Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz

by Thomas Harding

  Rossbach himself epitomized the right-wing reactionary of that time: a veteran of the First World War embittered by the terms of the armistice, fearful of Bolsheviks taking over the country, and thirsty for the violence of warfare to restore the rightful place of his cherished motherland. Despite being only twenty-five years old and hailing from a small village in Pomerania, now northwest Poland, Rossbach was highly admired by the young urban recruits who surrounded him. They considered him to be an “ideal man”—brutal, ruthless, swaggering and inexorably tough—someone who enjoyed getting drunk, smashing windows and brawling.

  It was Rudolf’s first trip to Berlin. He arrived to find the city in turmoil. A mob of disgruntled workers had occupied the newspaper district. Barricades were erected blocking many of the major streets, manned by armed left-wing activists. A series of strikes and mass marches had brought the city to a standstill. Trains filled with meat and vegetables stood rotting at the city’s outskirts. Each day there were reports of murders, and bodies of political leaders had been found floating in the city’s canals. The reformist government, still run by Friedrich Ebert and his Social Democrats, maintained control by deploying First World War veterans to violently suppress the revolutionaries.

  It is not clear when Rudolf and Rossbach first met, but eventually, in the early months of 1919, they did, and Rudolf was soon informed of the Freikorps’ next misson. The brigade was preparing to travel over seven hundred miles to the Baltic coast, partly by train, partly on foot. There they would relieve the Iron Brigade, another Freikorps group, who were trying to prevent the Russians from taking control of Latvia. For most Freikorps members, the real mission was to assist their German-speaking cousins in Latvia and to reassert German authority in a part of Europe which had been lost during the war. For others, it was a chance to take out their aggression on the Bolsheviks. Rudolf quickly signed on.

  Rossbach’s 3,000-strong brigade left Berlin and headed north, via the free city of Danzig on the Baltic Coast, then northeast across Lithuania and on to Riga, the capital of Latvia. It was an epic and exhausting journey, but for Rudolf, it was a coming home.

  I became a soldier again. Once more I had a homeland, and a sense of security in the friendship of my comrades. Strange to say I, a loner who had to deal with all my internal turmoil for myself, was always drawn to a kind of companionship in which men could depend unconditionally on each other in distress and danger.

  In Riga, Rossbach’s Freikorps joined up with the Iron Brigade and, together with the local partisans, managed to hold off and then to push back the Red Army. As soon as they had beaten off the Russians, the Freikorps marched on the city and, on May 23, 1919, wrested control from the Latvians. Their intent was now clear for all to see: they were there to regain the Baltic region for the local German population.

  The Freikorps were accused of horrendous massacres during this time, including the killing of three hundred Latvian citizens in the small town of Jelgava, another two hundred in Tukums, and over three thousand in Riga. Now that the Russians had been forced out of their land, the Latvians turned against their former German allies and requested aid from their Estonian neighbors. For the next month it was not clear who was fighting whom. The Latvians seemed to be fighting everyone: the Russians, the Germans, even their own people.

  Rudolf had never experienced warfare like this, not even during the most vicious battles of the Mesopotamian Campaign. He noted the difference—civilians were now being caught up in the conflict.

  The Latvians took cruel revenge on their own countrymen who allowed German or White Russian soldiers into their homes and provided them with supplies. They set fire to their houses and burned the people who lived there alive. I often saw terrible sights: burned-out huts and the bodies of women and children, charred or partly consumed by the fire. The first time I saw such things, I thought that the deranged human desire to destroy could go no further. Although later I was faced with much worse images, I can still see, in my mind’s eye, those half-burned houses, in which whole families had died, on the outskirts of the forest on the River Daugava. At that time I could still pray, and I did.

  The Freikorps exposed Rudolf to brutality and violence on a scale he had not seen before. Yet it was also here that he witnessed men pledge deep personal allegiance to a cause and, more important, to a leader. These pledges were reinforced by secret vigilante courts instituted to try those they considered traitors. If found guilty, such men were immediately shot.

