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

by Thomas Harding

  The next day Rudolf and his son Klaus—now fifteen years old—left the rest of the family and set off for Flensburg. Rudolf still hoped that they could challenge the Allies’ recent success and was keen for his son to play a part in the resistance. From Flensburg, they drove to a wood a mile north out of town, where they rejoined Richard Glücks and the other members of Amtsgruppe D for a previously agreed rendezvous. Also waiting there was Heinrich Himmler, who had made his own way from Berlin. He now told his anxious subordinates that the fight was over: it was time to take on false identities and disappear into the general population. Himmler said that he himself would adopt the identity of a corporal and head into Sweden.

  Rudolf was shocked that Himmler was giving up.

  We arrived to report for the last time in Flensburg, where Himmler and the government of the Reich had gone. Continuing to fight was out of the question now. Sauve qui peut [every man for himself] was the order of the day. I shall never forget my last report to Himmler and my farewell to him. He was beaming and in high good humor—and yet it was the end of the world, our world.

  After the rendezvous, Rudolf said goodbye to Klaus, sending him back to his mother with his driver. Then he and Gerhard Maurer, now on foot, took the sickly Glücks to a nearby navy hospital, where they left him under the false name of “Sommerman.” Rudolf then parted from Maurer, who headed south and set off to find himself a new identity. A few days later Rudolf met a submarine commander in Flensburg who handed him the papers of a certain Franz Lang, a junior seaman who had recently died. He thanked the commander, destroyed any documents that referred to his real identity, and headed north towards the island of Sylt, hoping to remain hidden until he could find his way out of Germany.

  *

  Shaped like the head of a hammer, the thirty-mile-long island of Sylt hangs off the northwestern edge of Germany, not far from the Danish border. Long favored as a holiday destination by German summer tourists, who loved the island’s thatched cottages, flowering heathland and unspoiled beaches, Sylt was also the home to the Naval Intelligence School. Arriving in early May 1945, Rudolf presented his papers and was accepted into the naval school without question. And it was here, amid the pine forests and the towering sand dunes, that Rudolf spent four weeks, as the surrender was negotiated between Germany and the Allied Forces.

  No one knew what the Allies had planned, and there was great anxiety at the school. The only consolation for Rudolf was that during this time he was able to visit his family, who were a short five miles away, across the St. Michaelisdonn Bay. The days went by slowly. The Allied victory had given way to resistance which had given way to defeat and flight. For a man who based his entire life on loyalty and action, this isolation and inactivity made him feel dissatisfied, confused and lost. He was becoming undone.

  On May 23, 1945, Himmler’s death was announced on the radio. Rudolf was shocked by the news. The Reichsführer had changed his mind after meeting with Rudolf and the others in the woods near Flensburg and had instead headed south, until he was stopped by the British at a checkpoint near Lüneburg. Having assumed the identity of Heinrich Hitzinger, a deceased lower-ranking soldier, Himmler had shaved off his mustache and taken to wearing a black patch over his eye. There was something about the whole getup which had rung untrue for Major Sidney Excell, the British officer at the checkpoint. He acted upon his suspicions, arrested Himmler and took him to Lüneburg prison. The next day, realizing that his charade was pointless, the Reichsführer had identified himself—“I am Heinrich Himmler”—and had then bitten down hard on a vial of cyanide which he had hidden at the back of his teeth. Despite the desperate efforts of the British medical staff, he died a few minutes later. The news was yet another sign that Rudolf’s world was breaking apart and a reminder to keep his own vial of cyanide close by.

  A few weeks later the Sylt Navy Intelligence School capitulated without a fight to British forces, and the entire staff was moved to a hastily erected camp near the Kiel Canal, just north of Hamburg. There, the senior officers were identified and transported to the prison in Heide, a small town located one hundred miles south of Flensburg. A few days after being moved to Heide, Rudolf petitioned for early release, telling his captors that he was a farmer and that he wished to work on one of the local estates. At this time the British high command was desperate to avoid a famine in Germany and had launched a mass mobilization of former soldiers to help bring in the harvest in an operation code-named Barleycorn. Rudolf was masquerading as a junior seaman so successfully that he was never questioned, and his desire to work on the land chimed well with the British policy. He was discharged and, shortly after applying for a job with the Labour Office, obtained a position on a local farm.

