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

by Thomas Harding

  Hedwig appears to have had a mixed reaction. On the one hand, she felt comfortable enough with her husband’s work to continue living next to Auschwitz, a fence away from the horrors of the crematorium. Indeed, to a certain degree, she agreed with Himmler’s views, once saying in her garden that the Jews “must disappear from the face of the earth to the last man.” On the other hand, Rudolf claimed that Hedwig became deeply distressed when she found out about the mass murder taking place within the camp. It was because of this, he said, that Hedwig stopped having sex with him. More likely, it was because Rudolf turned his attentions elsewhere.

  *

  In the spring of 1942, an attractive woman named Eleanor Hodys began working at the Höss villa.

  Eleanor was a thirty-nine-year-old non-Jewish Austrian prisoner who had arrived in Auschwitz two months earlier, having been found guilty of forging a Nazi Party membership card. When Hedwig had needed help mending the carpet in the villa’s hall, Eleanor, who was a skilled seamstress, was brought in to fix it.

  She spent two days on her hands and knees, working slowly and carefully at the repairs. Every few hours Rudolf walked by. At one point he stopped to ask if her name was Hodys. When she replied “yes,” he retorted that she should not be working in his house, as she was a political prisoner, but since Hedwig liked her, she could stay.

  Eleanor’s next few weeks were busy with a variety of projects at the villa: mending a torn tapestry that hung on the wall, repairing a hole in a silk cushion and darning a wool rug for the Kommandant’s car. She still slept in the camp, but was now able to eat in the family kitchen with the other staff, where she was given food which camp prisoners could only dream of: pastries, cakes, meat, soups, fruit salad and coffee. The food, she thought, was as fine as anything that could have been enjoyed in a good hotel before the war.

  After her first few visits to the Höss villa, Eleanor became aware of Rudolf’s interest in her. His attentions weren’t restricted to the family home, for he soon began seeking her out in the camp, cracking jokes and telling her stories to make her laugh. Even though she realized the danger, she found herself oddly attracted to him. When she first met Rudolf she was living with three other women in one of the redbrick prison blocks, but in time she was given her own room in Block 4 and told that she could decorate it as she pleased. She was also allowed cigarettes, which prisoners were strictly forbidden. She was even permitted the extraordinary privilege of spending occasional nights in the nearby town, where she was waited on by her own maid and cook.

  In May 1942, Eleanor found herself alone in the house with Rudolf. He had walked up close without her noticing and kissed her on the lips, so frightening Eleanor that she locked herself in the toilet. It was impossible to have a relationship with Rudolf: not only was he married but he was also the Kommandant. She resolved never to return to the Höss villa.

  Yet simply keeping her distance was not enough. In September 1942, Eleanor was called back to the villa, where Hedwig formally dispensed with her services. Two weeks after that, Eleanor was arrested and placed in Block 11, the dreaded interrogation block, for an infraction that allegedly had taken place at the house. After writing and pleading her innocence to Hedwig and Rudolf, she was released temporarily only to be detained again, in Block 11. She was put in cell 24, given a bed, a mattress, a table and a stool. She was allowed to read and write as well as to smoke, and was reassured to a degree by these few small luxuries granted her.

  Then, nine days before Christmas, at eleven o’clock at night, a man entered her cell. Lying on her mattress in the dark, she hadn’t heard the door being opened, and assumed it was one of the guards.

  “What is going on?” Eleanor said angrily.

  “Pst,” came a quiet voice, as the intruder flicked a lighter which illuminated his face. It was Rudolf.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, scared.

  “You’re coming out,” he said.

  She thought he had come to let her out of the cell. “Now? At once?”

  “Shh. Be very quiet, we’ll talk it over,” he said, sitting down at the end of her bed.

  Rudolf edged up the bed and tried to kiss her. She pushed him away and made a threatening noise. Rudolf told her to be quiet for fear of attracting attention. Nobody knew he was there, he said, since he had stolen through a door in the villa’s garden wall and let himself in. He tried to kiss her again, this time more gently, but again she pushed him away. Rudolf pulled back, saying he would return another day. When she heard this Eleanor seemed to relent, but begged, “Please, not during the night.” Taking this as a positive sign, Rudolf said goodnight, walked out and locked the cell door.

  Not long after this encounter Rudolf returned to her cell, where they talked for two hours about her life and family. He didn’t share his personal story. She again resisted his advances, and he left in a bad mood. Eleanor was then moved to another cell, number 6, which could be unlocked from the inside. Soon after, they had sexual intercourse for the first time.

  A few days later Rudolf returned to Eleanor. As they were lying in bed, an alarm went off in the camp. With the lights flickering on in the hall outside, Rudolf hid himself in the corner of the cell behind the door, fearful of discovery by his own staff, as Eleanor stashed his uniform under the bed. One of the guards walked up to the door, opened the cover to the spyhole, looked through, didn’t see anything suspicious, and walked away. Once everything was quiet, Rudolf quickly dressed and went outside, only to return a few moments later, worried that he would bump into someone in the camp who might ask awkward questions about his presence at that hour. He stayed with Eleanor until after one in the morning.

