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

by Thomas Harding

  Hanns then updated his sister and brother-in-law on the situation with Ann. They had kept in touch during his early Pioneer Corps days, and since 1943 had met up when Hanns was back on leave. By 1945, she was looking for a commitment, but he wasn’t ready. They had spent less than two weeks together during the past two years and his mind was more focused on getting home than setting up a home. As a compromise, she had suggested that they become engaged without an agreed wedding date, even though he was overseas. “I think if she keeps on arguing very much longer I’ll give way,” he wrote. “I like her very much indeed, but somehow it all seems very unfair and selfish on my part.”

  Paul also thought that Hanns was being unfair to Ann. In a letter to Elsie, he wrote that Ann “quite rightly in my opinion wants to know where she stands and at least get engaged now. I think personally it is only fair to her, and as she will always be self-sufficient, why not.” He suggested that Elsie “better talk things over with Ann, and find out carefully what our parents would say, and hint something to Hanns.”

  Elsie’s reply to Hanns, however, carried only more troubling news from home. Dr. Alexander had suffered a mild heart attack. Hanns wrote back immediately: “I am naturally worried and look forward to every letter. I am in constant contact with Paul as his mail seems to be chasing him around the countryside.” Given that the war effort was coming to a head, Hanns knew that it was unlikely that either of them would be given leave, so they both applied for compassionate leave. Their applications were turned down.

  Two weeks later Hanns received another letter from Elsie in which she said that their father was feeling better and that it was no longer necessary for him to return. Hanns replied that he was grateful that she and her sister were in England to take care of their parents, but he wished he were there to help. “Army life is hard enough as it is but when you can’t go home when something goes wrong it is bloody awful. But I am afraid that all the grumbling in the world won’t help.”

  His father’s health scare had shaken Hanns, a reminder that he was far from his family and that he wasn’t in control of his life. The only hope was that the war would soon end, but he realised that this was unlikely. “I suppose it is possible but somehow I can’t imagine Jerry asking for an armistice. If we have to fight through and for every town it will take a hell of a time yet.” Most of all he wanted to return to England, find a job and resolve matters with Ann. “Personally I don’t mind if I get sent home tomorrow, I have had enough.”

  Another matter troubling Hanns was his long-term future. Still officially stateless, he was eager to find out if Britain would offer him and his brother citizenship. In a letter to his parents, he reported a conversation with the officer responsible for the welfare of Pioneer Corps soldiers. Hanns had asked “a few questions which every one of our men want answered”: Would they be offered naturalization when they returned from active duty? What arrangements were being made for Pioneer Corps members after the war? Could their families remain in Britain? Hanns was not reassured when he was told that no arrangements had been made and “there is nothing to worry about.” Hanns wrote, “It is no use to say there is no Jewish problem in England. There damned well is.”

  But at the end of April 1945, Hanns’s personal problems took a backseat. For he received orders to report to the British headquarters based at the Brussels suburb of Uccle. The British had chosen the members of their first ever war crimes investigation team, and on the list was the name Howard Hervey Alexander.

  11

  RUDOLF

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  1943

  * * *

  In the spring of 1943, Heinrich Himmler was anxious about the corruption endemic in the concentration camps, and particularly about gold flowing into private hands—something expressly forbidden by the Reichsführer—which should have been delivered to the country’s war coffers. In order to determine the extent of the problem he appointed SS judge Konrad Morgen to investigate the camps.

  Konrad Morgen was an intriguing choice. The thirty-three-year-old son of an engine driver, who had studied law in his hometown of Frankfurt, Morgen was known as a pacifist and an independent thinker. At the start of the war he had been appointed as an SS judge, but his determination to seek out the truth soon earned him some powerful enemies, and in 1942, following a lengthy investigation into criminal corruption within the SS, he was demoted and sent to the Eastern Front. For his tenacity he had earned the nickname “the Bloodhound Judge.”

