Published: 25 September 2015
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Nikki Marczak reviews Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz, by Thomas Harding, London: Windmill Books 2014, joint winner of the 2015 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, including comments to her by Rainer Höss
The award-winning book, Hanns and Rudolf by British author Thomas Harding, juxtaposes the lives of the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and the Jewish man who tracked him down after the war. When it was revealed at his funeral that Hanns Alexander had been a Nazi hunter, Thomas Harding – Hanns’ great-nephew - knew there was a story that needed to be told. But amidst the enthralling plot, Harding’s book explores critical moral questions about what motivates individuals to violence, and how ordinary people can come to behave in inhuman ways.
The author’s sense of mission and urgency shines through the narrative, while his extensive research is bolstered by materials provided by Rudolf Höss’ grandson, Rainer. His inherited box of intimate photos, letters and other family documents enhances the reader’s experience of Harding’s deftly drawn characters.
Rainer is the only member of his family to have confronted his dark past. In fact, he accompanied Harding to Auschwitz in 2009. When they came to the gallows where Höss was hanged, Rainer commented, “This is the best place here. This place that they killed him.” It is a sentiment that has not mellowed with time, as Rainer tells me in an interview this week, “I am not able to forgive my grandfather for what he did, or any of the Höss family for denying what happened straight under their eyes.”
But the evil of Rudolf Höss, and the heroism of Hanns Alexander, are not so clear-cut. While qualifying at the outset that there is, of course, no moral equivalence between Hanns and Rudolf, Harding chooses to present the men not as caricatures, but in a way that “challenges the traditional portrayal of the hero and the villain”(p.3). In doing so, he draws some rather uncomfortable, even contentious parallels between the men, and it is perhaps this element of Harding’s work, rather than the story of the hunt or the Alexander family’s persecution, that is a significant contribution to the study of war, violence and genocide.
The reasons that perpetrators committed unimaginable crimes during the Holocaust have been debated for decades. So what do we learn through Harding’s portrayal of Höss? Historian Daniel Goldhagen emphasised the role of eliminationist antisemitism in motivating individuals to brutalise and murder Jewish civilians, and Höss’ own statements indicate that antisemitism was so ingrained, he simply took for granted the necessity of the Jews’ extermination for the survival of the German people. The Nazis even turned traditional morality on its head, viewing the eradication of their created enemy as not only necessary, but morally correct. Reflecting on Himmler’s direct order that the Final Solution be implemented at Auschwitz, Höss explained that “...the reasoning behind the extermination process seemed to me right”(p.114).
And so he set his mind to developing the most efficient killing machine, and to do the job he had been given, to the best of his ability. Höss thus also personifies the theories presented in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men1- his unthinking loyalty, his gradual initiation into a culture of obedience that shamed and punished dissent, the need for approval from his superiors and his desire to belong.
We want so much to believe that perpetrators of violence, especially genocide, are the embodiment of evil, because it is easier for us to understand and to distance ourselves. Depictions of Höss reading his children folktales or lovingly grooming his horses are discomfiting, since we have to reconcile his dual identity as a regular family man and simultaneously one of the worst mass murderers in history.
Disturbingly for the reader, Harding compels us to apply ethical questions to Hanns Alexander as well, by consistently drawing comparisons between the men. Both performed their roles with absolute diligence and a strong sense of duty, and just as Höss developed two existences, Harding writes that Hanns Alexander “...developed two sides to his personality. On the surface he remained charming and jovial... Hanns was serious and determined, fierce to the point of brutality with those he interrogated and full of hate”(p.182-3)..
Indeed, hatred is a common thread through the book. While Höss initially resisted what he called the “attitude of hatred” employed by the Kommandants of Dachau and Sachsenhausen toward their prisoners, he learnt over time that such an approach was effective. We observe a similar (though clearly not morally comparable) loathing in Hanns Alexander, as he is “gripped by a barely controllable rage”(p.174) after witnessing scenes at Bergen-Belsen. His feelings are more palatable, more understandable to the reader, because we are naturally rooting for him to bring Höss to justice, but it is important to examine Hanns’ hatred too.
Both men had to overcome any feelings of revulsion or empathy with their prisoners – a process of desensitisation that they came to view as rational and ethical. Hanns Alexander’s role as interrogator of Nazi war criminals required an “implacable hatred of the enemy” (p.177). in order to break the prisoner, and he appears to have had no qualms about frightening the Höss children with threats of killing their mother. He allows his men to beat Höss upon his arrest, forces him to walk naked across the main square to the prison, and even stops on the way to the prison to celebrate at a bar.
Rainer tells me he feels Rudolf Höss’ character was portrayed accurately and in all its complexity, “It shows that these criminals were normal people, with normal lives. Beloved fathers took care of their kids....” But he recognises that there is danger in understanding too much; that the actions themselves may become justified or excused. Rainer continues to recoil from his grandfather’s crimes, saying “I cannot touch anything at the camp area, because I do not want to come into contact with the deeds of my grandfather... the blood that he shed for this insanity should not stick to my hands.”
Ultimately, Rainer says the book has helped him deal with the legacy of being the descendant of a genocide perpetrator – not in diminishing or justifying Höss’ crimes as his relatives continue to do, but in raising awareness of how prejudice and hatred can provoke human beings to take terrible actions. “It’s like a puzzle and piece by piece I dig out, it shows more of the whole picture my family created at Auschwitz and after,” Rainer tells me. “It is important to share as many stories as we can, to show the truth and beat the deniers with it.”
Harding’s book does more than merely telling the story, though. The triumph of Hanns and Rudolf is that it refrains from being didactic or overly sentimental. The depiction of nuances of character, and the choice to explore difficult moral questions and human behaviour, set this book apart.
1. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 1992
