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

by Thomas Harding

  Back in Berlin, despite Henny’s attempts to persuade them otherwise, the twins decided to drop out of their Jewish private school, believing they could learn more in the real world. Through a family connection, Hanns obtained a job with Leo Perl, a small German bank that was run by a family friend, Franz Perl. This was Hanns’s first job and, although his responsibilities there were not onerous, he relished the opportunity to prove himself and was glad to be done with the daily drudgery of school life. Each day he dressed in a dark suit and hat, and joined the other workers heading into central Berlin on the streetcars. At the end of each month, Hanns handed his meager earnings to his mother, who thanked him with pride.

  Paul was also busy. Despite a new law forbidding Jews from apprenticeships, he had secured a job with a Berlin cabinetmaker. His employer, Johan Geider, refused to acknowledge laws telling him whom he could and could not employ. But as was the custom, Dr. Alexander had to pay for Paul’s apprenticeship.

  A few weeks into his placement, Paul was sent across town to a large hall to work on the preparations for a Nazi Party exhibition called “German Work, German Labor.” The much feted event was due to be opened by Adolf Hitler himself, and when Paul arrived he found a group of men already hard at work. A few hours later a large truck full of plywood pulled up. When the driver asked Paul where he should unload the supplies, Paul told him to drive in and onto the hall’s wooden floor. “Is it safe?” the driver asked him. “Of course,” Paul replied, knowing full well that the sprung floor could not support such a weight. The driver slowly backed into the hall until a loud crack was heard and the rear end of the truck broke through the floorboards. The driver jumped out of the cab and ran away, quickly followed by Paul. The next day, Paul learned that the exhibition’s opening had been canceled and that Hitler’s schedule had been ruined.

  As each twin tried to build an adult life for himself, the familiar elements of their lives began to unravel. Hanns could no longer go to the films he so enjoyed. Signs reading “Jews Unwelcome” were increasingly common and the family’s lavish parties had come to end, with many of their friends too frightened to cross the city at night. Fewer patients visited their father’s consulting rooms on the Kaiserallee or the clinic on Achenbachstrasse, for fear of being associated with a Jewish doctor. Hanns too suffered from discrimination and had been called names on the street. Although better than most at concealing his identity, appearing like any other young German professional, it would have been obvious that he was Jewish when he walked in and out of his local synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.

  So as the Nazi Party gained influence, Hanns was drawn, like so many others, into the Jewish world, not for religious reasons so much as for an explanation of the anti-Semitism he was experiencing in his life. One Friday evening, late in 1934, Hanns left work and traveled to the Friedenstempel Synagogue to hear the sermon of Rabbi Prinz, a twenty-four-year-old who was fast making a name for himself, especially among the younger members of the Jewish community. That night the rabbi arrived late and for a while the enormous crowd worried that he had been arrested. When at last he did appear, Prinz warned that Nazi anti-Semitism was not a momentary problem, but a long-term threat that should be taken very seriously. He also acknowledged that most rabbis were saying something different: that life would return to normal, that the German people could be trusted to take care of the anti-Semites, who, though virulent, were few, and that he, Prinz, was swimming against the tide of this popular Jewish opinion. The rabbi finished his sermon with one simple message: all Jews should leave Germany as soon as they possibly could. As he was walking home, Hanns was concerned that perhaps his father had it wrong and they really should be thinking about leaving.

  To protect themselves, Hanns and Paul joined a progressive Jewish youth group, who met each week to inform and educate each other on the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism, and to share ideas on how to deal with abuse. Here they were told never to go anywhere alone, to walk away from trouble, and that daytime travel was better than night. Such advice was ignored by the twins, as they often moved around when it was dark. But Hanns kept going to the meetings to gather information on the latest attack against the Berlin Jews and to find out about the Jewish elders’ efforts to negotiate with the government, all at a time when mainstream newspapers and state-owned radio were controlled by the Nazis. These gatherings also provided a chance to take the temperature of the wider Jewish community, and to gauge whether there were alternative opinions to those voiced by his father.

