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  CONTENTS

  * * *

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1: Rudolf, Baden-Baden, Germany, 1901

  2: Hanns, Berlin, Germany, 1917

  3: Rudolf, Berlin, Germany, 1918

  4: Hanns, Berlin, Germany, 1928

  5: Rudolf, Berlin, Germany, 1928

  6: Hanns, Berlin, Germany, 1933

  7: Rudolf, Oświęcim, Upper Silesia, 1939

  8: Hanns, London, England, 1939

  9: Rudolf, Oświęcim, Upper Silesia, 1942

  10: Hanns, Normandy, France, 1945

  11: Rudolf, Berlin, Germany, 1943

  12: Hanns, Brussels, Belgium, 1945

  13: Rudolf, Berlin, Germany, 1945

  14: Hanns, Belsen, Germany, 1945

  15: Hanns and Rudolf, Gottrupel and Belsen, Germany, 1946

  16: Hanns and Rudolf, Gottrupel, Germany, 1946

  17: Hanns and Rudolf, Belsen and Nuremberg, Germany, 1946

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Photographs

  About Thomas Harding

  Notes

  Family Trees

  Research Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  * * *

  Unless otherwise stated, all photographs courtesy Alexander Family Archive.

  Höss family home, Baden-Baden (Baden-Baden State Archive)

  Bella, Elsie, Hanns, and Paul Alexander, dressing up, 1917

  Corner of Kaiserallee and Spichernstrasse, Berlin, 1917 (Courtesy Wolfgang Lorenz, www.wl-historische-wertpapiere.de)

  Hanns and Paul Alexander, 1920

  Dr. Alfred Alexander with Iron Cross, 1917

  Dr. Alexander in Berlin at clinic, 1922

  Neue Synagogue, Berlin (AKG)

  Believed to be Martin Bormann and Rudolf Höss, circa 1923 (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München/Rainer Höss)

  Dr. Alexander at the wheel, 1928

  Alexander weekend house, Groß Glienicke

  Hanns and Paul Alexander on day of their bar mitzvah, 1930

  Rudolf Höss’s Artamanen League membership booklet, 1928 (Yad Vashem)

  Rudolf and Hedwig Höss on their wedding day, 1929 (Höss family archive)

  Pages from Illustrierter Beobachter, propaganda article about Dachau Camp, 1936 (AKG)

  Robert Ley and Theodor Eicke, Dachau, 1936 (AKG)

  Hanns Alexander’s exit visa certificate issued by president of Berlin police, 1936

  Hanns Alexander’s British Alien registration booklet

  Announcement of Alexander family’s loss of German nationality, 1939 (Bundesarchiv, Berlin)

  Richard Glücks, Chief Inspector of Concentration Camp Inspectorate (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Bundesarchiv, Berlin)

  Hedwig Höss and wife of Joachim Caesar (chief of Auschwitz agriculture department), with children in Auschwitz villa’s garden, a few hundred feet from old crematorium, 1942–1944

  Hans-Jürgen, Inge-Brigit and Annagret Höss on a slide in the Auschwitz villa’s garden, 1942–1944 (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München/Rainer Höss)

  Rudolf Höss with Heinrich Himmler inspecting Auschwitz III/Monowitz building site, July 17, 1942 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Instytut Pamięci Narodowej)

  Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942 (Topfoto)

  Motto for Pioneer Corps: “Work conquers all”

  Hanns Alexander British alien registration booklet, 1936

  Cäcilie Bing, Frankfurt, 1930s

  Rudolf Höss with children on Sola River a few yards from Auschwitz camp, 1940–1943 (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München/Rainer Höss)

  Jewish women and children from Hungary who have been “selected” walk toward gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1, 1944 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Auschwitz Museum)

  Celebration in Solahütte near Auschwitz to honor Rudolf Höss (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  Clearing Belsen concentration camp, April–May 1945 (AKG)

