For two years I tried to meet the daughter of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Each time I called, she put me off, saying that she was too busy, or wasn't feeling well. She lived in America, in an affluent suburb in Northern Virginia. Nazis and extermination camps were a world away. She didn't speak about her childhood or father to her own family. Why would she talk to a journalist?
I was researching a story about my great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled Berlin for London in the 1930s and who, I heard, was responsible for tracking down and capturing Höss. I was attempting to discover if the story was true.
Höss's daughter, Brigitte, had grown up in the family villa, adjacent to the main camp, less than 200 yards from the crematoria. She had lived there from 1940 to 1944, between the ages of seven and 11.
She agreed to the interview. When the day arrived, I decided not to confirm beforehand. I was so close. What if she pulled out? Instead, I went to a local bakery, and bought the largest chocolate cake on offer. An hour later, I was standing outside a small cottage on a leafy street. I knocked on the door. It was opened by a short woman with fine silver hair and a round, wrinkled face.
When I explained who I was, Brigitte started to protest: "Today is not a good day after all," she said. "I am so tired." Thrusting the box towards her, I asked if we might be able to talk after some chocolate cake.
Soon I was sitting on an old sofa in a cramped wood-panelled den on the ground floor of the house. Little light penetrated the draped windows. In a corner stood a sparsely adorned Christmas tree, a tired-looking violet-and-cream knitted star at its top. Brigitte told me it was made by her mother, Hedwig, the commandant's wife. "He was the nicest man in the world," she said of her father. "He was very good to us."
She remembered them eating lunch and dinner together, playing in the garden and, gathered in the living room, reading the story of Hansel and Gretel.
Brigitte's father was the man who, in 1940, had built the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. At first, the camp was designed to hold political prisoners, but later, following Heinrich Himmler's instructions that he must carry out the "final solution of the Jewish question", Höss turned the camp into a killing machine. With gas chambers masked as showers, and enormous crematoria built to burn the bodies, Höss supervised the murder of more than a million men, women and children. Brigitte had guessed that her father was involved in something awful but says she did not know about the killings in the camp. "I'm sure he was sad inside," she recalled. "It was just a feeling. Sometimes he looked upset when he came back from work. I don't know what to believe. There must have been two sides to him."
When I asked how he could be the nicest man in the world if he was responsible for the deaths of at least one million Jews, she said: "He had to do it. We would have been threatened if he didn't. And there were others as well who would do it if he didn't."
She also said that she was aware that the camp held prisoners – some, she remembered, even worked in the family's garden. They wore black-and-white striped uniforms. But she didn't mix with them.
I asked Brigitte if she remembered being quizzed by a British soldier; a tall, dashing man who spoke German. She did. Brigitte and her siblings had been hiding in an old sugar factory near the Danish border in March 1946, when Hanns and a troop of British soldiers had sat them down to question them. Hanns had shouted at her, demanding to know where her father was hiding. It had been so terrifying, she told me, that she had run outside. She could still hear his screaming more than 60 years later.
After talking for a couple of hours she showed me around her house. She pointed to a photograph above her bed. It was of her parents on their wedding day in 1929, taken on a farm in northern Germany. She slept every night under the picture of one of history's greatest mass murderers.
Later, I watched Brigitte interact with her son and grandson. They appeared to be a loving and happy family. Brigitte told me that she had not told her grandchildren about her father, and her own children knew only the basic details. They never asked questions. The war, the camps, the persecution, was something that the family simply didn't talk about.
My family didn't talk about their history either. I knew only the very basics. Hanns and his family had grown up in Berlin in the 1920s. Their father, Alfred Alexander, was a pre-eminent doctor, whose patients included Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and the nuclear scientist James Franck. Hanns's childhood had been cosmopolitan and easy. That is until the rise of the Nazi party. Then the family had been forced to flee to England, where they had tried to rebuild their lives.
I also knew that Hanns and his twin brother, Paul, were not above reproach. As teenagers, they had pushed a tram off its tracks, lit a fire in their parents' living room and, during a birthday party, had tied a friend to a tree and left him there until their mother told them to set him free.
Of course, I knew Hanns well. He was my grandmother's younger brother. He had been a constant presence in my life. He was tall, handsome, charming and, even after living in London for more than 50 years, spoke with a thick German accent. I saw him at all the family events: birthdays, anniversaries, Jewish holidays. It was always Hanns who gave the toast to the Queen, for ever grateful, he said, for being given refuge from Nazi Germany. Best of all, he liked to tell us children dirty jokes.
What I didn't know was what Hanns and other family members had done during the second world war. It was only at Hanns's funeral in 2006 that I learned that he may have been a Nazi hunter at the end of the war.
As children we had been told not to ask questions. I wasn't sure why. Were their wartime experiences too traumatic to recall? Was it that they felt guilty to have survived when so many of their friends and family didn't? Perhaps their reluctance came from wanting to protect me. After all, which parent wants to pass the memory of their darkest moments to their children? It is one of the gifts of being a parent – to protect, to feel you have handed down a legacy that is free of burden. Perhaps, it was a combination of all of the above. Either way, it was something I was driven to uncover.
