BOOK REVIEW: Hanns & Rudolf by Thomas Harding

[image error]






Title:  

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

Author: Thomas Harding




Publisher: William Heinemann 




Age Group & Genre: Biography/Historical Non-Fiction for Adults






Reviewer: Kate Forsyth






The Blurb:





The untold story of the man who brought a mastermind of the final solution to justice.




May 1945. In the aftermath of the Second Word 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 the First World War 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.




[image error]





Hanns & Rudolf 







What I Thought: 

The author of this utterly riveting and chilling book found out, at his great-uncle’s funeral, that the mild-mannered old man he had known had once been a Nazi hunter. And not just any Nazi. His Great Uncle Hanns had been the man who had hunted down and caught Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz and the architect of the Final Solution that saw millions of people efficiently and cold-bloodedly murdered.


This stunning realisation led Thomas Harding – a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Washington Post and The Guardian – on a quest to find the whole story. His research is remarkable and at times harrowing. As a result, his book Hanns and Rudolf is as illuminating and fact-filled as a biography, and as personal as a memoir. Harding tells the life stories of both men in parallel, moving from their childhood towards the outbreak of war, which happened when they were both young me, and then onwards through all the horrors of the death camps, Rudolf’s to escape and hide himself and Hanns’s determination to hunt him down, and then on the execution of one and the peaceful old age of the other. 





The most awful aspect of the book is, of course, Auschwitz. The steps Rudolf Höss took to turn this prison camp into the most efficient killing machine the world has ever known is told with absolute clarity, often in the Kommandant’s own words. The lack of guilt or pity or mercy is utterly horrifying.





However, the book is so filled with a sense of the strength and resilience of the human spirit that I was left both moved and uplifted. This is one of the best non-fiction books I have read in a long while. 




[image error]



Shoes of Auschwitz victims


Thomas Harding's website 





PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT – I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK