Paradise in Hell: Inside the life of the commandant of Auschwitz

Thoughts on the film 'The Zone of Interest'

The Zone of Interest was recommended to me by so many people that my curiosity got the better of me, and I watched it in the cinema earlier this week. Jonathan Glazer’s film is based on a novel of the same title by Martin Amis and tells the story of how Rudolf Höß, commandant of Auschwitz, lived in a house right next to the concentration camp with his wife and five children. His is the story of a man who was able to run a camp in which, even by his own reckoning, over 1.1 million people were murdered while raising a young family in immediate proximity to the site of such horrors.

For 105 minutes, Glazer relentlessly exposes his audience to the intense contrast between the superficially ordinary lives of the Höß family and the idea that hundreds of thousands of other lives are brutally exploited and destroyed under Rudolf’s leadership next door. We see the Höß children play in their walled garden to a soundtrack of dog barking, bellowed orders and the piercing screams of Nazi Germany’s victims. But we also see these horrors penetrating the family idyll despite the high walls. At one point, the commandant tells his children to get out of the river where they had been swimming because he finds human remains in the water. 

Glazer allows one utterly disturbing sequence after another to take effect on his viewers without interfering or offering any commentary. The scenes take their time to unfold, in no rush to tell a story. The effect is a fly-on-the-wall feel that is as slow in pace as it is uncomfortable to observe. On occasion, blank, block-colour screens, thermal night vision effects and abstract sounds are inserted, presumably to reinforce the emotional disquiet caused by the jarring juxtaposition of banality and evil – though I personally found that a distracting and unnecessary imposition that broke up immersion and gave the whole film a somewhat surreal feel. 

Four of Rudolf Höß’s children in the garden of their house outside Auschwitz concentration camp.

Of course there is a moral case for reminding viewers of a holocaust film that they are watching a fictional re-imagining of real events. When filmmakers impose their presence onto their creation by showing viewers something they wouldn’t see in real life, say, a bright red screen for 30 seconds or so, they deliberately tear their audience out and remind them that what they are watching isn’t real. But that can easily backfire when the historical events depicted seem themselves so bizarre that many people, willfully or not, doubt their truth already. 

One of the people who’d recommended The Zone of Interest to me said that she’d found the film incredibly impactful before adding hastily: ‘But as a historian of Germany, you’re probably going to tell me that they overdid it all a bit. I mean, you could actually hear the sounds of Auschwitz from the family’s garden. And you could see the chimneys of the crematoria from their bedroom window. Those bits are probably exaggerated. The father wouldn’t have brought his family this close to a site of mass murder and his wife wouldn’t have wanted to stay there, would she?’ The BBC History Extra Magazine picked this doubt up, too, publishing an article to answer its readers’ question: ‘Did Rudolf Höss really live next door to Auschwitz?’

The answer is ‘yes’. Of course the film isn’t a documentary. It had to invent dialogue, imagine and recreate aspects of the Höß residence, script events in the family’s life and so on. But Glazer, a descendant of eastern European Jews, took his historical subject matter seriously, conducting extensive research and trying to recreate many real people, objects and events in the film. His Rudolf Höß is based on a real historical person, who was commandant of Auschwitz and who indeed lived with his wife Hedwig, who repeatedly referred to their home as ‘paradise’, and their five children right next to the camp – Auschwitz I, to be precise, the original camp, rather than its extension Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which is perhaps the better known concentration and extermination camp as it was where much of the so-called ‘Final Solution’ was carried out. 

Glazer’s Höß is a dispassionate administrator. And indeed there was little sign that the real Höß ever considered the morality of the task assigned to him one way or the other. When he was told in the summer of 1941 that Adolf Hitler had ordered the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ and that he was to facilitate this at KL Auschwitz of which he had been the commandant since May 1940, he immediately and systematically oversaw the expansion of the camp. Adolf Eichmann, a key organiser of the holocaust, visited him there to tell him that the number of Jewish victims to be murdered would be vast and that he was to use gas because shootings would be too expensive and too mentally taxing on SS personnel.

It is also true that the Höß home had a direct view of the crematorium and gas chamber of the camp. Any visitor to Auschwitz Museum and Memorial can see that for themselves. Standing in front of the building that housed the crematorium today, you can see the windows of the house (now a private residence).