Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of

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. _____________________________________ THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE JQ WINGATE PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 'A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.' JOHN LE CARR _____________________________________ Hanns Alexander was the son of a prosperous German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s, becoming an investigator of war crimes. Rudolf H ss was a farmer and soldier who became the Kommandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp and oversaw the deaths of over a million men, women and children. The hunt was on. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander is one of the lead investigators, Rudolf H ss his most elusive target. In this book Thomas Harding reveals for the very first time the full account of H ss' capture. Moving from the Middle-Eastern campaigns of the First World War to bohemian Berlin in the 1920s, to the horror of the concentration camps and the trials in Belsen and Nuremberg, Hanns and Rudolf tells the story of two German men whose lives diverged, and intersected, in an astonishing way.

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.