  Morgen immediately visited the German camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Within a few weeks he had built sufficient evidence to instigate criminal proceedings against more than eight hundred members of the SS, and had arrested the Kommandant of Buchenwald, Karl Koch. It was clear that Himmler was sincere about stamping out camp corruption and that his appointee was taking his job seriously.

  When he had first received Himmler’s orders, Morgen had been unaware of the gassings taking place in Auschwitz or at the other camps. That soon changed after a visit to Treblinka, where he was told by Kommandant Christian Wirth that thousands of Jews were being gassed weekly, and these killings were taking place on Himmler’s specific instructions. The vast piles of wristwatches and foreign currency were enough to convince the young judge of the Kommandant’s account. At the end of their meeting, Wirth suggested that Morgen should investigate an extermination camp based near the town of Auschwitz which was run by a certain Rudolf Höss, a man whom Wirth described as Himmler’s “untalented disciple.”

  For a while, Morgen was unable to find a reason to visit Auschwitz. A few weeks after his return from Treblinka, however, the Berlin Customs Department had intercepted a package containing two kilos of dental gold sent home by an Auschwitz medic. This was evidence enough for Morgen.

  In the late summer of 1943, Morgen arrived at Oświęcim station and was driven straight to the camp to see Rudolf. The judge presented his credentials and, unusually given the secrecy surrounding the camp, he was to be granted full access to the entire facility. Rudolf had no choice, since Morgen had Himmler’s backing. He offered to help the investigative judge in any way he could and provided him with a junior officer to show him around the camp.

  A short while later, Morgen found himself sitting in a car next to the railroad platform, close to the camp’s entrance, when a transport of prisoners arrived. He watched as a guard ordered the prisoners off the train. Then the camp doctor walked up and down the line, methodically “selecting” the sick, the old and the children for the gas chamber. The victims were then told to climb aboard some nearby trucks, which Morgen and his driver followed out of the camp and along a narrow road for a few miles. Eventually, the trucks stopped, and the prisoners were again unloaded and told to enter long buildings that looked like large bathing rooms. Morgen was shocked when the driver explained that these were in fact gas chambers connected to crematoria. The driver went on to explain that after the gassing was complete, Sonderkommandos were sent into the chambers and, before dragging the bodies to the crematoria, they pulled the gold teeth from the victims.

  Morgen was then driven to the SS guardhouse in Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he was astonished to see guards lazing around on couches, staring blankly as if high on drugs. In one corner of the guardhouse, four or five beautiful young Jewish women cooked potato pancakes on a stove and waited on the guards like slaves. In one of the guardhouse lockers Morgen discovered gold jewelry, pearl rings and stacks of foreign money.

  Over the next few days the judge traveled around the camp, talking to the guards, officers and doctors. He learned that in addition to the organized mass execution of prisoners, thousands of others had been routinely and unofficially killed, the vast majority of whom were Polish and Russian inmates who had been shot against the wall between Block 11 and Block 12. He also discovered that Maximilian Graebner, the head of the Auschwitz Political Department, which oversaw camp discipline, had been responsible for the unauthorized killing of more than two thousand prisoners.


  Morgen returned to the main camp and once again met with Rudolf. He asked about the extermination facilities, and wondered how word of the mass killings hadn’t spread back to Berlin or overseas. Rudolf said that secrecy was critical to running the camp and went on to disclose one of their deceptive tricks: Jewish prisoners with good connections abroad were forced to write to their contacts saying that they were alive and that there was nothing wrong with the conditions in Auschwitz. Asked about the corruption and immorality in the camp, Rudolf said that while he was aware of some problems, they were limited to the junior staff.

  Back in Berlin, Morgen presented his findings to two of the highest-ranking members of the SS, both of whom reported directly to Himmler: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who headed the Reich Security Main Office, and Oswald Pohl, Richard Glücks’s boss, who headed the Economic-Administrative Main Office, and was responsible for all the concentration camps. He told them about the shocking stories he had heard from Wirth in Treblinka and the terrible scenes that he himself had witnessed in Auschwitz. His superiors feigned shock and gave him vague promises of further investigations. Realizing the futility of any attempt to stop the killings, Morgen instead pursued a legal strategy, writing a report that concentrated on the corruption epidemic among the guards and the unauthorized executions he had uncovered at Auschwitz.

