Her dad was a notorious Nazi who oversaw the murders of more than 1 million Jews — but she remembers him as “the nicest man in the world.”
An 80-year-old woman who spent decades working as a fashionista in Washington D.C. has revealed herself as the daughter of Rudolf Hoess, the infamous designer and commandant of the Auschwitz death camp.
Brigitte Hoess, who’s now battling cancer, gave an interview to the Washington Post on condition that it not publish her married name or any details that could disclose her identity.
She said she’s kept her secret from almost everyone she knows — even including her grandchildren — since she fled Germany in shame during the 1950s and began working as a model for Balenciaga in Spain.
“It was a long time ago,” she said.
“I didn’t do what was done. I never talk about it —- it is something within me. It stays with me.”
Brigitte was tracked down and interviewed by British writer Thomas Harding, whose great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, was a Nazi hunter who captured Rudolf Hoess hiding on a German farm near the Danish border in 1946.
The high-ranking Nazi — who also ran death camps at Dachau and Sachenshuasen — was forced to testify at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, then hanged on a gallows next to the Auschwitz crematorium.
“If somebody asks about my dad, I tell them he died in the war,” said his daughter, who still speaks with a German accent.
According to Harding’s Washington Post report, it took him three years to find Brigitte, who lives on “a leafy side street in northern Virginia,” while researching his upcoming book, “Hanns and Rudolf,” about the capture of Brigitte’s father by his great-uncle, a Jew who fled Germany in the 1930s and became a captain in the British military.