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“A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.”
— John le Carré
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“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.”
— Jay Winik, New York Times bestselling author of April 1865
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“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, National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author
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“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.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“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.”
— Library Journal
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“The protagonists’ individual choices and family backgrounds
give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“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.”
— Rabbi Dr. Stuart Altshuler, Belsize Square Synagogue
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“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, author of Killing Hitler
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“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.”
— Richard Breitman, author of The Architect of Genocide and editor-in-chief of the US Holocaust Museum’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies
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“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.”
— Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University
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“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, British journalist
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“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, author of The Battle of Britain
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“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.”
— David Lodge, author of Small World
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“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, author of Savage Continent
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“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, Baroness Neuberger, West London Synagogue of British Jews