Hanns and Rudolf, by Thomas Harding – review

Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two weeks ago, the New York Times’s savvy London correspondent accused the British of being obsessed with the Nazis. This might appear a case of pots and kettles: not for nothing did America’s widely watched History Channel become known as the Hitler Channel. Nevertheless, Sarah Lyall had made a valid point. A stupefying 830 books on the Third Reich were published in the UK in 2010 and — although no figures are yet available for 2013 — a reduction any time soon seems unlikely.

Germany’s history of genocide is unforgivable. Still, how many more books, over what period of time, do we require to remind ourselves of that fact? What new detail can we possibly need to learn about Auschwitz and the dreadful kommandant whose memoirs were first published in England in 1959 and are still readily procurable today? (Death Dealer, available, with giftwrap, on Amazon for around £7.)

I don’t want to diminish the sincere motivation of a well-told true story. Hanns and Rudolf is as absorbing as Lodge, Le Carré and Freedland allege. (The use of the word ‘exhilarating’ by another endorser bothered me more.) Thomas Harding narrates, in careful, understated prose, the story of how his great uncle Hanns Alexander hunted down the man who vaingloriously identified himself as ‘the world’s greatest destroyer’: Rudolf Höss, the Bavarian-born kommandant of Auschwitz.

The hunt and trial occupy the book’s final heartstopping 50 pages; before that, however, Harding must lead the reader back — once more — to sit behind a protective wall of glass, and watch — once again — the terrible drama of how the powerful set out to annihilate the powerless, and did so with a combination of efficiency and brutality, the horror of which today has come to resemble for its observers a kind of infernal pornography.