  Eventually the Latvians succeeded in stemming the imperial ambitions of the Freikorps and, with British support, pushed the Germans westwards, back towards Prussia. The Freikorps had managed to curb the Bolshevik ambitions in the Baltics, but they had failed to retain any land for themselves.

  While Rudolf was fighting the Russians and the Latvians, the German populace had elected a new assembly, dominated by German center-right politicians. They adopted a new constitution, which would be the foundation of the Weimar Republic. The leaders of this new republic were fickle when it came to supporting the Freikorps’ campaign in the Baltics. Sometimes they provided them with armaments and funds in their attempt to regain the Baltics and East Prussian lands, but at other times they publicly denounced them. At the last, when Rossbach’s Freikorps needed help the most, the republic proffered no assistance at all. This was the biggest lesson for Rudolf, Rossbach and the other members of the Freikorps: their greatest enemy was no longer the Bolsheviks or the Latvians; it was the German republic.

  *

  After being pushed out of Riga, Rossbach’s Freikorps kept fighting for another two years, sometimes acting like a police force, sometimes as a private army—against the Poles, the French, and the Communists, in southern Poland and in northern and western Germany.

  In 1921, the Rossbach Freikorps were finally outlawed by the German government. Their unrestrained violence and anti-republican ambitions had become too much of a liability. Rossbach quickly adapted, opening the Tiergarten nightclub in Berlin, at 18 Hohenzollernstrasse, and staffing it with former members of his brigade. The club acted both as a headquarters and as a front for the collection and storage of weapons. He dispersed the rest of his men around the Baltic region and Poland, where they worked on large estates owned by men sympathetic to the Freikorps ideology, waiting for the next chance to follow their leader into action. Rudolf found himself on a farm in Silesia, in what is today southern Poland, as an apprentice agriculturalist. Ever since his boyhood, Rudolf had loved animals and the outdoors, and he cherished the opportunity to live simply and work in the fields.

  A few months later, in November 1922, Rudolf headed south to Munich, where he was reunited with his fellow soldiers celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Rossbach Freikorps. The main star at the party was Gerhard Rossbach himself, who had just been released from prison after having been arrested for conspiring to overthrow the republic. During the party, Rossbach declared that they would create a new “power organisation” that would “end the present nonsense” using “blackjacks and bayonets.” Later that evening Rossbach, Rudolf and the others crossed Munich to hear a speech by a young man named Adolf Hitler, a rising star in the National Socialist movement.

  Originally formed as the German Workers Party (DAP) in January 1919, the Munich-based National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was one of dozens of völkisch organizations—literally “folk organizations,” but in practice right-wing nationalist organizations—active in postwar Germany. Basing their appeal on ideals of national supremacy and ethnic purity (and by extension being anti-Slav and anti-Semitic), these groups attracted widespread support. The NSDAP was slow to build, however. When Hitler attended his first meeting in September 1919, there were only forty other people present. By 1921, largely due to Hitler’s extraordinary gifts as a public speaker, the party had over three thousand members and, by 1922, its reputation had grown sufficiently to attract the attention of Rossbach and his men.

  As the group walked through the doors of
a large L-shaped building at number 18 Rosenheimer Strasse, down a flight of stairs, and into the cavernous Kindlkeller, they found a crowd of four thousand men and women gathered before them.

  Sitting on a chair on a platform at the front of the beer cellar was the thirty-three-year-old Adolf Hitler, wearing heavy boots, a dark suit, a leather vest and a semi-stiff white collar. After a few introductions, Hitler stood up and gave a brief summary of recent German history: losing the war, the fall of the Kaiser, the battles between nationalists and socialists, the founding of the republic, the betrayal at Versailles. As the audience warmed, Hitler began gesturing emphatically with his arms, praising Italy’s prime minister and leader of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini, for marching his supporters into Rome three weeks earlier when he came to power, and repeatedly thanking the veterans for their bravery and courage during the war. He attacked war profiteers and Jews for their black-marketeering, and mocked the Communists’ lack of respect for German ways and customs. When he concluded, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

  Rudolf had never seen anything like this. He agreed with what Hitler was saying, but he rejected the mass propaganda and what he saw as the appeal to the crowd’s basest instincts. Yet those in the room felt like his kind of people. Along with many of Rossbach’s soldiers, he joined the queue of young men and women waiting to sign up with the National Socialists. When his turn came, he wrote down his details, signed his name and was handed a card with his party number: 3240.