  On July 5, 1945, Rudolf arrived in Gottrupel, ten miles west of Flensburg’s city center and four miles south of the Danish border. A village of some 280 people, Gottrupel was surrounded by flat open fields on one side and a small wood on the other. Rudolf reported to the Hansen Farm situated at the edge of the village. There he was taken to the barn where he would be sleeping: a long, single-story Danish-style structure with whitewashed stone walls and a tall, pitched slate roof.

  Luckily for Rudolf, the farm’s owner, Hans Peter Hansen, was absent, having been interned in an American camp for former members of the SS. Rudolf had the freedom to work the land as he saw fit. Over the course of that summer Rudolf labored tirelessly. During the days he worked on the farm, and at night he stayed up late reading in the barn. The villagers were reassured by his polite and humble manner, and impressed with his quiet diligence. Introducing himself as a former sailor named Franz Lang, he soon gained the trust of the community, and before long was acting as secretary for the village council. Nobody suspected his true identity.

  In September, he traveled twice to St. Michaelisdonn to see Hedwig. They met on the sandy flats outside of town. Their meetings were brief, for they feared being seen by the British patrolling the area. They had just enough time for Rudolf to share his plans and for Hedwig to provide an update on the children, and the day-to-day difficulties of their new life.

  Rudolf spent the rest of the autumn working on the farm; stowing the harvest in the barn, plowing the fields, preparing the land for winter. A few days after Christmas 1945, Rudolf met his brother-in-law at a Flensburg bar. There Fritz handed Rudolf a letter and a package of clothes from Hedwig. Before he left that day, Fritz reminded Rudolf that he remained in grave danger and that the British were keeping a close eye on Hedwig and the children in St. Michaelisdonn. He should now have no direct contact with them, Fritz warned, and all communication was to be conducted through Fritz himself. If he wanted to avoid arrest and escape Germany, Rudolf must keep hidden and out of sight.

  14

  HANNS

  BELSEN, GERMANY

  1945

  * * *

  By the end of 1945, the British War Office had realized that it was time to reinvigorate their war crimes team. True, they had successfully overseen a major trial at Belsen and—along with the Americans, Soviets and French—were now embarking on an even bigger series of trials at Nuremberg. But they also knew that the vast majority of war criminals were still on the run.

  The British established a new War Crimes Group based in Bad Oeynhausen, a small market town near Hamburg which the British Army had requisitioned in May 1945—evicting the German residents in the process—as the headquarters for the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). One of the houses that had been taken over, at 24 Lettow-Vorbeck-Strasse, was allocated to the group. It was from this building that all investigations were now coordinated.

  Heading the War Crimes Group was Anthony George Somerhough, a bear-sized man whose keen intellect was masked by a jovial face and who would often stay up late making omelets for his hard-working investigators. Somerhough was assisted by Colonel Gerald Draper, a short and slim bespectacled London lawyer who had served as an infantryman with the Irish Guards, and now ran the War Crimes Group’s legal section. I
n another change, Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn had returned to England, and 1 WCIT was now headed by one Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Humphrey Tilling.

  In a memo to Somerhough drafted in early November 1945, Draper summarized the position of the outstanding members of Amtsgruppe D: Dr. Enno Lolling had committed suicide; Karl Sommer was in American custody in Berlin; Richard Glücks was said to have committed suicide after being discharged from a hospital near Flensburg in north Germany, although Draper was not convinced by this story; and Oswald Pohl, Gerhard Maurer and Rudolf Höss were still at large. There was much work to be done.