  Rabbi Hartman overseeing Jewish ceremony by mass grave in Belsen, May 1945 (Imperial War Museum)

  Letter from Hanns Alexander to Elsie and Erich Harding, July 15, 1945

  Ann Graetz postcard to Hanns Alexander, July 16, 1945

  Josef Kramer, former Kommandant of Belsen and Birkenau camps, under guard in Celle Prison, May 1945 (Yad Vashem)

  Belsen Trial, September–November 1945 (Yad Vashem)

  War Crimes Investigation Team dinner menu, October 1945

  Gauleiter Gustav Simon salutes at Luxembourg rally, 1942 (Centre de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Résistance)

  Captain Hanns Alexander; Victor Bodson, Minister of Justice; and Jos Thorn, president of the Luxembourg War Crimes Commission, December 1945 (Centre de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Résistance)

  Anita Lasker leaving Belsen, December 1945 (Anita Lasker-Wallfish)

  Hanns Alexander on leave with Ann Graetz, 1946

  Rudolf Höss, after being arrested by the British, March 1946 (Yad Vashem)

  Rudolf Höss prisoner of war preliminary record, Nuremberg, April 1946 (Auschwitz Museum)

  Whitney Harris, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, 1946 (Whitney Harris estate)

  Rudolf Höss handed over to Polish authorities, May 1946 (Auschwitz Museum)

  Rudolf Höss hearing sentence during Warsaw trial, April 1947 (Yad Vashem)

  Letter from Rudolf Höss while in Polish prison to his wife, Hedwig, 1947 (Auschwitz Museum)

  Hanns Alexander’s “Thank You Britain Party,” Croydon, 1986

  Rainer Höss and Irene Alba at Auschwitz main gate, November 2009

  For Kadian

  Now write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it, so that it may be a witness for me against them. And when many disasters and calamities come on them, this song will testify against them, because it will not be forgotten by their descendants.

  Deuteronomy 31:19 and 21

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  The Kommandant of Auschwitz’s name can be spelled in different ways. Perhaps the most authentic is “Rudolf Höß,” which is how the Kommandant himself spelled it. This uses the letter ß, affirming the Kommandant’s conservative Swabian heritage. The more common English spelling is “Rudolf Hoess.” However, the Kommandant never spelled his name this way, and it also has the danger of being confused with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s secretary. I have chosen to use the contemporary German spelling, “Rudolf Höss,” which was not only the way that the SS typed his name, but also the way it was written by Hanns Alexander.

  One more point. By calling Hanns and Rudolf by their first names I do not mean to equate them. Indeed, it is important to me that there be no moral equivalence. Yet both of these men were, self-evidently, human beings, and as such, if I am to tell their tales, I should begin with their first names. If this offends, and I understand why it might, I ask for your forgiveness.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  ALEXANDER. Howard Harvey, lovingly known as Hanns, passed away quickly and peacefully on Friday, 23rd December. Cremation on Thursday, 28th December, 2.30 p.m. at Hoop Lane, Golders Green Crematorium, West Chapel. No flowers please. Do
nations, if desired, to North London Hospice.

  Daily Telegraph, December 28, 2006

  Hanns Alexander’s funeral was held on a cold and rainy afternoon three days after Christmas. Considering the weather, and the timing, the turnout was impressive. More than three hundred people packed into the chapel. The congregation arrived early, and in full force, grabbing all the seats. Fifteen people from Hanns’s old bank, Warburg’s, were in attendance, including the former and current CEO. His close friends were there, as was the extended family. Hanns’s wife of fifty years, Ann, sat in the front row, along with the couple’s two daughters, Jackie and Annette.

  The synagogue’s cantor recited the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead. He then paused. Looking down upon Ann and her two daughters, he delivered a short sermon, saying how sorry he was for their loss and how Hanns would be missed by the entire community. When he had finished, two of Hanns’s nephews stood to give a joint eulogy.