  Believed to be Martin Bormann (left) and Rudolf Höss (right)

  As an early member of the National Socialist Party, Rudolf could have pursued a career within the organization. Instead, he returned to his job as an agricultural officer, working on estates in Silesia and Mecklenburg. For the time being all he wanted was to be close to the land. On May 31, 1923, six months after hearing Hitler’s Munich speech, Rudolf met his friend Martin Bormann, a farm supervisor, for dinner at a restaurant in Parchim, a small town in Mecklenburg, 150 miles north of Berlin.

  It was a warm spring evening. Bormann and Rudolf and two other friends stayed late at the restaurant, drinking beers and becoming increasingly rowdy. They then spotted a former brother-soldier, Walter Kadow, eating at a table nearby. Kadow had left the Freikorps with a black cloud hanging over his name: he was believed to have betrayed another member, Albert Leo Schlageter, to the French, who in turn accused Schlageter of blowing up bridges in the French-occupied Ruhr. Five days before the meeting at the Parchim restaurant, the French had taken Schlageter onto Golzheimer Heath, near Düsseldorf, read out his sentence and shot him.

  Rudolf, Bormann and the others joined Kadow at his table, pretending to be eager to catch up with their old Freikorps colleague. After they were all fairly drunk, they suggested that they go for a drive, not telling Kadow where they were headed. A short while later they were outside town and entered some dark woods. There they beat Kadow with clubs until he could not stand. When he was half dead and covered with blood, one of the men cut his throat and another then shot him twice in the head with a revolver at close range. They buried the body in the woods and then drove back to town. Later, Rudolf described this killing in clinical tones: “I was firmly convinced then, and I still am, that as a traitor he deserved to die.”

  A few days after the killing, one of the participants called Vorwärts, the Berlin-based newspaper of the Social Democratic Party, and told a journalist what had happened. Soon afterwards, Rudolf and Martin Bormann were arrested. It was quickly agreed that Rudolf would protect Bormann—it is unclear if he offered or was asked, but either way it was an act of loyalty—taking full responsibility for the crime.

  Rudolf had been unworried about his arrest. He was convinced that his case would be dismissed, and that the government had an unspoken agreement to release any arrested member of a right-wing paramilitary group in return for their support on the streets. However, this deal was soon to be broken.

  On November 9, Hitler led a crowd of National Socialists—including Gerhard Rossbach—into a Munich beer hall where Gustav von Kahr, the acting commissioner of Bavaria, was preparing to make a speech to three thousand people. Hitler jumped onto the platform and, shooting into the air, declared that the Bavarian government had been overthrown: “The day for which I have been waiting with such longing for five years has arrived! I will make Germany a glorious state.” Skirmishes took place throughout the night and into the early hours, ending with a confrontation in Munich’s city center, where Hitler and his armed supporters came face-to-face with soldiers from the state police. During the fight that followed, sixteen Nazis were killed. Hitler was later arrested, taken into custody, and sentenced to five years for high treason. The unspoken agreement between the paramilitary groups and the government was swept away: no longer could political prisoners expect early release.

  In the middle of Hitler’s very public trial, Rudolf was found guilty of manslaughter. In the end he was not found guilty of murder, as even though the prosecutor had Kadow’s badly damaged skull, he had been unable to prove whether the victim had died from a cut to the throat, blows to the head or bullet wounds. Rudolf was sentenced on March 15, 1924 to ten years of hard labor. For his part Bormann was sentenced to one year in prison.

  As Rudolf and the other prisoners were escorted out of court, their supporters sang old battle songs of defiance, calling out their names and wishing them well. Rudolf was then driven from Leipzig to Brandenburg, near Berlin, where he was handed over to the guards outside the ancient five-story brick prison block on Neudorfer Strasse. Only twenty-two years old, Rudolf was totally unprepared to face the prospect of a decade of incarceration.

