Hanns and Rudolf

Thomas Harding has shed intriguing new light on the strange poison of Nazism, and one of its most lethal practitioners… Meticulously researched and deeply felt. – Ben Macintyre * The Times, Book of the Week *
Fascinating and moving…This is a remarkable book, which deserves a wide readership. – Max Hastings * The Sunday Times *
A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history. – John Le Carré
This is a stunning book…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
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 Two. 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
In this electrifying account, Thomas Harding commemorates (and, for the tired, revivifies) a ringing Biblical injunction: Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue. – Cynthia Ozick
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
Absorbing … Thomas Harding narrates, in careful, understated prose, the story of how his great uncle Hanns Alexander hunted down the man who vaingloriously identified himself as ‘the world’s greatest destroyer’: Rudolf Höss, the Bavarian-born Kommandant of Auschwitz.Harding balances with scrupulous care the stories of the pursuer and the pursued … Le Carré is quite correct. The last section of Harding’s book does indeed read like a gripping thriller. – Miranda Seymour * Spectator *
Hanns and Rudolf is a masterpiece. The detail is amazing, the restrained narrative brilliantly judged. It’s a classic of Holocaust history, telling of the rise of evil and the ultimate triumph of good.
An extraordinary tale deriving from meticulous research – the story of how a young Jew after 1945 almost single-handedly hunted down the Kommandant of Auschwitz.

Thomas Harding is a journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, 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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