  Much was familiar: Hanns growing up in Berlin. The Alexanders fleeing the Nazis and moving to England. Hanns fighting with the British Army. His career as a low-level banker. His commitment to the family and his half-century of schlepping for the synagogue.

  But there was one detail that caught nearly everyone off guard: that at the war’s end Hanns had tracked down the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss.

  This piqued my interest. For Hanns Alexander was my grandmother’s brother, my great-uncle. Growing up, we had been cautioned not to ask questions about the war. Now I learned that Hanns may have been a Nazi hunter.

  The idea that this nice but unremarkable man had been a Second World War hero seemed unlikely. Presumably, this was just another of Hanns’s tales. For he was a bit of a rogue and a prankster, much respected for sure, but also a man who liked to play tricks on his elders and tell dirty jokes to us youngsters, and who, if truth be told, was prone to exaggeration. After all, if he had really been a Nazi hunter, wouldn’t it have been mentioned in his obituary?

  I decided to find out if it was true.

  *

  We live in an age when the waters are closing over the history of the Second World War, when we are about to lose the last remaining witnesses, when all that is left are accounts retold so many times that they have lost their original veracity. And so we are left with caricatures: Hitler and Himmler as monsters, Churchill and Roosevelt as conquering warriors, and millions of Jews as victims.

  Yet Hanns Alexander and Rudolf Höss were men with many sides to their characters. As such, this story challenges the traditional portrayal of the hero and the villain. Both men were adored by their families and respected by their colleagues. Both grew up in Germany in the early decades of the twentieth century and, in their way, loved their country. At times, Rudolf Höss, the brutal Kommandant, displayed a capacity for compassion. And the behavior of his pursuer, Hanns Alexander, was not always above suspicion. This book is therefore a reminder of a more complex world, told through the lives of two men who grew up in parallel and yet opposing German cultures.

  It is also an attempt to follow the courses of the two men’s lives, and to understand how they came to meet. And the attempt raises difficult questions. How does a man become a mass murderer? Why does a person choose to confront his persecutors? What happens to the families of such men? Is revenge ever justified?

  Even more, this story is an argument that when the worlds of these two men collided, modern history was changed. The testimony that emerged proved particularly significant in the war crimes trials at the end of the Second World War: Höss was the first senior Nazi to admit to executing Himmler and Hitler’s Final Solution. And he did so in great and shocking detail. This testimony, unprecedented in its description of human evil, drove the world to swear that such unspeakable atrocities would never again be repeated. From this point forward, those suffering from extreme injustice could dare to hope for intervention.

  It is also the story of surprise. In my comfortable north London upbringing, Jews—and I am one—were cast as the victims of the Holocaust, not its avengers. I had never really questioned that stereotype until I fell into this story. Or, to be more accurate, it fell to me.

  This is a Jew-fighting-back story. And while there are some well-known examples of resistance—uprisings in the ghettos, revolts in the camps, attacks from the woods—such examples are few. Each should be celebrated, as an inspiration to others. Even when faced with profound brutality, hope for survival—and perhaps revenge—is still possible.

  This is a story pieced together from histories, biographies, archives, family letters, old tape recordings and interviews with survivors. And it is a story that was, for reasons that I think will become clear, never fully told by the men at its heart: Hanns and Rudolf.

  1

  RUDOLF

  BADEN-BADEN, GERMANY

  1901

  * * *

  Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was born on November 25, 1901. His mother, Paulina Speck, was twenty-two years old, and his father, Franz Xaver, was twenty-six. Rudolf was their first child. They lived at 10 Gunzenbachstrasse, a small whitewashed house with a red-tiled roof, situated in a wooded valley on the outskirts of Baden-Baden.

  In the early 1900s, the medieval town of Baden-Baden was rushing to catch up with the twentieth century. Located in southwest Germany, Baden-Baden sat along the banks of the gently meandering Oos River, at the bottom of a lush green valley full of well-tended vineyards. Five hills overlooked the town, and beyond them, the Black Forest stretched to the horizon.