  Himmler was displeased with Morgen’s findings and instructed the SS judge to arrest those involved with the unauthorized killings and the gold smuggling. Meanwhile, Martin Bormann—who had heard about the report—wrote to Himmler urging that Rudolf be protected. He had not forgotten that Rudolf had taken the fall for his part in the Walter Kadow murder in the mid-1920s. A short while later, Himmler placed a call to Rudolf in Auschwitz. It was a tense conversation.

  Referring to Morgen’s report, Himmler told Rudolf that his command of Auschwitz was no longer tenable. Rudolf’s initial reaction was negative: “At first I found it painful to tear myself away from Auschwitz, for the very reason that all my problems there, the shortcomings of the camp and the many difficult tasks I faced, had brought me very close to it.” He also worried about Hedwig, who would be devastated to leave their luxurious villa. She had recently given birth to their fifth child, on September 20, 1943, a daughter whom they named Annagret. Then he realized that the change might actually be good for him, for “after nine years of working in concentration camps, three and a half of them in Auschwitz, I had really had enough.”

  Rudolf asked that he be allowed to fight on the Eastern Front, but Himmler refused. He wanted Rudolf to continue working in the concentration camp system; it would be a waste to send such an experienced officer to the front line. Finally a compromise was struck: Rudolf would take up a desk job at the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, the bureaucracy that managed all the Nazi concentration camps and which was based in Sachsenhausen, while Hedwig and the family would stay in the Auschwitz villa. Though he wasn’t keen to work in an office, and he certainly didn’t want to be away from Hedwig and the children, Rudolf realized that he had been lucky to escape a far worse fate—prison, torture, possibly even execution.

  In the meantime, Konrad Morgen continued his detective work, hoping that, with Rudolf Höss’s imminent departure from Auschwitz, the mass murder would slow down. Given time and a little more investigation work, he might even be able to put the soon-to-be former Kommandant on trial. After all, if Himmler had followed the recommendations of Morgen’s Auschwitz report, there was no reason to believe that he wouldn’t do so again.

  *

  On December 1, 1943, Rudolf returned to Sachsenhausen, the camp on the outskirts of Berlin, where he started his new job as chief of Amtsgruppe D1 (First Division of Department D) of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate.

  Rudolf was now responsible for overseeing the stores, security, motor transports, arms and prisoner punishments (including executions) for all the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. He would work directly under Richard Glücks, who had been so unhelpful during Rudolf’s early days in Auschwitz. Glücks had proven resistant to the prospect of having Rudolf back in Berlin, but his protests had been overruled by Oswald Pohl. Rudolf was now only three steps away from the Reichsführer himself.

  Amtsgruppe D’s highly secretive offices were housed in the T-building—so named because of its shape—just outside Sachsenhausen’s perimeter walls. Then fifty-four years old, Richard Glücks had run the organization since 1939. He was a man who looked at everything from the bright side of life, cracking jokes about even the worst instance of brutality, and, according to Rudolf, was incapable of remembering details or of making decisions. Glücks worked on the second floor of the T-building in an enormous high-ceilinged private office, with a red-tiled marble floor and two balconies that offered extensive views of the town of Oranienburg. From this office, Glücks was tasked with managing the Nazis’ extensive network of concentration camps.

