Hanns and Rudolf

Reviews

“A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.”

“Written with the verve of a writer and the sure touch of a historian, Thomas Harding’s Hanns and Rudolf is a fascinating, fresh, and compelling work of history.”

“Thomas Harding’s Hanns and Rudolf not only declines to forget but challenges and defies the empty sententiousness characteristic of those who privately admit to being ‘tired of hearing about the Holocaust.’ In this electrifying account of how a morally driven British Jewish soldier pursues and captures and brings to trial the turntail kommandant of Auschwitz, Thomas Harding commemorates (and, for the tired, revivifies) a ringing biblical injunction: justice, justice, shalt thou pursue.”

“Gripping…Rudolf emerges as a loyal, workaholic, career Nazi who, upon his capture, is chillingly candid about his role in the Final Solution, and readers will revel in Hanns’s admirable determination to avenge the deaths of his countrymen and the years of vicious anti-Semitism that forced his family to flee Berlin.”

“Providing further details about efforts to capture and indict Nazi war criminals, this will be a compelling book for World War II history and biography buffs. Readers of Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland will find in this book another portal through which to understand the psyche of the oppressor.”

“The protagonists’ individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.”

“Outstanding, outstanding, outstanding! I was riveted to the text. Thomas Harding writes superbly, the storyline is better than any contrived mystery, and a compelling part of history. I see a movie here…because while there is almost a saturation of Holocaust books and movies, this is most compelling because it is about people, the deranged Nazi who didn’t give any thought to what he was doing and murdered in cold blood and the German Jewish refugee, a charming but rather regular fella, who got caught up in a history-making capture that turned the course of the Nuremberg trials.”

“This fascinating book, based on the gripping story of one man’s unrelenting pursuit of Rudolf Höss in his search for justice, confirms my belief that much of the most important knowledge of the Holocaust comes from the personal accounts of those involved. Hanns and Rudolf vividly brings to life not only the impact of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies on the author’s German Jewish family, forced to flee Berlin in the 1930s, but shows how an ordinary German farmer became one of the most feared and notorious war criminals in history, implementing with chilling efficiency the extermination of over a million Jews in Auschwitz. As awareness of the full horror of these dark years continues to advance, this book fills a unique and vital role.”

“A fascinating, well-crafted book, entwining two biographies for an unusual and illuminating approach to the history of the Third Reich, its most heinous crime, and its aftermath.”

“Thomas Harding has written a book of two intersecting lives: his uncle, a German Jew and potential Nazi victim, and Rudolf Höss, kommandant of Auschwitz. In a neat historical irony, his uncle became a British officer who tracked down war criminals, including one of the worst mass murderers. A fascinating account, with chunks of new information, about one of history’s darkest chapters.”

“This important and moving book describes the unlikely intersection of two very different lives—that of Hanns Alexander, the son of a prosperous German family in Berlin who became a refugee in London in the 1930s, and Rudolf Höss, the kommandant of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Well-researched and grippingly written, it provides a unique insight into the fate of Germany under National Socialism.”

“Its climax as thrilling as any wartime adventure story, Hanns and Rudolf is also a moral inquiry into an eternal question: what makes a man turn to evil? Closely researched and tautly written, this book sheds light on a remarkable and previously unknown aspect of the Holocaust—the moment when a Jew and one of the highest-ranking Nazis came face to face and history held its breath.”

“This is a stunning book. Rudolf Höss’ descent into the horror of mass murder is both chilling and deeply disturbing. It is also an utterly compelling and exhilarating account of one man’s extraordinary hunt for the kommandant of the most notorious death camp of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

“Only at his great uncle’s funeral in 2006 did Thomas Harding discover that Hanns Alexander, whose Jewish family fled to Britain from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, hunted down and captured Rudolf Höss, the ruthless commandant of Auschwitz, at the end of World War II. By tracing the lives of these two men in parallel until their dramatic convergence in 1946, Harding puts the monstrous evil of the Final Solution in two specific but very different human contexts. The result is a compelling book full of unexpected revelations and insights, an authentic addition to our knowledge and understanding of this dark chapter in European history. No one who starts reading it can fail to go on to the end.”

“A remarkable book: thoughtful, compelling, and quite devastating in its humanity. Thomas Harding’s account of these two extraordinary men goes straight to the dark heart of Nazi Germany.”

“Hanns and Rudolf packs an extraordinary punch about the nature of evil, told in a cool, dispassionate voice. As these two lives wrap around each other, the quality of evil becomes ever clearer and more shocking.”

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