  Regardless of the new laws restricting Jewish activities, nothing was going to stop Hanns and his brother from attending the Monday-night ice-hockey games held at the Sportpalast. It had been decreed that only Nazi supporters could buy tickets for this sporting event—indeed there was a notice plastered on the door saying “Juden raus!” (“Jews Out!”)—but Hanns and Paul had a different idea. They dressed in normal street clothes and, paying for a ticket at the door like everybody else, were able to watch their heroes knock the puck across the glistening ice each and every week.

  The rest of the family also attempted to live as normal a life as possible. In early 1935, Elsie attended one of the Jews-only performances at the Deutsches Theater. There she met Erich Hirschowitz, a short, affable Berliner. Erich’s father was a leather merchant, and with one eye on business growth and another on the mounting anti-Semitism in Berlin, he had sent Erich to London to establish a leather import/export business. In July 1935 Elsie and Erich were married. Because the families didn’t want to attract attention to themselves, it was a smaller affair than Bella’s wedding two years earlier. A few guests were invited back to the apartment on Kaiserallee; no notices were placed in the papers. For their honeymoon they drove to Switzerland. At one point they had to take a detour around one of the towns because a sign had been posted on its outskirts: “Juden sind hier unerwünscht” (“Jews are not wanted here”). A few weeks after the wedding Erich returned to London. Elsie would join him once things had settled down in Berlin.

  Around the same time, an enraged Nazi Party official banged on the door of Dr. Alexander’s clinic on Achenbachstrasse, claiming that Alfred had performed an illegal abortion on his sister. Outraged by the accusation, and with a clear conscience, Dr. Alexander threw the man down the stairs. Then, realizing the danger that he was now in, he immediately set off to the nearest police station, hoping to head off any complaint. He was told that if he wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party, he couldn’t be helped. It was at this point that he finally reconciled himself to the reality that time was running out. But even now, he hesitated.

  *

  At the end of 1935, Henny’s parents departed for their native Switzerland—the clean air was recommended for her father’s failing health—and it was agreed that Paul should travel with them. Once in Basel, he started an apprenticeship at the city’s technical school. It was the first time that the brothers had ever been apart.

  In January 1936, Dr. Alexander traveled to London, in order to spend some time with Bella and his young grandson. While he was away, Henny received a phone call from Colonel Otto Meyer, the man who had so bravely driven away the Nazi mob from the Alexanders’ home during the 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses.

  “They will be coming for him,” Meyer told Henny. “You must see to it that he goes into hiding at once.” He explained that he had seen the doctor’s name high on the list of Jews whom the Gestapo intended to round up in the next few days. When Henny replied that her husband was in England, Otto recommended that Alfred should stay there. Henny sent a note to her husband, telling him not to come back.

  At last Dr. Alexander came to the awful realization that he had no choice. He made a call to Edmund Dreyfus, an old family friend and an English banker and protégé of Lucien Picard, Alfred’s father-in-law. Dreyfus quickly agreed to stake the guarantee that the British required of any refugee seeking temporary asylum. It appeared that, for now, the doctor could remain in London, although he was deeply distressed at having to leav
e the country he so loved and depressed at the thought of having to requalify as a doctor. Most of all, he worried that if his name had been on the Gestapo’s list, then so could those of his loved ones. He sent word back that he would stay in London, and told the rest of the family in Berlin to make plans to join him.

  Hanns’s life in Germany had come to an end, and while he was anxious about beginning again, he was also excited about the adventure ahead of him. He quickly focused on the practical matters of how to arrange for his departure for England. The first step was to secure an exit certificate from the Berlin Polizeipräsident, the chief of police, without which he could not obtain an entry visa. It was not too difficult a task: the authorities were still keen to see Jews leave the country. He took a streetcar to the police station in central Berlin and, after paying 10 Reichsmarks, was granted a certificate valid for six months.