  These encounters with Eleanor put Rudolf at tremendous risk. Not only were they contravening the official SS rules, but they were also a violation of the oath he had sworn to himself as a teenage soldier in Palestine. Nevertheless, he continued to visit Eleanor in cell 6. In all, Eleanor and Rudolf had sex four or five times.

  During one of the visits Rudolf asked what she would do if anyone found out about their affair. Eleanor promised silence. He pushed her and said that if the authorities presented evidence against her, then she should relent and say that she had been visited by a prisoner, not the Kommandant. He went even further, handing her a pen and paper and, under the dim glow of a flashlight, telling her to write that she’d had an affair with a Kapo. Once she had signed her name, he placed the paper into a leather book and put it in his pocket.

  In February 1943, while still in cell 6, Eleanor became violently sick. She was taken to see one of the camp physicians, who examined her and said she was pregnant. He told her she was eight weeks along, and asked her who the father was. Refusing to answer, she pleaded with him to keep the matter quiet. She also asked for help with the pregnancy and the next day a prisoner passed her a couple of pills through the cell window. When she took one she suffered excruciating stomach pains. She threw the other pill away.

  A few days later, Eleanor was moved to another cell, deep in the basement of the prison block. This cell was airless, dark and small. Having just enough room to stand, she found it easier to remain on her knees. Here she was kept naked and whenever she cried the guard threw water on her. In the darkness, she could feel a dead body lying on the floor beside her. She was unable to wash and was given meager rations of bread and coffee. Every fourth day she received a small amount of cooked food. When she asked for clothes the guard called her an “old cow” and a “hysterical goat,” expressing surprise that she hadn’t yet died.

  Eleanor was not released until June 16, 1943. She was six months pregnant at the time. On Rudolf’s instructions she was taken to the hospital block, where a doctor performed an abortion on her. Eleanor was then sent to work in a camp kitchen. She was in and out of hospital for the rest of that year.

  *

  Shortly thereafter, Rudolf received an unwelcome guest, Maximilian von Herff, who ran Himmler’s personal office. A man with tremendous political power, Herff was i
n Auschwitz to assess the state of the camp and, in particular, to see what improvements the Kommandant had made since Himmler’s last visit. Rudolf need not have worried, for Herff wrote a favorable report to Himmler on July 25, summarizing his findings:

  Camp Kommandant SS-Obersturmbannführer Höss:

  Of good soldierly appearance, athletic, horseman, knows how to behave in every situation, quiet and simple, yet sure of himself and objective. He does not push himself forward, but rather his actions speak for him.

  H. is not merely a good commander, but also in the field of concentration camp management he has done pioneer work with new ideas and new methods in educational training. He is a good organizer as well as a good farmer and the model German pioneer for the Eastern territory.

  H. is absolutely capable of holding leading positions in the field of concentration camp management. He is particularly efficient when confronted with practical questions.

  Five days after Herff sent his report to Himmler, Rudolf received a cable from Richard Glücks authorizing the next shipment of Zyklon B. The extermination program was to continue without hindrance.

  As the summer of 1943 came to a close, Rudolf was at the pinnacle of his Kommandant career: he oversaw a network of camps that housed over 80,000 people, manned by over one thousand guards. He had constructed the most effective killing machine in human history, capable of murdering over four thousand people a day. His wife was able to enjoy the benefits of such a position: entertaining the most powerful men in the land in her lavishly appointed home.

  Rudolf had begun to fulfill Himmler’s most sacred order, the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. For now, his superiors were very pleased.

  10

  HANNS

  NORMANDY, FRANCE

  1945

  * * *

  As early as 1942, eyewitness accounts of the atrocities taking place in Germany and Poland were filtering back to the Allied Powers. On August 10, 1942, an unclassified telegram was passed from the consul general in Geneva to the Department of State in the United States—which had joined the war eight months earlier—and the Foreign Office in London:

  Receiving alarming reports stating that, in the Führer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering three and a half to four million should after deportation and concentration in the East be exterminated at one blow in order to resolve once and for all the Jewish Question in Europe. Action reported planned for autumn methods under discussion including prussic acid.

  At first, reports of Nazi persecution against civilian populations had been discounted as little more than vague and unsubstantiated rumors. But by the middle of 1943, the reports had grown in both volume and credibility so that they could no longer be ignored: German and French Jews had been rounded up, loaded on trains and sent to the east; the Warsaw Jews had been forced into a ghetto, subjected to beatings and starvation, and then transported to concentration camps; Jews in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine had been marched out of their villages, shot en masse and pushed into giant pits.

  In October 1943, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, along with the governments in exile, had established the United Nations War Crimes Commission. They agreed that this body would compile a list of war criminals and receive evidence submitted by member states. After hostilities ceased, anyone suspected of committing an atrocity would be arrested and tried. A joint statement signed by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt declared: “Most assuredly the three Allied Powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice be done.”

