Devastated that he would have to serve out his ten-year sentence, Rudolf fell apart.
I couldn’t eat anymore. Every morsel that I forced down came up again. I couldn’t read or put my mind to anything. I paced my cell like a wild animal. I could not sleep, although I had always been able to sleep deeply and almost dreamlessly all night. I had to get up and go on pacing around the cell, unable to rest. If I did drop on my bed, overcome by exhaustion, and fall asleep, I would wake after a short time, bathed in sweat, from confused and fearful dreams. In those dreams I was always being pursued, struck down, or shot, or else I fell into an abyss. Those were nights of torment. I heard the clock in the tower strike the hours, and the closer morning came, the more I feared the next day, the people I would see again, and I wished I need never see another living soul.
Lying on his cot, he began to hallucinate, seeing and speaking to his dead parents as if he were a child. He confessed to breaking with the Church and that he had forgotten how to pray. When he was working, he felt like he was exerting more effort than he ever had before, but was still unable to meet his quotas. One day, a prison guard caught Rudolf tipping his lunch into the garbage and immediately took him to see the prison doctor. After a brief examination, the physician diagnosed “prison psychosis”—a temporary psychotic state induced by the harsh surroundings—injected him with sedatives, and told the guards to put him in solitary confinement and wrap him in cold towels. For the next few days, he fell into a deep sleep, occasionally waking to eat the food that was left for him and which had been laced with more sedatives.
After his condition had improved somewhat, Rudolf was returned to his prison cell. The warden then intervened and increased his privileges: he was allowed to have his light on for longer than other inmates and to keep flowers in his room. As he regained his strength, he started to interact more with other prisoners, read newspapers, and on Sundays played chess. Perhaps best of all, he was permitted to write and receive additional letters from friends and former colleagues in the Freikorps. In this way he was kept up to date with the outside world, and with the seismic changes taking place in Germany.
Following the inconclusive general election of 1928, an unstable “grand coalition” cobbled together from an array of right-wing and left-wing parties had seized power. With a sense that politics had achieved a modicum of security, the new government announced an amnesty for all political prisoners. This was the good news that Rudolf had been waiting for. Only four years into his ten-year sentence, at the age of twenty-six, Rudolf was released back into society, on the morning of July 14, 1928. A guard at the main entrance to the Brandenburg Prison handed him a small bag of possessions, opened the front gate, and pointed him in the direction of the railroad station.
4
HANNS
BERLIN, GERMANY
1928
* * *
By 1928, Dr. Alfred Alexander’s hard work had started to pay off. His practice had grown substantially, and Henny was able to hire an impressive domestic staff to help run their Berlin household. She employed a cook, two maids, a chauffeur, a washerwoman, an ironing lady, and even a man to come and wind the clocks.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alexander had purchased a dark blue open-topped S-model Mercedes-Benz, and it wasn’t long before the family was being driven out of their Wilmersdorf neighborhood, through the Grunewald Forest, out to the countryside west of Berlin to Frankfurt to visit Henny’s parents and south to Stuttgart, where they picnicked in the Black Forest.
They had also acquired a weekend house near the small village of Gross Glienicke, a retreat fifteen miles west of Berlin where they might escape the bustle of the city and where the boys could run about without causing trouble. It was a charming one-level log structure that stood close to the lake shore. It had three small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a living room with exposed log walls. White-and-blue Dutch tiles featuring various types of windmills were plastered in above the fireplace. A smaller cottage had also been built for a caretaker so that the property could be supervised and maintained when the family was away. Most excitingly of all, the children learned how to water-ski, a sport that had been invented only a few years previously. His father bought a motorboat and built a dock at the end of the garden, and by the time he was eleven years old Hanns had become an expert skier.
Alexander weekend house, Gross Glienicke
The family used the cottage as a party venue, with many of the children’s birthdays celebrated next to the lake. At one such party, Hanns invited all his classmates for a springtime picnic. Sometime during the afternoon Henny pulled him aside and asked about a missing boy called Loewenstein. Hanns sheepishly admitted that the boy was tied up to one of the garden’s cherry trees. Seeing his mother in a rare display of anger, Hanns ran over to Paul—whose idea it had probably been in the first place—and together they untied their friend.
Hanns and Paul attended the Waldschule, or forest school, located next to the Grunewald Forest at the western edge of Berlin. Each day the twins caught a streetcar outside their apartment and then an above-ground S-Bahn train from the zoo to Heerstrasse. From there they walked five minutes along the cobbled Lötzener Allee to the two-level school that stood at the end of the road. Hanns was proud that his parents trusted him and his brother to travel so far without adult supervision, and these trips fostered a sense of self-reliance and independence.
The Waldschule was an all-boys nondenominational school. The students were taught not only the typical classes of a German gymnasium—mathematics, classics, French, and science—but also woodworking, cooking, and agriculture. The school had been built on pastoral ideals and was committed to introducing country values and skills to its upper-middle-class students. To cope with the twins’ obvious unruliness, the principal decided to separate them into different rooms. However, Hanns and Paul frequently swapped classes: Hanns, who was good at French, stood in for Paul, while Paul, who was the more competent at mathematics, stood in for Hanns. The teachers never knew the difference and Hanns thought it wonderful that he could so easily bamboozle the adults. In terms of their studies, neither twin was very successful.