I rang the Imperial War Museum in London, requesting information on my great-uncle who had captured the commandant of Auschwitz. The woman on the phone laughed at me. "A German Jew as a British war crimes investigator? It doesn't sound likely."
She was probably right. After all, Hanns had been a prankster, a teller of tall tales. He worked for a bank, he helped stack the chairs at the local synagogue. A war hero? Surely not.
I drove to the Military Intelligence Museum, north of London, and was soon looking at a declassified report on the arrest of Rudolf Höss. And, on the final page, a name: HH Alexander. At the National Archives in Kew, I discovered that Hanns had been assigned as a German-speaking interpreter to the so-called No 1 war crimes investigation team. His first assignment had been to interview the senior officers who ran the camps. They told him about the "selections" – the gassings. They also told him about the commandant of Auschwitz, a certain Rudolf Höss.
Hanns was gripped by a righteous anger. This was the country of his birth and a fate he and his family only narrowly avoided. He was determined to find the commandant. Little did he know that Höss, his most elusive target, had adopted the identity of a sailor, and was hiding in a small agricultural community a few miles from the Danish border in northern Germany.
Soon, Hanns was driving around the countryside, searching for senior Nazis in his spare time, without the permission of his superiors. He had no powers of arrest, no experience or training as a detective, no intelligence or support. Yet, as the months progressed, he adapted to his new, unofficial role, and was soon promoted. The chase for Höss took him to Berlin, Hamburg, Heide, and ultimately Flensburg, near the Danish border. Late in the evening of 11 March 1946, Hanns and a troop of axe-handle-wielding British soldiers – many of them Jewish – arrived at an old barn in the hamlet of Gottrupel. Hanns had found his man.
Following the arrest, Höss was handed to the Americans. It was his testimony at Nuremberg, unprecedented in its candour and detail about the Nazi system of genocide, that changed the momentum of the trial, described by the New York Times as the "crushing climax to the case". The commandant was later hanged by the Polish authorities on a gallows next to the old crematorium in Auschwitz.
At first, the older generations of my family did not understand my obsession with Hanns and Rudolf. "Why would you want to write about all these old stories?" they asked. "And who are you to tell them?" But as the years rolled by, they became more supportive. Hanns's daughter wrote to the British army and secured copies of his war record. A cousin said he had found Hanns's father's Iron Cross from the first world war. Another cousin called to say she had found two boxes of wartime letters in her attic.
As I continued with my research, I recognised that my story was about two men who had both grown up in Germany and whose lives diverged and then intersected in an extraordinary way. I realised I needed to learn more about Höss and his family. What could have led to such evil? How had the Höss family coped with this dark legacy?
Through an Israeli journalist, I tracked down the commandant's grandson, Rainer Höss, who was living near Stuttgart in Germany. I met him shortly after making contact. He showed me extraordinary colour photographs of the Höss family's life, a few yards from the Auschwitz camp: images of Rudolf Höss rowing with his daughters on the Sola river; of his wife having a picnic with a friend in the garden of the Auschwitz villa; another of three of his children smiling happily on a slide. This was Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" captured in stunning Kodachrome.
Rainer, like me, was eager to find out more about his family's history. We travelled together, along with his mother – the commandant's daughter-in-law – to Auschwitz in 2009. It was the first time that members of the Höss family had returned to the camp since 1947. Rainer and his mother appeared overwhelmed by the camp; the electrified barbed-wire fences, the piles of shoes and hair taken from the prisoners, the crematoria. At one point, Rainer turned to me and said, matter-of-factly: "If I knew where my grandfather was buried, I would piss on his grave."
I now understood that the Höss family – like my family, but for very different reasons – have a difficult relationship with their past. They don't talk about the gas chambers or the death camps. They don't talk about Dachau or Sachsenhausen, the camps in which their father worked in the 30s. Nor do they speak about the visits from Heinrich Himmler, or Uncle Heiner as they called him. I discovered, too, that both the Höss and Alexander families have writings linked to their wartime years, but as with their histories, the two families have very different relationships to these texts.
For the Höss family, their text is the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, written while the commandant was held in a Polish prison and since published around the world. But for his descendants today, this family text is shunned. Their story now starts in 1947, after Rudolf was executed in Auschwitz. Their history is a tale of overcoming the harsh winters after the war, survival by stealing coal from passing trains and wrapping their unshod feet with old cloths. Their endurance in the face of a German population who now didn't want to be associated with the Nazi era.
The text for my family, in contrast, is the Alexander Torah, a much-loved 18th-century scroll that has been in the family's possession for more than 200 years and was smuggled out of Berlin just before the war.
Recently, 30 members of my own family met in my parents' house to discuss the future of the Torah, which was in desperate need of restoration. By the end of the meeting, they had agreed to pay for repairs so that the ancient scroll could continue to be used by the family and the synagogue to which they belonged.
At this same meeting, my father invited me to talk about my research. My family's attitude to their own history had shifted. They were now supportive and very enthusiastic.
A few weeks later, a package arrived at my home. It was from Annette, Hanns's daughter. Inside the package were her father's carefully wrapped war medals. She said that she wanted me to have them. She was proud of her father, the roguish soldier, the Jewish avenger, the victim turned hero.
Twitter @thomasharding
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