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

by Thomas Harding

  Although Hanns remained grateful and appreciative of his adopted home, his feelings about Germany never changed. When he and his siblings went through their father’s possessions after his death, they found his Iron Cross First Class. Knowing how much it had meant to him as a boy, Bella offered the medal to Hanns. But he told her he wanted nothing to do with it, or with Germany. The anger that he felt in 1945 remained: “The number of murderers I had to dismiss made me sick. They made fools out of us. You know, the Russians were more efficient. When they heard such stories they found the accused and shot them. We could not do it. We did not do it.” The war, for him, was never a topic for discussion. “I would not talk to children about it because they should not be brought up to hate. I, however, am full of hatred.”

  When, in his eighties, Hanns was invited by the museum established at the old site of the Belsen concentration camp to receive an award for his wartime efforts, he declined, keeping his oath that he would never return. And in this way—because of his silence, and because of his hate—Hanns’s efforts went unacknowledged.

  *

  Over the next few years, Hanns attended the funerals of those closest to him: his sister Bella in 2000; his dear brother, Paul, who died in 2003; Elsie in 2004.

  On December 23, 2006, Hanns—aged eighty-nine, after a long week of dinner parties and theatergoing—woke up in the night struggling to breathe. Although he insisted he was fine, Ann called an ambulance, and an hour or so later they were taken on the short journey to the Royal Free Hospital. Neither slept well that night. In the morning the doctors informed Ann that Hanns had contracted pneumonia, but that the condition was not life-threatening, and told her to go home and rest. A short while later their daughters, Jackie and Annette, arrived at the hospital. Hanns removed his oxygen mask and they chatted happily. On her way out the door, Annette kissed her father and said, “We will be back soon.”

  Later that afternoon Hanns’s condition deteriorated rapidly. The hospital was unable to reach Ann, who was at home, having taken some sleeping pills, but did get through to Jackie and Annette. By the time they reached their father’s side, he had died. The two returned to their parents’ flat, but chose not to wake their mother. When she saw her daughters in the morning, she immediately guessed what had happened. She was not surprised. They were glad that he had not suffered. He had presented a positive face until the very end.

  At the funeral, the true story of his life was revealed to many for the first time. Hanns’s nephews ended the eulogy as follows:

  In short, Hanns was a man, a mensch . . . we can be sure that he left this world having done his duty in all respects, having left it perhaps a better place, and us, who have known and loved him, rather better people. I will end by quoting from his nephew little Benji, aged six, who on hearing of Hanns’s death asked, “Has he packed his bags because he can now go and play with Grandpa Paul in heaven?” I am sure he will. We hope that he now finds his soulmate, his brother Paul. I should like to think that they are both looking down on us now rather embarrassed by what is being said of them, but meanwhile having a good laugh at our expense and probably planning something as they did when, throughout their lives, they emulated Dennis the Menace—or was it Max und Moritz?

  After the memorial celebration, Hanns’s ashes were taken to the Jewish Cemetery in Willesden, north London, and sprinkled at the Alexander family plot. This was where his father, Alfred, had been buried years before, later to be joined by the ashes of his mother, Henny, and brother, Paul.

  At the head of this family plot, rarely visited and covered with ivy, stands an impressive headstone, upon which reads the legend: “Service before self.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  * * *

  It is a cool November morning, the air is crisp and clear, but the clouds overhead threaten rain. I am standing at the entrance to Auschwitz below the massive black wrought-iron words that read “Arbeit Macht Frei,” along with a man my age and his elderly mother.

  The man is Rainer Höss, forty-four, wearing an orange striped sweater covered with knitted snowflakes. Rainer is the grandson of Rudolf Höss. Having grown up in a family who refused to talk about the past, Rainer wants to know more. For years he has gathered information on his own, spending hours in the library, talking to family friends, browsing through old photographs, and reading his grandfather’s autobiography. When he first started asking questions, his father, Hans-Jürgen, cut him off. More recently Rainer was accused of attempting to sell some of his grandfather’s artifacts—an ornately carved wooden box donated by Himmler, an SS dagger, color slides from the family’s time in Auschwitz—and Rainer is still upset about the rebukes he received in the press.

  Rainer’s mother, Irene Alba, is a round-faced and chunkily built woman in her mid-seventies, with long silver hair swept back in a ponytail. Born and bred into the conservative Swabian culture of southwest Germany, Irene has lived by herself for the past twenty years, having divorced Rainer’s father.

  Over a million Jews were murdered here, as well as hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, Gypsies, and Catholics. This will be the first time that any of Rudolf’s family has visited the camp since Hedwig and her children left their luxurious villa in 1944.

  We take photographs of each other at the entrance: Rainer looks stern, Irene looks scared. We walk past the three layers of barbed-wire fence into the camp itself.

