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Grandson of Infamous Nazi Spends Lifetime Making Amends

(Jerusalem Post) Tal Bashan - I received an invitation from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, to speak on a panel on "Humanity and Barbarism in the Holocaust and in Europe Today." The invitation noted: "The other keynote speaker will be Mr. Rainer Hoss, the grandson of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hoss, who, like you, also has a family connection with Auschwitz." Rudolf Hoss commanded Auschwitz-Birkenau. My 92-year-old mother survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Rainer Hoss, 51, lives in Munich and has made it his life mission to promote Holocaust education and tolerance. At the age of 15, when he found out who his paternal grandfather was, he ran away from home. Rainer's father, Hans-Jurgen Hoss, who was born in 1937, grew up in a large villa near Auschwitz. There are color photographs taken during the war which show the Hoss children frolicking in the garden and swimming in the pool at the villa, with the death camp and crematoria in the background. After the war ended, Rudolf's children - and even his wife - claimed that they did not know what was taking place at the camp. "This is ludicrous, of course, because all of the servants at the house were prisoners from the camp," Rainer explains. Rainer spent hours looking through archival information, and this is how he found out about his grandfather's mistress, Eleanore Hodys. Rainer succeeded in finding some of Hodys' belongings in a storage room in Vienna. "Inside a box, we found gloves with my grandfather's initials on them, uniforms and a ring with his initials on it that was made of gold taken from the teeth of Jewish prisoners. My daughter, who's a dentist, helped me investigate this. It turns out there were 153 grams of gold in the ring. If you consider that the average person had between one and five grams worth of gold fillings in their mouth, quite a lot of Jews died to make that ring."
2016-01-22 00:00:00
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