Hanns never enjoyed reading, and performed badly at school tests—he would joke that although he and his brother were “half-witted, together we made up a whole.” But he was better than most of his contemporaries at navigating Berlin’s crowded streets. Some people might call what he had “common sense”; it is perhaps more accurate to describe his self-reliance as street smarts: a nose for avoiding pitfalls and for solving the everyday puzzles that confronted him. He was equally comfortable traversing the wide thoroughfares and the dark alleyways. While Paul might be intimidated by having to ask an adult for help if lost, Hanns was comfortable seeking assistance to find his way home.
Throughout his childhood, Hanns was surrounded by some of the most famous and powerful people in Berlin. His father had by now become one of Berlin’s eminent doctors, and his well-known patients could often be found at the family’s apartment on Kaiserallee. To Hanns it would have been normal to see the Nobel Prize–winning scientist James Franck walking out of his father’s consulting rooms or Albert Einstein eating at their dinner table. Equally, he would have been unfazed to see the director of the Deutsches Theater, Max Reinhardt, or movie stars such as Max Pallenberg or Marlene Dietrich greet him at the front door when he returned from school. The high profiles of the houseguests did not, however, prevent Hanns from playing a prank or two. For instance, when his parents invited the composer Richard Strauss for dinner, Hanns crept up behind him and flicked pieces of bread roll onto his bald head.
Hanns also mixed with his parents’ friends when they attended the Alexanders’ annual New Year’s Eve party. In 1928 the more than two hundred partygoers posed for a photograph: all wore fancy dress and all looked somewhat the worse for wear as they stared at the camera. It was not easy to tell who were the real stars and who were the commoners dressed up as celebrities: one woman looked like Greta Ga
rbo, another like Marlene Dietrich, while a third had come as a white-hatted milkmaid. There was a man dressed like a Zulu warrior, two or three like American cowboys, and at least two Charlie Chaplins. At the front of the crowd lay Hanns and Paul—dressed up like two of Aladdin’s thieves in black puffy silk trousers and shirts, and long pointy shoes—looking triumphant as though they had just pulled off some mischief, which they probably had. As the clock struck twelve, and couples kissed in the new year, Henny opened the doors to the balcony and in rushed two real piglets, to the delight of the boys and the squealing of many of the gathered starlets. This was the home of a highly assimilated, successful, and self-confident German family.
The Alexander children were also regularly exposed to Berlin’s cultural riches. Hanns’s father took him to see plays at the acclaimed Deutsches Theater, and his mother took him to the Tiergarten park, where they listened to classical music at open-air concerts. He was dragged to the latest Bauhaus exhibit, as well as to one of the first performances of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. But he had no interest in high art. What Hanns loved were movies. Not the avant-garde—such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which had received its world premiere in Berlin in 1927—but the lowbrow films at his local cinema: the early detective movies of Charlie Chan and the Thin Man pictures, both of which were dubbed into German, or films starring Paul Wegener, another of his father’s patients. These movies often shared a common storyline: an amateur detective is faced with great odds but at the last minute, and after a few false starts, manages to catch the crafty-but-not-quite-as-intelligent villain.
Hanns and Paul also frequented the Sportpalast, an enormous indoor sporting arena that could hold more than 14,000 people, and which stood only a short walk from their apartment. There they attended weekly ice-hockey games, often unaccompanied, cheering on their local team. It was also here that the National Socialists held many of their large rallies, plastering their posters over the stadium’s walls. On those days thousands of Jew-hating Nazis would be waving their fists in the same venue where the brothers had watched their ice-hockey games.
As a child moving into his teenage years, Hanns was aware of the political struggles that were wracking the country. He read the stories in his father’s newspapers and listened in as his parents talked about current events. Each day the headlines were full of the latest political turbulence: millions made unemployed by the American stock-market crash; a failed referendum on renouncing the war reparations that had been agreed on in the Treaty of Versailles; the collapse of the “Grand Coalition”; the new government sidestepping the Reichstag and forcing through economic reforms by presidential decree. He saw the weekly protests in the streets, not only in the city’s center, but also near his home in west Berlin. But the political maelstrom that swirled around the city registered little with him. It wasn’t just that he was only thirteen years old; it was 1930 and he didn’t yet feel a threat to his freedom: he could still go to the movies, attend school, and live in the comfort of his home.
*
In late May 1930, after a painful year of studying their allotted section of the Torah with an elderly Hebrew teacher, Hanns and Paul celebrated their bar mitzvahs. The family was driven by their chauffeur to the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse, the city’s largest synagogue, with a seating capacity of more than three thousand people. The synagogue’s massive golden dome stood two full stories taller than the buildings on either side; it was located at the center of the city’s commercial district and was the heart of Jewish life in Berlin.