  Group Captain Somerhough, who was affectionately known as “Gruppenführer” by his men, now received word from London that his team must speed up their investigations, and was given orders that at least five hundred people were to be captured and brought to trial by the end of the following April. By this time Hanns had impressed his superiors with his hard-won local knowledge and investigative skills. As a result, on November 15, 1945, Somerhough sent word to Tilling that Hanns Alexander had been ordered to start looking for one of the most hated figures in the Third Reich, the Gauleiter of Luxembourg, Gustav Simon.

  RESTRICTED

  BOAR/15226/7/JAG

  15 NOV 45

  CC NO 1 WCIT

  SUBJECT—Gauleiter Gustav SIMON

  A letter has been received from the Ministry of Justice, National Office for War Crimes, WIESBADEN, to the effect that the Luxembourg Government is much concerned that the above named Gauleiter, formerly, “Chef der Zivilverwaltung in Luxembourg,” whom they regard as a major war criminal has so far escaped arrest.

  There seems to have been some investigation by the French authorities which seems to establish the fact that SIMON is hidden in the British zone near Cologne (Eifel area).

  Although these clues are somewhat meagre, I should like to assist if possible and I am therefore writing to ask if you could detach Captain Alexander to undertake this special consignment co-operating with whatever British security services in the area are disposed to assist.

  A. G. SOMERHOUGH

  Gustav Simon was born in the city of Saarbrücken in 1900 to a railroad bureaucrat father and a homemaker mother. He trained as a teacher, and joined the Nazi Party in 1925, rising rapidly through the ranks. Although he never joined the SS, Simon was considered an “old fighter” because of his early enrollment, and trusted with increasing responsibilities. He was appointed regional leader, or “Gauleiter,” of Koblenz by Hitler in 1931, and, following Germany’s invasion, regional leader of Luxembourg in 1940. Simon’s instructions were to dismantle the principality’s state apparatus, to ban the use of the French language, and to Germanize its people. Sometime in late-1940, Gustav Simon initiated a new program: the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Luxembourg.

  Gustav Simon, Luxembourg, August 1942

  As part of the pre-occupation exodus, over a thousand Jews had fled into France, Portugal and Belgium. The Jewish community that remained in Luxembourg was led by Rabbi Dr. Robert Serebrenik, a thirty-eight-year-old Austrian who had been Chief Rabbi of Luxembourg since 1929. In the following months, an additional few hundred Jews managed to escape to neighboring countries. Some were able to find safety; the less fortunate were rounded up by the Gestapo.

  On October 16, 1941, the first group of Luxembourg Jews were loaded onto trains and transported to the Łódz ghetto in Poland (later trains were sent to Theresienstadt and then on to Auschwitz). The next day, on October 17, Gustav Simon proudly declared that Luxembourg was “Judenfrei”—free of Jews. He was the only Nazi Gauleiter to claim that his region had been entirely “cleansed.” Altogether, of the 3,900 Jews living in pre-occupation Luxembourg, 1,290 died in the Holocaust.

  Since the American liberation of Luxembourg in September 1944, little had been heard of Simon, who was presumed to have fled back to Germany. There were rumors that he was hiding somewhere near Cologne.

  Up until this point, the British war crimes investigations had been limited to interrogating SS guards and political leaders who were already in custody. This was about to change. Hanns was called in to see Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Tilling. A thin man with short red hair, a narrow mustache and piercing blue eyes, Tilling told Hanns that he was to hunt down and arrest Gustav Simon. If he successfully arrested the Gauleiter, his mission would become the prototype for a new unit-wide program in which investigators would be sent out into the general population to track down a single war criminal. This new strategy would be called “Operation Haystack.” Hanns’s job was to find the needle.

  While Hanns would be working on his own, Tilling said that if he needed assistance, he could contact the American and the Belgian security forces. Both had been made aware of his mission and would provide backup should he ask for it. Most important, Gustav Simon should be brought back alive.

  *

  On November 23, 1945, the day the American prosecutors concluded their opening statements at the Nuremberg Trials, Hanns drove four hours south to the German city of Wiesbaden to talk to Judge Léon Hammes, the Luxembourg representative of the War Crimes Commission. The judge gave Hanns two photographs of Simon: he had a predatory look, with small eyes and a small mouth, a pointy nose and a cleft chin. His dark hair was parted on the side and shaven two inches above his ears, emphasizing their large size.

