Hanns a Rudolf - Hon na velitele Auschwitzu – Harding Thomas (2014)

This nonfiction book recounts the pursuit and capture of Rudolf Höss by Hanns Alexander, one of the principal British investigators in the First War Crimes Investigation Team established after the Second World War to track down prominent Nazi perpetrators. Alexander, a lieutenant and later captain from a prosperous German Jewish family that fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, was the brother of the author Thomas Harding’s grandmother. Höss, a former German farmer and soldier who served in the SS during the war, commanded Auschwitz concentration camp and supervised the physical extermination of at least one million men, women and children, yet initially managed to evade his pursuer. Thomas Harding reveals fascinating details from both men’s lives and from Höss’s capture, covering the Central European battlefields of the First World War, bohemian life in 1920s Berlin, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, and the trials of leading Nazi figures before the international military tribunals at Bergen-Belsen and Nuremberg. He vividly traces the intersecting lives of two German men. Harding, born in England in 1968, studied anthropology and political science at Westminster School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He worked as a journalist and in television before becoming co-owner of The Observer in West Virginia and a writer of nonfiction; he has received several awards in the United States for his journalism and writing.