Hanns and Rudolf

‘A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.’

John Le Carré

‘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.’

James Holland

‘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.’

Jonathan Freedland

‘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.’

Roger Moorhouse

‘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.’

Lyn Smith

‘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.’

Keith Lowe

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

Jay Winik

‘As the twentieth century recedes, especially for the newest generations, its horrific record of the German abduction and mass murder of entire European Jewish populations grows more and more remote. “Never again” slides easily into “Let’s forget,” and the criminally explicit inferno of Auschwitz melts into lazily generalising abstraction (“man’s inhumanity to man”). Yet Auschwitz-as-metaphor masks what Rudolf Höss, its overseer, speedily and savagely achieved: the industrialised annihilation of living Jewish families – children, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents – even as in the very pit of atrocity he gaudily sentimentalised his own family.

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.’

Cynthia Ozick

‘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 WW2. 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.’

David Lodge

‘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.’

Rabbi Julia Neuberger

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