THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
The extraordinary true story of the Jewish investigator who pursued
and captured one of Nazi Germany's most notorious war criminals.
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, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. He lives in Hampshire.
"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."
*The Times, Book of the Week*
"Fascinating and moving...This is a remarkable book, which deserves
a wide readership."
*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."
*Spectator*
"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."
*Frederick Forsyth*
"A highly readable detective story … This is really a book about
the world of Hanns Alexander…[and it is] well worth reading ...
Harding has researched it thoroughly."
*Sunday Telegraph*
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