  Rainer takes out his video camera and starts filming everything, as if trying to separate himself from the experience. I take out my video camera, trying to do the same. The grandson and daughter-in-law of Kommandant Rudolf Höss are back in Auschwitz, with a Jewish descendant of a family who only narrowly avoided the devastation that took place here. It is all too weird.

  We walk along the uneven stony road, past the low redbrick buildings, and then turn right down an alley towards the center of the camp. Here, we stop in front of two black metal poles between which hangs a third pole. It was from here that the Auschwitz guards hanged prisoners for crimes such as moving during assembly or making eye contact.

  This is my second visit and I am thankfully not feeling the same inner turmoil as I did during the first. Rainer is still filming—the redbrick barracks, the “Achtung!” signs, the electric fence upon which prisoners threw themselves to commit suicide—but when I turn to Irene, I realize that she is not doing as well.

  “This not good, I am so sad,” she says, as she starts to cry. She hugs herself in her dark gray fur coat. “I did not know any of this when I married Hans-Jürgen. He did not tell me. I find out only when my sister shows me an article from Der Stürmer magazine.” She is crying so hard now that it is difficult to understand her.

  “Your husband was the son of the Kommandant. When he lived in the villa next to the crematorium, did he not know about the gassings?” I ask.

  “He said there was a bad smell in the air. Not all the time. But oh so bad.”

  “And the mother, Hedwig. Did she know about the killings?”

  “Of course, of course. She lived here for all these years.”

  “Why did you stay married to Hans-Jürgen for so long if you knew about this?” I ask.

  “When I was getting married in church, I said until death, with sickness, with health, I stay with him for twenty-seven years. He no happy.”

  I am not sure if she is crying because of the terrible crimes that have happened here or because she is feeling sorry for herself. I try to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  I look around to see Rainer walking into Block 11. This is where the prisoners were interrogated, tortured and shot, and where Rudolf’s men first experimented with Zyklon B. I stay outside with Irene.

  “Did Hans-Jürgen talk about this when you were married?”

  “He talked about it only when he was sad. And then he would say it was a terrible time.”

  I join Rainer in a barracks dedicated to the memory of the Jews deported from France, following him as he walks from room to room and studies th
e walls filled with hundreds of photos of Jews during better times: dressed in their finest clothes, carrying musical instruments, dancing in clubs, riding bicycles, sitting with their families at their dinner tables. All are now gone.

  Rainer starts to cry. “This is so terrible,” he says. “What my grandfather has done. It is so bad. It is so bad. I have read so many books, I have studied this over the years, but to be here, it is much worse. What a horrible place.”

  We walk out of the barracks, and head towards the far side of the camp. This is the moment I have been waiting for above all else. We walk through a short passageway made out of barbed wire.

  “Here it is,” I say.

  In front of us stand the gallows upon which Rainer’s grandfather was hanged, next to the old crematorium. Rainer walks up to the wooden structure. He stops, stares at it for a few moments. “This is the best place here,” he says. “This place that they killed him.”

  Irene is still having a hard time. She cannot stay close to the gallows for very long and walks away. Turning, she sees me taking a photograph of Rainer by the gallows. “Don’t do that,” she yells. “Do not take a photograph here.”

  When she asks why I have been taking so many pictures, I tell her I have been researching the story of my great-uncle Hanns Alexander.

  “He arrested Rudolf,” Rainer explains.

  “I heard about the arrest,” she says. “Rudolf was sleeping when they found him. They beat him when they caught him.”

  “It was Hedwig who confessed to my uncle,” I say. “She said that Rudolf had adopted the name Franz Lang, and told him where he was hiding in a farm nearby.”

  “Is this true? It was Hedwig who told about Rudolf, not her brother?” Irene looks at me hard. “I cannot believe it. Hedwig always told me that it was her brother Fritz who denounced him.” I tell her that I have a copy of the arrest report proving it. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she says, hugging herself even tighter. She appears genuinely shocked.

  Rainer walks over to a metal door with a small hole in it. This is the back door to the old crematorium. This is where his grandfather looked through the peephole and watched the prisoners being gassed to prove to his staff that he could cope with the mass murders taking place under his watch. Rainer shakes his head.

  “Mutti, you should not come in,” he says. “It will not be good for you.”

  “I will, I will,” she said, her arms shaking, her breath short. She appears to be having an asthma attack.

  When Rainer shrugs and walks on, his mother follows. I am close behind.

  Rainer walks through the first concrete hall and into the next chamber. “Look up there,” he says, pointing to a small square opening in the ceiling. “That is where they dropped the Zyklon B.” He continues to the next room, which contains the blackened ovens where the bodies were burned. His mother stalls at the doorway, unable to move any closer.

  “My God, my God,” she whispers.

  “This is awful,” says Rainer. “Awful.”

  Irene has somehow shuffled forward and is standing next to the black wrought-iron doors of the furnaces. Her whole body is shaking as she sobs. “Nein, nein, nein,” she mumbles.