  In an act of petty office politics, Glücks had assigned Rudolf a small viewless room at the end of the corridor on the ground floor. This was as far as Rudolf could be from Glücks while still working within the same building. His new accommodation was infinitely worse than the rambling administrative complex he had managed back in Auschwitz. Across the corridor worked Rudolf’s four immediate staff, men named Wehner, Sug, Pallasch and Unger, who together ran Amtsgruppe D1. Two floors above Rudolf was the office of Gerhard Maurer, deputy to Glücks, who ran the second division of Amtsgruppe D, overseeing the organization of prison labor in the camps. Maurer had a great deal of energy and a sharp eye for detail. Whenever Rudolf wanted to sidestep Glücks he would pass a message to Maurer, who would then, in turn, relay it to Oswald Pohl. Also on the same floor as Maurer and Glücks, in office number 95, was Enno Lolling, who ran the third division of the Amtsgruppe D, which was responsible for the organization’s doctors and medical units, including the medical experiments that took place in the camps. It was Lolling who had, in 1941, ordered that the weak prisoners—particularly children and those with incurable mental illness—be “euthanized” by injecting Phenol directly into the heart. It was also Lolling who, a few days before Rudolf’s arrival at the T-building, had delivered a collection of prisoners’ tattooed skins to his superiors as a “thank-you” present for a recent promotion. Lolling was only fifty-five but already looked like an old man after years of morphine and alcohol abuse.

  Departmental meetings were held in a large conference room near Glücks’s second-floor office. The room had windows on three sides, and its wood-paneled walls were covered with a square motif that mirrored similar designs on the green-and-white tray ceiling. It was here, around tables set out in a U-shaped formation, that the Final Solution was planned in detail; decisions that would determine the fate of millions.

  Rudolf’s loathing for Glücks increased with proximity. He viewed his superior as a deskbound weakling and as a man who refused to do anything without permission. Glücks was someone who didn’t like to visit the camps, and if forced to go, chose to sit in the officer quarters talking about anything except the issues that worried the Kommandants.

  He was at a loss when faced with the most difficult situations in all the camps—and generally left it to the camp kommandants to deal with them. “Don’t ask me so many questions!” was his usual response at meetings of the kommandants. “You know much more about it than I do!”

  Glücks became disoriented when Himmler called him and would try to avoid seeing him. When faced with meeting the head of the SS, he would become withdrawn and uncommunicative in the days before. He was obsessed with prisoner escapes, which had to be reported to Himmler in person. As a result, each morning Glücks asked Rudolf, “How many have broken out of the camp?” Similarly, Glücks’s response to any of Rudolf’s requests was, “Do whatever you like, so long as it doesn’t reach Himmler’s ears.”

  Although there was plenty of paperwork from the various concentration camps stored in his office, Rudolf soon discovered t
hat it was impossible to discern what was actually going on inside each of these facilities. There were long lists of what food was being consumed, how many blankets were shipped, the number of guards on duty and the volume of transports that arrived each day. But as to the day-to-day activities of the guards, the health of the prisoners or the hygiene conditions within the camps, there was little information available.

  Oswald Pohl suggested that Rudolf visit the camps—something his predecessors had gone out of their way to avoid—to ascertain their condition. Rudolf spent the first few weeks of 1944 on a grand tour of Germany and Poland, becoming increasingly disturbed at what he found. The camps were overcrowded and lacked basic sanitation. Prisoners were forced to work long hours in extremely harsh conditions with little food or water. More than 10,000 Jewish inmates had died or been killed on a forced march from Auschwitz to labor in a local munitions factory. Rudolf concluded that those running the camps were failing to use prison labor effectively in support of the war effort.

  Returning to Berlin, he set about issuing a series of orders to improve the efficiency of the concentration camps.

  *

  While Rudolf was toiling away at the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, his superiors remained focused on accelerating the liquidation of European Jewry.

  On March 20, 1944, the day after the German Army had rolled into Hungary, Adolf Eichmann arrived in the capital, Budapest. There he met with the Hungarian leaders and discussed the rapid deportation of the country’s 800,000 Jews.

  The plan was for the Hungarian government and its police force to round up all the Jews over the next three months, starting in the countryside and then moving on to the cities. They would then load the prisoners onto trains: sixty-five people per car, forty-five cattle cars per train, four trains per day, totaling some 12,000 Jews each day. The trains would then travel north three hundred miles through Czechoslovakia, into Poland and on to the camp at Auschwitz.