  Throughout the spring of 1936, Hanns tried and failed to obtain a British entry visa. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration. Moreover, as Hanns was now of working age and no longer a dependent, he could not rely on the fact that his father and sister were already in London. He would have to find his own way to leave, and soon.

  Over the previous six months, conditions for Jews had worsened in Berlin. Hanns’s friends at university had been expelled and sent back home. Many of his father’s friends had lost their jobs—as lawyers, accountants and civil servants—following the enactment of a law forbidding Jews from holding professional or governmental positions. Hanns could no longer read his synagogue’s newsletter—one of the last ways to glean uncensored news—following yet another law muzzling the religious press. And then following an announcement by Hitler during one of his Nuremberg rallies, the Reich Citizenship Law was passed, stripping Hanns and his family of their national citizenship: from this point on Germany considered them to be mere “subjects,” separate from the rest of the German nation.

  But as spring approached summer, Hanns noticed a change in the Nazi regime’s rhetoric. There were fewer boycotts and rallies, no new anti-Jewish laws, and a few “Jews Unwelcome” signs were even removed from shop windows. Hanns realized that Hitler was attempting to present a positive impression to the world’s media, who had already started to arrive in Berlin for the Olympics, scheduled to commence on August 1, 1936.

  Knowing that this might be his only opportunity to obtain a visa before the anti-Semitism resumed with a vengeance, Hanns redoubled his efforts. Sometime that May, he went to see Franz Perl, his boss at the bank, and told him that he had to leave the country as soon as possible. Perl agreed to recommend him to a London bank. The next day, Hanns woke early and walked to the British Passport Office at 17 Tiergartenstrasse, a fifteen-minute walk from the family’s apartment. By the time he arrived, scores of people were lined up in front of him, some of whom had been waiting there since four that morning. Many of the men and women stood quietly, papers in hand, facing forward, while others wept openly, terrified at being turned down by the bureaucrats. That one of his father’s patients was the British Embassy’s First Secretary gave him some cause for hope, but given the numbers queuing outside, there was no guarantee that he would be granted a visa. The doors opened at nine o’clock, and when it was his turn, Hanns entered the small office and filled in an application form. With less fuss than he had anticipated, and after only a few minutes’ wait, Hanns walked away with a visa stamped into his passport.

  Hanns next went to the French Embassy to ask permission to cross France on his way to England, but was refused. With time running out, Hanns wrote to Paul in Switzerland for help. A few days later, Paul replied that Hanns should join him in Switzerland and then, after a good meal, catch a plane directly to London. With Elsie having managed to obtain a ticket to Amsterdam and soon to depart—she had found it relatively easy to secure a permit with her husband already in London and running a business—only Henny was left with the task of finding a way out of Berlin.

  But it would not be so easy for their mother. Individuals with significant assets or incomes were forced to pay the extremely expensive Reichsfluchtsteuer, the Reich Escape Tax, to secure an exit visa. So Henny would have to remain in Berlin until she had sold her husband’s clinic. Nobody wanted to leave Henny by herself, but there was little choice. They all knew that speed was now essential, given that the world’s gaze would leave Germany once the Olympics came to an end in mid-August.

  On the morning of May 29, 1936, Hanns said goodbye to his mother and walked out of the giant wooden front door onto the Kaiserallee for the last time. He was filled with conflicting emotions: worried about Henny, eager to be finally on his way, nervous about what lay ahead. He took the S-Bahn to Potsdam Station and purchased a train ticket for Switzerland. It was a 500-mile journey taking him past the family’s country home at Glienicke, through Munich, where his father had studied medicine, and on to the small rural town of Geislingen, in southwestern Germany, where he stopped off for a few hours to say goodbye to his much-loved former nanny, Anna. The next day he continued his journey, via Baden-Baden, to the border crossing with Switzerland.