The guests included their grandparents Lucien and Amalie Picard, as well as their great-aunt Cäcilie Bing, a short but wide lady with a thick lisp and a fondness for mink coats, all of whom had traveled from Frankfurt for the big occasion. What was unique about the twins’ service, at least to the family, was that they would read from the Alexander Torah, which Dr. Alexander had brought for the occasion.
Hanns and Paul walked up onto the stage at the front of the massive hall and began reciting the blessings. They were both dressed in white shirts, polished black shoes, and dark double-breasted suits, custom-made at the city’s most renowned tailors, Peek and Cloppenburg. The boys had become rather chubby, so Henny hadn’t been able to purchase anything off the rack. When Hanns read the final verse, and in the tradition of the Liberale German synagogue to which he belonged, the congregation called out approvingly: “Skoiach, skoiach,” congratulations, congratulations. As on all such occasions, Dr. Alexander cried with joy, and was handed a handkerchief by his wife.
Their bar mitzvahs now complete, Hanns and Paul Alexander passed into manhood.
5
RUDOLF
BERLIN, GERMANY
1928
* * *
Four years after being handed down his prison sentence, Rudolf Höss stood staring at the crowds on the vast open space of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz.
Streetcars headed north and south, east and west; men on bicycles carrying groceries purchased in the Hackescher Market wove in and out of the tracks; a line of cars sped past the clock tower stationed on the oval patch of grass at the center of the square; pedestrians gathered on the sidewalks waiting to cross the crowded streets, while others took a break at one of the many street cafes; and open-topped buses, packed with shoppers and sightseers, careened around the square’s tight curves towards the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. It was July 1928, and Potsdamer Platz was the busiest traffic center in Europe.
Rudolf stood at the busy square for a long time, overwhelmed by a sense of unreality: “I felt as if I were watching a film in a movie theater. My release had been sudden and unexpected, and everything still looked too strange and improbable.”
Unsure of what to do with himself, he spent the next few days wandering around the city, meeting up with friends and going on trips to the theater, to the cinema, and to parties. They couldn’t have chosen a better city or time to excite their friend: Berlin was the cultural capital of the world, attracting the most famous stars to its stages, the most celebrated singers to its nightclubs.
He also visited the seedier side of Berlin, which he euphemistically called “the places of entertainment.” With its dancing girls and burlesque theater—so aptly captured in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin, and later made into the film Cabaret—the city would have been thrilling to many men, let alone one recently released from prison. The National Socialists had castigated Berlin as a city of vice, but Rudolf was not a prude and for a short while he enjoyed the amusements. But he soon grew tired of city life: “I longed for peace and quiet. I wanted to get away from the noise and all the comings and goings of the big city as soon as I could, and be out in the country.”
In those first few days of liberty, friends suggested that he travel abroad, perhaps to Mexico or the United States, while others urged Rudolf to reenter politics. He had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1922, after all. But while he agreed with the party’s policies and aims, in the end Rudolf concluded that he had had enough of it all—of the politics, of the military, of speeches, and of street violence—and now resolved to follow his passion. He wanted to work on a farm and raise a large family. And so, ten days after arriving in Berlin, he boarded a train and headed northeast, having secured a place on a farm through the Artamanen League, one of the many back-to-the-land groups that were popular in Germany at this time.
The Artamanen League, also known as the Artam League, was set up in 1924 as a means to send young people, most of whom were unemployed and from the cities, to help out on large agricultural estates. Some of these lands were located in eastern Germany—large farms that had become heavily indebted through the economic crisis—while others were in West Prussia, which had been taken from Germany at the end of the First World War, but were still inhabited by ethnic Germans. The focus of the league was Blut und Boden—blood (of your family) and soil (of the motherland). Its members believed in the virtues of a greater German state and, above all else, the
importance of family. They did not drink or smoke, and eschewed activities that they considered unhealthy. The league was loosely connected with the Nazi Party; it shared many of the same values, most particularly hypernationalism, Slavophobia, and anti-Semitism.
Rudolf Höss’s Artamanen League membership booklet
Rudolf was a proponent of the anti-Semitism that had been gradually increasing throughout Germany. These sentiments had been fanned by the flames of economic and social breakdown, as well as by orators such as Adolf Hitler, who blamed the Jews for everything from the defeat in the First World War to the collapse in the value of the Deutschmark. Yet Rudolf rejected the outlandish anti-Semitic stories put out by Der Stürmer—a weekly Nazi magazine circulating since 1923, which published caricature sketches of Jews with hook noses and bags of gold—which he described as “foul and unpleasant” and “designed to play on its readers’ worst instincts.”
Instead he favored a more “scientific” and “serious” version of anti-Semitism, one that saw the Jews as a threat to the German way of life. As a “fanatical National Socialist,” he was “firmly convinced that our ideas would find a welcome in all countries, would be adapted to the nature of their peoples, and that would be the end of Jewish supremacy.” He summed up his position as follows: “I never personally hated the Jews, but I did see them as the enemies of our nation.”
So it was that, by the summer of 1929, Rudolf found himself working on one of the Artamanen farms in Pomerania, on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. There, Rudolf’s natural instinct for management was recognized. He was quickly appointed as an agricultural inspector, and sent across the region to check on the various estates run by the league.
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