  Conditions were harsh. The prison had a reputation for appalling hygiene and widespread violence, with inmates ranging from petty criminals such as pickpockets, to gamblers, murderers and renowned safecrackers. The main currency in this alternate criminal universe was tobacco, and even though it was illegal to smoke in prison, the smokers protected themselves by sharing cigarettes with the guards.

  As a political prisoner, Rudolf was fortunate to be given a cell to himself. This allowed him privacy and control over his immediate environment, and for this he was grateful. He kept his cell immaculately clean and was proud that he was never faulted during inspections.

  His day-to-day life was one of routine and monotony: brief periods exercising in the yard and performing his tedious duties as a supply clerk, though most of his time was filled by reading, something he had been unable to do while on active duty. The prison housed a small library, which was augmented by books sent by friends on the outside. Rudolf became a voracious reader, particularly of books on agricultural techniques, history, ethnology and genetics. He studied English, so that by the time he left prison he could speak fluently. He was able to keep up with the news on the outside world by exchanging letters with his military friends, though he was restricted as to how many pages he could write, and could send only one letter each month.

  When not reading in his cell he listened in on conversations between other prisoners. Rudolf remembered one conversation in which an inmate bragged of robbing a farmer’s house and killing a servant with an axe, before murdering the farmer’s wife and four children by smashing their heads against a wall. Rudolf was so shaken by this story that he could not sleep. And though he would be told many such terrible stories in prison, this one upset him the most because the prisoner had “described this dreadful deed in such vile and shocking terms.”

  Rudolf became accustomed to carrying out his prison duties “willingly, and without any unspoken protest,” and would even let out a “silent chuckle” at some of the more ridiculous orders. But he was repulsed by the vulgar speech of other inmates, and could “never get used to the way the prisoners spoke in coarse, risqué, and vile terms of all that is fine and good and to many people sacred in life.” He was also distressed by the frequent brawls that erupted, as well as the violent punishment which was inevitably meted out by the g
uards.

  Even though he was alone in his cell, he was able to meet other inmates in the courtyard or when he picked up supplies for work, had his hair cut, or took a shower. During these chance encounters, Rudolf became fascinated with the prisoners’ psychology, separating them into different types: the hard-nosed violent professionals, the politically motivated offenders and the unpopular prisoners—either the weak or informants who had to be protected. Until now, Rudolf had considered himself worldly, but prison made him realize how limited his horizons had been.

  The authorities deployed a number of methods to pacify the inmates, but Rudolf’s favorite was the concert they put on every Sunday morning in the prison chapel. One day, a famous female singer from Berlin performed “Ave Maria,” by the French Romantic composer Charles Gounod. Rudolf noticed how even the most hardened inmates were moved by her voice, and that during these brief few moments, the prison was quiet and calm. Only a small number were unaffected, and he saw that these men were quick to discuss their next nefarious deed as soon as the music had stopped.

  *

  In 1926 German penal policy was changed. The authorities now embraced the belief that prisoners could be reformed while behind bars. Rudolf was selected to join eight hundred other prisoners in a three-step recovery program that focused on good behavior, education, and hard work. He excelled and, as one of a handful who successfully navigated the course, naturally expected to receive parole. Those hopes were dashed, however, by a letter from his lawyer, telling him that because he was a political prisoner, any parole would have to be approved at the very highest levels of state, which was highly unlikely given the currently calm political climate.

  These were the golden years of the Weimar Republic. A new currency had been introduced and the economy had stabilized. This had been further underpinned by large loan agreements negotiated between the new government and American banks. Soon after, with the government agreeing not to challenge its western borders by force, Germany was accepted back into the international community, even joining the League of Nations. A sense of calm and order had descended on the country. The right-wing nationalists were deprived of their political oxygen, thereby removing any incentive that the government may have had to approve Rudolf’s parole. After all, why allow the early release of a known troublemaker, a self-confessed murderer?