  Late on May 30, 1936, Hanns arrived at the railroad station in Basel. He had yet to escape, however. Although on Swiss soil, the station was actually run by the German railroad network and controlled by the German government. Hanns pulled his bag from the luggage rack, stepped onto the platform and walked towards the customs office, joining a long line of men, women and children. Most were Jews, exhausted from long hours on trains and the anxiety of uprooting their families.

  When it was his turn Hanns handed over his passport with the words “Deutscher Reich Reisepass” typed boldly across its olive-green front cover. The German customs officer looked at Hanns’s travel document, comparing the man in front of him with the picture of the fifteen-year-old inside, glanced at the British visa, stamped the passport and waved him through. When Paul saw Hanns walking through passport control, he rushed up to his brother and, with a loud laugh, gave him a tremendous hug.

  Hanns had now left the country of his birth. He was nineteen years old, with only a train ticket and ten marks in his pocket—all the money the German government had allowed him to take.

  *

  On June 2, 1936 Hanns arrived at Croydon Airport, south of London. He handed his German passport to the officer at control, who stamped it with the following words:

  Permitted to land at Croydon on 2 June 1936 on condition that the holder registers at once with the Police and that he does not remain in the United Kingdom longer than six months.

  Bella was waiting for him and immediately took him out for lunch at the Aerodrome Hotel in Croydon. After the meal they took a taxi back to her apartment in Olympia, where Hanns was greeted by his father, his brother-in-law and, for the first time, his three-year-old nephew, Peter. While he was acutely aware that his family was now split—Henny in Berlin, Elsie in Amsterdam, Paul and his grandparents in Basel—it felt good to be reunited with at least some family members in London.

  Over the next few weeks Hanns set about building a life. He took a room at the Regent Palace Hotel off Piccadilly Circus while looking for suitable long-term accommodation. He also registered with the Aliens Registration Office in Bow Street, where he was assigned Alien Number 594942. Being a registered alien meant that he could not hold a paying job; he could not vote or receive government benefits; as a German foreign national his movements would be monitored by the security services; and in six months’ time he would have to apply for the renewal of his visa.

  A few days later, Hanns took a bus into the City and walked into Japhet & Co., the small bank owned by Bella’s husband’s family, where he would carry out his apprenticeship. He was greeted by one of the bank’s managers, who spoke quickly about the bank’s mission, its employees and the tasks that Hanns was expected to perform. With only schoolboy English Hanns was unable to catch any of the details. He re
alized that if he was to navigate this new environment, then he was going to need help with his language skills.

  In a letter to his mother, sent four weeks after his arrival in England, Hanns provided details of his new life. He thanked her for the gifts she had sent: money, which “I shall diligently attempt to stretch out,” and two cans of cherry compote from the family garden in Glienicke, which he had not yet opened, “as it is so precious.” He had been keeping busy, he wrote, by seeing many of their old friends and acquaintances from Berlin, including Loewenstein, the boy whom Hanns had “bound to the tree” during the birthday party at the lake house, and whom he “didn’t like any better.” The previous Saturday Hanns had taken a day trip with his father to the Isle of Wight, which he described as “heavenly.” And while he wished that his weekends were longer, the work at the bank was “still fun.” In general, then, he was doing fine, particularly because he had found a new restaurant for dinner: Lyons Corner House in the center of London, which had cheap food, tablecloths and free iced water. Reassuring his mother, he added, “I for my part am happier than ever.”

  In early July 1936, Hanns received a reply. The sale of the clinic would not be as easy as Henny had hoped. According to the Nazi laws, she could not sell to a Jew, nor was she likely to be able to sell to a supporter of the party, who would be less than keen to take over the clinic with its Jewish staff and patients. His mother had found one buyer, but the deal had collapsed at the last minute.

  Henny spent the rest of that summer trying to locate a buyer, but when another deal came and went, her situation became precarious. Eventually, in early August, Henny was able to find a couple—she Jewish, he Christian—willing to purchase the clinic, albeit at a fire-sale price. With no other choice, Henny agreed, and with what funds she then had, paid the Reich Escape Tax. A few days later, she boarded a train to London.