Quotes
“A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history.” John le Carré
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The protagonists’ individual choices and family backgrounds
give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.” Kirkus Reviews
“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
“This fascinating book, based on the gripping story of one
man’s unrelenting pursuit of Rudolf Höss in his search for justice, confirms my
belief that much of the most important knowledge of the Holocaust comes from
the personal accounts of those involved. Hanns
and Rudolf vividly brings to life not only the impact of Hitler’s
anti-Semitic policies on the author’s German Jewish family, forced to flee
Berlin in the 1930s, but shows how an ordinary German farmer became one of the
most feared and notorious war criminals in history, implementing with chilling
efficiency the extermination of over a million Jews in Auschwitz. As awareness
of the full horror of these dark years continues to advance, this book fills a
unique and vital role.” Lyn Smith, author of Forgotten Voices and lecturer in international politics at the Open University
“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
“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