  Now that the Allies had delegated the matter to an international organization, minimal effort was directed to establishing a comprehensive war crimes policy. There was little appetite to explore postwar issues, including the capture or prosecution of war criminals, when victory was not yet assured.

  Then, in early 1944, a report landed on government desks in London, Moscow and Washington, stating that thousands of Jews were being gassed in Nazi-run concentration camps in Poland. In response, on March 24, 1944, President Roosevelt issued a statement to the press: “In one of the blackest crimes of all history—begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war—the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour.” He added, “All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland, or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany, are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.”

  Yet the public pronouncements and extensive media coverage did little to solve the many practical questions facing the Allies: what constituted a “war crime”? How many people could realistically be brought to justice? And which specific individuals should be targeted? Some argued that only the higher echelons of the Third Reich should be tried; others argued this was not fair. After all, how could the head of the Ministry of Transport be as guilty as the heads of the armed forces? Then there was the question of what was to be done with the criminals once caught: should they be shot or tried according to Western law? And if a trial, where should it be held—in one of the Allies’ capital cities or in the country where the crimes were committed?

  On August 30, 1944, the United Nations War Crimes Commission held its first press conference. Each day had brought new stories of Nazi terror and abuse, and the public was clamoring to know what action the Allies planned to take. The press conference was an unmitigated disaster. Sir Cecil Hurst, chairman of the commission, was asked by a journalist whether Adolf Hitler was on the list of war criminals. He tried to avoid the question, but when pushed was unable to answer. Another journalist asked how many people were on the list. “The list of war criminals is not a very long one,” said Hurst. “It is meager.”

  As the war neared its close, the Allies’ efforts to compile lists of war criminals increased. Memos started flying back and forth between the headquarters of Britain—via the various Polish, French and Belgian governments in exile—and the United States. Finally, it was agreed that the list of war criminals should include any person responsible for an act of violence committed since January 30, 1933. This was a huge departure from the narrow definition of crimes committed against Allied forces, which had been the operating assumption the year before, and could, if interpreted literally, result in over a million people being charged in postwar Germany.

  In order to narrow the list down, the Allies created a database of alleged war criminals. This tool, known as CROWCASS—the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects—contained three tiers of suspects: the first was a list of wanted men; the second those detained for specific crimes; and the third a list of POWs. The first list produced more than 100,000 names, but it was out of date and did not include the perpetrators’ alleged crimes.

  A separate priority list of 165 high-profile war criminals, including Adolf Hitler, Oswald Pohl and Hermann Göring, was also created. And although there were obvious omissions on the list—Richard Glücks’s name was absent, as were those of Dr. Enno Lolling and Adolf Eichmann—Rudolf Höss had made it onto the list.

  HESS [sic] SS STUBF. 38 [born 1906]; 1m80; 78 kgs; dark blond; CO of AUSCHWITZ Concentration Camp. War Criminal.

  Though they had misspelled his name, and got his position, age, height and weight wrong, at least Rudolf had been listed.

  By the start of 1945, however, neither the Americans nor the British were fully prepared to run full-scale war crimes investigations. The Americans planned to deploy fewer than two hundred people—including investigators, lawyers, evidence-gatherers and clerical staff—only a small percentage of whom had any investigative experience or spoke German.

  The British were even less ambitious. They intended to assemble three investigative teams, totaling no more than forty people, only twelve of whom had any prior investigative experience.
But even these paltry plans failed to materialize. In April 1945, less than a month before the war’s end, the British pushed eastwards across Germany and began to capture towns and factories; they had no war crimes teams in place to handle the interrogations of captured guards, let alone to track down the Nazi Party leaders who had fled into hiding.

  Britain’s war crimes strategy radically changed when, on April 15, 1945, its troops entered the Belsen concentration camp. Appalled by what they found, they immediately dispatched reports to headquarters detailing the condition of the prisoners and the need for investigators to interview the captured guards. The British were still in the throes of formulating their war crimes response and did not have a war crimes team in place to send to Belsen. Their solution was to find a team of twelve suitable men—four investigators, four interpreters and four assistants—who would spearhead Britain’s war crimes response.

  The first task was to select them.

  *

  In early 1945, Hanns was working as his commander’s adjutant in a newly created Allied headquarters in Normandy. Meanwhile, Paul’s company had been put in charge of managing German prisoners of war, picked up during the Allies’ push eastwards. In his spare time, Paul dabbled in the black market, purchasing cheap French perfume, blackberry brandy and women’s clothing, selling some for profit and sending the rest to his sisters. All parcels mailed home had to be signed off by the company commander and, luckily for Paul, this responsibility fell to his brother.

  In a letter to Elsie and Erich, Hanns wrote about the privileges that his new post afforded. He slept on a bed in the barracks rather than outside in a muddy tent. He had to wake at seven and work till late at night, but spent most of his time writing letters home, “although they don’t like to see me in front of all my letters, but they will have to get used to it.” He also thanked the family for the razor blades they had sent, but asked for extra flints so that he could light his pipe.