old. He fought, came home, worked on a farm, married and had children….and unfortunately met Heinrich Himmler. He writes, "I was planning to leave active service after the war, and work the farm. After long consideration and much doubt, weighing up the pros and cons, I decided to join the active SS." And from there, as he was a capable, steady, efficient worker, he was often promoted and eventually became the commandant at Auschwitz. There he, his wife and five children lived in a lovely home, furnished with "artwork and tapestries stolen from the Jewish prisoners."  He explained to his wife,  as Himmler had explained to him that "the Jews were a threat to civilization, that they must be exterminated, and if the Reichsfuhrer had ordered it, then it must be done."

The author alternates chapters paralleling the lives of Rudolf and Hanns. What made this such an intriguing book was the way rather ordinary men became extraordinary. I had the unsettling impression that Rudolf became entrenched in evil in spite of himself. He got caught up in the rhetoric, in his admiration for those who promised a better life for Germans, in the recognition he received for doing a good job, in wanting privileges for himself and his family….While most of us will not ever be able to understand the Holocaust, a book like this sheds some light on the process whereby men and women became seduced by Hitler and his ideals and ideas.

Rudolf's life ended when he was hanged "from a wooden gallows with a trapdoor a few steps from the old crematorium in Auschwitz, two hundred feet from the villa where Rudolf and his family used to live." He wrote a last letter to his children. To his oldest son, Klaus, he writes:

"Klaus, my dear boy! …Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and to judge for yourself, responsibly. Don't accept everything without criticism and as absolutely tree. Learn from life."

He exhorts them over and over to take care of their Mummy….

As so many Nazis did, Rudolf also argued he was only following orders….

In Britain, Hanns joined the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps "which had been created…to make use of men who were refugees from Germany…who wanted to fight Hitler…If caught by the Reich, they would be viewed as traitors and shot. Yet, of the more than 70,000 German and Austrian refugees who landed in Britain between 1933 and 1939, approximately one in seven enlisted with the Pioneers."

On May 12, 1945 he was at Belsen: "Hanns carried hundreds of bodies to a mass grave. Back and forth he went all day…They then moved on to the next mass grave, until that too was full, and so they continued until the grounds had been cleared."

Hanns then became a member of the War Crimes Investigation Team and in that capacity, he hunts high-ranking Nazis who were directly responsible for the atrocities in the concentration camps. And he finds Rudolf Hoss.

The book describes the early years of these two men in fluid and easy prose, immersing the reader in their lives, common at first but increasingly complex as Hitler gains power. They become more than names from history; they become very real human beings who move in different trajectories. And that was the fascination…the events and influences brought to bear on a life like Rudolf's which resulted in his acquiescence to evil and then the questions about ourselves, our leaders, our responses to power, our responsibilities to others.