  After a few moments we walk outside to sunlight and fresh air.

  There, Rainer turns to me and says, matter-of-factly, “If I knew where my grandfather was buried, I would piss on his grave.”

  *

  I set about finishing this book when I returned home from Auschwitz. It had been six years since my uncle’s death, and six years since I started my research. I now had a better understanding of how Hanns Alexander came to meet Rudolf Höss. I could see the steps that had led to Rudolf becoming Kommandant of Auschwitz, and why Hanns chose to face his persecutors at the war’s end.

  What was less clear to me were the details. Through the research process I came to learn that history—like the story of the blind men describing the elephant—differs depending on the point of view, and is never as clear as you would expect.

  As I continued my investigations, I was also struck by the importance of the texts. There was the Alexander Torah, which had miraculously survived the Nazi era. There were Hanns’s letters, discovered in a small box among Ann’s possessions. There was also Rudolf’s memoir, a critical piece of Holocaust evidence, preserved so that future generations will never forget.

  “What Hanns Alexander did was remarkable,” I was told by Whitney Harris, the man who had summoned Rudolf to the Nuremberg Trials. “Yes, most of the leaders got away. But the important thing is we got some of them, and we were able to record their stories, for history’s sake, so that people would know what really happened. That is what he accomplished.”

  I also learned that the same recorded history endures in different ways. When I visited Rudolf’s daughter I noticed a copy of her father’s memoirs lying on her bedside table; she told me she had barely read it. In Hanns’s apartment, in the week after his death, I found the same book on his living-room table, well thumbed, and with his name penciled on the inside front cover.

  As for the Alexander Torah, it is still used to this day. On March 16, 2013, my family gathered at the Belsize Square Synagogue in London to hear my daughter, Sam, and my niece, Sipan, complete their bat mitzvahs. As they finished their reading the congregation called out approvingly: “Skoiach, skoiach,” and, in the process, the two girls passed into adulthood.

  As ever, we all cried.

  Alfred and Henny Alexander with Bella, Hanns, Paul, and Elsie, 1917

  Hanns and Paul, circa 1920

  Fasanenstrasse Synagogue after Kristallnacht, 1938 (Yad Vashem)

  Paul and Hanns in British Army Pioneer uniforms with their mother, Henny, 1940

  Rudolf Höss poses for a photograph with his family in the Auschwitz villa, 1943. Counterclockwise from left: Inge-Brigitte, Hedwig and Annagret, Hans-Jürgen, Heideraud, Rudolf, and Klaus. (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München/Rainer Höss)

  Selection of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Yad Vashem)

  Heinrich Himmler with Rudolf Höss during an inspection of Auschwitz (Yad Vashem)

  Hanns Alexander, 1945

  Drawing of Hanns the war crimes investigator, 1945

  Barn in Gottrupel where Rudolf Höss was hiding. Photo taken circa 1909. (Geminde Handewitt/Jan Kirschner)

  Rudolf Höss under British arrest, March 1946 (Yad Vashem)

  Handcuffs worn by Rudolf Höss upon his arrest (Intelligence Corps Museum, Chicksands)

  The execution of Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz, April 1947 (Polish Press Agency)

  Hanns and Ann’s wedding day, London, April 1946. Paul Graetz and Alfred Alexander stand behind them.

  Reading the Alexander Torah in Belsize Square Synagogue, London, 2001. Paul reading (left), and Hanns watching (right).

  THOMAS HARDING is a former documentary filmmaker and journalist who has written for the Financial Times and The Guardian, among other publications. He founded a television station in Oxford, England, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. He lives in Hampshire, England.

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  NOTES

  * * *

  Chapter One

  “On August 1, 1916 . . .” From the time that he enlisted, Rudolf told everyone that he had been born on November 25, 1900, contradicting his birth, baptism and marriage certificates. Rudolf had his official SS personnel file altered so that the last digit of his birth
year, 1901, was rounded out into a “0,” thus retrospectively covering up the lie about his age. A copy of this document is held in the U.S. National Archive in College Park, Maryland. His birth and baptism certificates are available at the Baden-Baden town hall in Germany.

  “When Rudolf and his comrades . . .” This conflict, known as the Mesopotamian Campaign, was made up of two opposing forces: the Central Powers, mostly represented by Turkish troops but with some limited German support; and the Allies, represented by the British Empire, involving mostly Indian troops and under Indian command. The Mesopotamian oil wells were strategically critical, for both sides relied on oil to fuel their global war effort.

  “In early 1917 . . .” The battle for Jerusalem went on for two months, and resulted in significant casualties for both sides—18,000 for the Allies and 25,000 for the Central Powers. Jerusalem was finally captured by the Allies on December 9, 1917. The victory was marked by the commander in chief of the Allied forces, Sir Edmund Allenby, when, according to his own reports, he walked into the holy city on foot and was greeted warmly by the inhabitants.