Hanns Alexander (businessman)

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Hanns Alexander (born May 6, 1917 in Berlin ; † December 23, 2006 in London ) was a German-British businessman . After the end of the Second World War he looked for former Nazi officials . One of his successes was the arrest of Rudolf Höß and Gustav Simon .

Life

Hanns Hermann Alexander was born in May 1917 in Berlin as the fourth child of the doctor Alfred Alexander and his wife Henriette (Henny) Picard. He was the twin brother of Paul Alexander (1917-2003) and came from a respected Jewish family. Alexander grew up in a well-protected and wealthy family. The family lived in a large apartment with 22 rooms on Kaiserallee (today: Bundesallee ) 219/220 on the first floor. The apartment also served as his father's practice. The apartment and the practice were ideally located in the center of the Jewish community in western Berlin.

Hanns Alexander and his brother Paul first attended the Private Forest School Grunewald , a non-denominational school for boys in Grunewald on the western outskirts of Berlin. In July 1933, the two boys had to leave the forest school due to the Nazi laws. From then on they attended a private Jewish school. Due to the increasing restrictions as a result of the Nazi laws, the family left Germany in 1936 and emigrated to England via Switzerland . In July 1939, it was announced in the German Reichs- und Staatsanzeiger that Hanns Alexander, his brother and his parents had been expatriated and had lost their German citizenship . The family's property passed to the German Empire .

With the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, Alexander volunteered for the British Army . After training as a simple soldier, he finally came to the Officier Training Unit at his own insistence in early 1943 and was trained as an officer. After the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Hanns Alexander was deployed in France and Germany .

He was a member of the War Crimes Investigation Team (WCIT) in Belsen and was charged with investigating war crimes as part of the War Crimes Program . He had been used during the interrogation of numerous concentration camp guards and finally urged that the search for Nazi criminals not yet caught should be allowed. In December 1945 he succeeded in tracking down Gustav Simon and in March 1946 the long-time commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp , Rudolf Höß , and taking them prisoner.

Hanns Alexander later lived as a banker and merchant in London. He worked for the SG Warburg & Co. bank for decades .

Hanns Alexander was married to Ann Graetz (1920–2006) since 1946. The two children Annette Alexander (* 1948) and Jackie Alexander (* 1950) emerged from the marriage. He died at the age of 89 years at a pneumonia . His grave is in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden in north London.

The story of his life was told in a double biography by his great-nephew Thomas Harding after his death .

literature

  • Thomas Harding : Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz . Heinemann, London 2013
    • Hanns and Rudolf. The German Jew and the Hunt for the Commander of Auschwitz . Translated from the English by Michael Schwelien. dtv, Munich, 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sara Malm: The Nazi Hunter: Remarkable story of the Jewish refugee responsible for tracking down the Auschwitz commandant who slaughtered 3million people. In: Daily Mail of August 19, 2013 (accessed August 27, 2014).
personal data
SURNAME Alexander, Hanns
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British businessman
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 2006
Place of death London