  For centuries Baden-Baden’s natural springs and glamorous nightlife had drawn Europe’s glitterati. Dostoevsky had researched his novel The Gambler at the casino there, and Queen Victoria, Napoleon III and Johannes Brahms all spent time in the city which, for a while, had been known as Europe’s summer capital. With these tourists came great wealth, and during the first few years of the early 1900s major modernization efforts were under way. New tunnels had been carved out of the limestone seam supporting the town’s Roman foundations to increase the capacity of the public baths; an electric funicular railway had been built up to Mt. Merkur, offering magnificent views of the surrounding valley from its summit; and the wrought-iron gas street lights around the main square had recently been switched over to electricity.

  Höss family home (center), Baden-Baden

  Yet in the Höss family’s small house on the edge of town, life remained much as it always had. Franz Xaver had served as an officer with the German Army in Africa, until his career was ended by a poison arrow wound to the chest. He had returned to Germany to become a teacher at the military school in Metz, before retiring as a merchant to Baden-Baden. But for the hint of romanticism attached to his African exploits, he was in all respects unexceptional: a patriotic German and devout Catholic on the edge of middle-class respectability; a family indistinguishable from its neighbors. Three years after Rudolf’s birth a daughter, Maria, was born; another daughter, Margarete, followed in 1906.

  Rudolf spent most of his early childhood playing by himself. In his rural community the local children were mostly older and his sisters too young to be of interest. His mother was busy with the chores of children and house. Almost of necessity, Rudolf’s favorite pastime was to wander away from the house into town towards the water tower that stood above the neighborhood. Here he would sit, ear pressed against the metal, listening to the water rushing and gurgling. At other times, he ventured into the dark recesses of the Black Forest, whose edges fell only a short distance from his home.

  Rudolf passed endless hours in the woods. But it was not as idyllic a location as it seemed. When he was five, he was kidnapped from the forest’s fringes by a band of Gypsies. They carried him to their caravan, perhaps planning to sell him to another family or to put him to work in one of the local coal mines. Luckily for Rudolf a local farmer recognized him just as the Gypsies were leaving and came to his rescue.

  After the kidnapping, Rudolf was not allowed to walk far. He was,
however, permitted to visit the neighbors’ farms, where he mucked out the stables and brushed the horses. It was during this time that Rudolf discovered he had an instinctive feel for these animals. He was small enough to creep under the horses’ legs, but he was never kicked or bitten. While he was also fond of bulls and dogs, he truly fell in love with horses, a passion that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

  When Rudolf turned six, the family took an important step towards solidifying its claim to respectability, moving to a larger house in the suburbs of Mannheim. Located sixty miles north of Rudolf’s first home, and fifty miles south of Frankfurt, Mannheim was a much larger city than Baden-Baden, with a population of over 300,000 and an industrial base that served the entire region. While Rudolf missed the animals and the expansive beauty of the Black Forest, there was a silver lining to the move: on his next birthday he was given a coal-black pony, which he named Hans. He went for frequent rides in the nearby Haardt Forest and groomed the pony for hours when he returned home from school. He loved the animal so much that he would smuggle it into his bedroom when his parents were away. Any spare time that he had was spent with Hans, a pony so faithful that it followed Rudolf like a dog. They became inseparable.

  *

  Rudolf was captivated by his father’s stories of his military career. He was particularly keen to hear about the Africa campaigns, his battles with the local populations, their strange religions, their exotic practices. But despite the fact that both Rudolf’s father and his grandfather had served in the military, Rudolf was more attracted to becoming a missionary than a soldier fighting in some foreign land.

  It was from his father that Rudolf learned about the traditions and principles of the Catholic Church. Franz Xaver took his son on pilgrimages to holy sites in Switzerland and to Lourdes in France. Rudolf became a fervent believer; he later recalled that he “prayed with a child’s earnest gravity, and was ready and willing to act as an altar boy,” and he took his “religious duties very seriously.”