  Hanns returned to Belsen to report what he had learned to Tilling. But just as he arrived at the camp, a terrible storm swept across central Europe, delaying his trip by a week. The delay gave him time to gather supplies: two days’ rations, blankets, snow chains, warm clothes, a clipboard for his notes and a first-aid kit, as well as his pistol and handcuffs. Also critical was the waxed road map of northwestern Germany, given to him by the War Crimes Group.

  At last, the snow stopped. Hanns and his driver left Belsen on December 1, 1945, and having decided that he should start at Gustav Simon’s last known address, they made their way across snow-covered roads to Koblenz, a city three hundred miles southwest of the camp. Upon arrival, Hanns met the chief of police, hoping to pick up clues from the time that Simon had lived in the city in the mid-1930s. The police chief confirmed that Simon had indeed lived at number 15 Rheinallee, but queried the need for Hanns’s journey, given that he had read, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that Simon had been arrested shortly after the war’s end. This was news to Hanns, so, thanking the police chief, he rushed over to the newspaper’s offices, a two-hour drive to the southeast. But when he arrived, he was told that the paper had never run such a story. Hanns learned an important lesson: from now on, he would treat all informants, even those in positions of authority, with greater skepticism.

  Hanns returned to Koblenz, this time visiting the district police station. There, he met a policeman who was much more helpful, informing Hanns that Simon’s wife’s maiden name was Friedel Henning, and that the couple had divorced in 1942. He also said that Friedel’s parents lived in Hermeskeil, and that she and the Gauleiter had a son called Gustav Adolf Simon, who was now fourteen years old.

  Hanns hurried over to Hermeskeil, where he interrogated Gustav Simon’s in-laws. The elderly couple were only too willing to help—Simon had apparently “left their daughter in the lurch”—but unfortunately they had not seen or heard of him recently, and had no idea as to his current whereabouts. However, they told him that Simon’s mother was still alive and could be found at her home in Friedewald, near Betzdorf, another hour’s journey south.

  The chase continued. The next day, December 4, Hanns drove over to see Simon’s mother in Friedewald. She remained cold and abrupt throughout the interview, claiming that she had no information on either her son or her grandson. Realizing that any German town would likely hold both anti- and pro-Nazi inhabitants, Hanns decided to knock on her neighbors’ doors and, after a few false starts, was able to gather some useful information. From one neighbor he learned that the Gauleiter had indeed been in town, leaving for an undisclosed location on March 27, 1945, the
day before the Americans took Friedewald. They also told him that a young man carrying a rucksack had been visiting the old lady at night, and that this young man, along with the Gauleiter’s two nieces, had headed for the town of Marburg. Hanns presumed that the “young man with the rucksack” was Gustav Simon’s son.

  Hanns now backtracked to Marburg, a small town seventy miles north of Frankfurt, where he was able to locate the Gauleiter’s two twentysomething nieces. To his relief, they seemed cooperative, telling Hanns that the Gauleiter’s son was now living in Dassel, south of Hanover, and that he had taken his mother’s maiden name, now going by “Gustav Henning.”

  Hanns next visited the Dassel town hall to pick up any intelligence that they may have gathered on this “Gustav Henning.” To his delight, the mayor there handed him a bag that had been dug up in a wood just outside of town. Inside were documents belonging to “Gustav Henning,” including his identity cards, a Hitler Youth uniform, an up-to-date photograph and propaganda papers from the Werwolf resistance movement.

  Thinking that he was closing in on his quarry, Hanns hastened over to the address given by the two nieces, only to be told by the house’s occupants that Gustav Henning had not lived there since August, five months earlier. The nieces had given him old information; once again those trying to protect Gustav Simon had duped Hanns. He was furious. Not only was he desperate to catch the Gauleiter—as could be seen by his single-minded efforts to track him down—but he hated the idea that these young Nazis thought they could deceive him.