Read by Mark Meadows

The untold story of the man who brought a mastermind of the final solution to justice May 1945. 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. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. As kommandant of Auschwitz, Höss not only oversaw the murder of more than one million men, women, and children, he was the man who perfected Hitler's program of mass extermination. Höss is on the run across a continent in ruins, the one man whose testimony can ensure justice at Nuremberg. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss' capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day. 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, it tells the story of two German men-one Jewish, one Catholic-whose lives diverged and intersected in an astonishing way. "A gripping thriller, an unspeakable crime, an essential history." "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." "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." "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." "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." "The protagonists' individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality." "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." "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 chill

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