For years, Rainer Höss was the perfect story: a grandson of the feared Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who had dedicated his life to Holocaust education and reconciliation work.
The trained chef was a regular in television talk shows, wrote a book about his family and even had a Star of David tattooed on his chest alongside the words “Never Forget”.
Now the 55-year-old is accused of being a confidence trickster who used his family notoriety to exploit and steal from elderly Holocaust survivors.
A Jewish journalist in Germany has accused the media of making matters worse by feeding his desire for prominence – and profit.
“The only thing that interests Rainer Höss is Rainer Höss,” said Eldad Beck, Europe correspondent with Israel Hayom. “Giving a man a public stage, as the German media have done for years, is a disgrace.”
Beck admits now he had a major role in building that stage. In 2009 he heard about Rainer Höss for the first time after the latter offered to sell to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial photographs that once belonged to the grandfather he never knew.
Rudolf Höss was an SS functionary who served three years as commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. He was responsible for introducing Zyklon B, allowing the industrialised murder of millions of people in gas chambers.
Höss was executed in 1947, 18 years before his grandson Rainer was born.
Contacted by Beck about his approach to Yad Vashem, Rainer Höss said he had never been to Auschwitz. The two men visited the camp together and Beck, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, wrote about their trip. It was the first time a member of the Nazi’s family had given an interview, starting the “third generation” media career of Rainer Höss.
Soon television chat shows were competing to have him on as a guest, particularly around the time of Holocaust and war anniversaries.
In his media appearances Höss said he was 15 when he learned of his family past and chose to go public because his family “glorified” their dead Nazi relative.
“I saw a shift to the right spreading all over the globe and I noticed how people worldwide were beginning to ignore it all again,” he said in one television appearance.
A second wave of interest came in 2014 when he was symbolically adopted by Eva Mozes Kor, a two-fold survivor: of Auschwitz, and of the experiments of notorious camp doctor Josef Mengele.
Personal debt
Eventually Mozes Kor broke with Höss, claiming he “lies the whole time”.
It wasn’t the only such complaint against him. The Bild tabloid says Höss claimed to have found watercolour paintings by his grandfather in his attic in 2011, and offered to sell it the pictures for €11,000.
Earlier this month, a court found him guilty of defrauding a businessman of €17,000. Höss claimed the money was to finish a Holocaust film but the court heard there was no such film, just €200,000 in personal debt.
While Höss disputes all claims against him, journalist Beck says Höss has clocked up 18 convictions in the last 20 years, 15 alone for fraud.
He is scathing about what he calls the “Rainer Höss Festival” in the German media. Some 75 years on, it indicates to him a worrying shift away from serious Holocaust reportage towards “a certain sensationalism”.
“Rainer Höss is an opportunist of the highest order,” said Beck to the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper. “I think [his] media presence gave him a certain amount of protection from more severe criminal consequences.”
