Hanns alexander biography

Hanns Alexander

Nazi hunter who arrested Rudolf Höss in 1946

Hanns Alexander

Born6 May 1917

Berlin, Germany

Died23 December 2006(2006-12-23) (aged 89)

London, England

NationalityGerman
Known forNazi hunter

Hanns Alexander (6 May 1917 – 23 December 2006) was a German Nazi hunter who tracked down and arrested Gustav Simon, a Nazi Party official, and Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz.[1]

Life

Born in Berlin to father Alfred Alexander and mother Henny Alexander, he grew up with his twin brother Paul in a wealthy household. His father was a prominent physician who counted many well-known actors, artists, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, among his friends and patients.[2] In 1936, after being tipped off that he was on a Gestapo arrest list, Alfred remained in London where he was visiting a daughter, and managed to help the rest of his family emigrate to England via Switzerland.[3]

In September 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, Alexander volunteered for the British A

In search of the executioner

After World War II, German Jew Hanns Alexander, who escaped Nazism and served in the British army, took on the mission of capturing Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. His solitary and tireless efforts had a dramatic end.

Hanns Hermann Alexander was born in Berlin on May 6, 1917, fifteen minutes before his twin brother Paul. His father, Dr. Alfred Alexander, was one of the city's most prominent clinical physicians.

At the time of the birth of his two children, he was serving in a German military hospital in Alsace, where he took his family. In 1918, at the end of the First World War, victorious French Alsatians threatened to vandalize the hospital. Dr. Alexander managed to rescue all the patients in time and, together with the injured, his wife and children, boarded the last train heading to Berlin. He returned to his nice apartment on Kaiser Street. The family residence, where two of the rooms served as a consulting room, occupied the entire second floor of number 1 on that street, one of the most sophisticated addre

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

In 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 plan­ning and imple­ment­ing some of the worst atroc­i­ties the world has ever seen. One of the lead inves­ti­ga­tors was Lieu­tenant Hanns Alexan­der, a Ger­man Jew who had fled Berlin in the 1930s and found refuge in Eng­land. He was now serv­ing in the British army. Rudolf Hoss was one of his most impor­tant and elu­sive tar­gets: as Kom­man­dant of Aus­chwitz, Hӧss over­saw the trans­for­ma­tion of Auschwitz-Birke­nau from an old army bar­racks in Poland to a killing fac­to­ry of unprece­dent­ed effi­cien­cy and bru­tal­i­ty. By the end of the war, 1.1 mil­lion Jews had been killed in the camp, along with 20,000 Gyp­sies and tens of thou­sands of Pol­ish and Russ­ian pris­on­ers. Now Hoss is on the run and Alexan­der and his team are in hot pursuit.

Thomas Hard­

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