WITH its sandpit, slide and paddling pool, plus a team of home helps, Hedwig Höss considered her new home to be “paradise” for her and her five children.
So much so that when her husband Rudolf was transferred to a more important post far away, she refused to leave it, and he went alone.
Life then carried on in her idyllic family home — while just a few yards away on the other side of the mansion’s wall, unspeakable horrors were being perpetrated in Auschwitz concentration camp, where Rudolf Höss oversaw the extermination of between one and two million Jewish people in World War Two.
Now a new film, The Zone Of Interest, by British director Jonathan Glazer, examines the extraordinary and shocking everyday life of Hedwig, her husband and their children in the house next door to the gas chambers.
From their villa they could see the smoke billowing from the chimneys at the camp in occupied Poland, where Höss decided to use a pesticide, Zyklon B, to kill Jewish men, women, children and the elderly. He was brought to justice after the war thanks to a British Nazi-hunting team led by a German Jew.
Sadistic personality
Jonathan, best known for the 2000 Ray Winstone cult hit Sexy Beast and the 2013 Scarlett Johansson sci-fi thriller Under The Skin, wanted to try to understand how anyone could commit such evil acts.
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The Jewish filmmaker said: “I visited the house and the garden, which is not exactly like it was then, but it still exists. And being there, in that space, what struck me was the proximity of it to the camp.
“The house shared a wall with Auschwitz. It was all happening right there, on the other side of that wall.
“And the fact that a man lived there and brought up his family there . . . How do you do that? How black a soul must be.”
Rudolf Höss had an unfathomably sadistic personality.
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Brought up in a strict religious household by his father Franz, a former army officer, Höss served with the German army in the Middle East in World War One, aged just 15.
Even during the 21 years of relative peace between the two world wars, Höss continued to fight. He joined the mercenary paramilitary Freikorps force and was one of the earliest members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
His brutality was revealed to the authorities when he beat a right-wing German schoolteacher to death in 1923, believing he had betrayed a fellow fascist.
He was jailed for ten years but freed after four, thanks to an amnesty.
Höss committed the murder on the orders of Martin Bormann, who later became Hitler’s private secretary.
It was this willingness to follow commands, however gruesome, that led Höss to be selected to work for the SS in Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria in 1934. There he was in the firing squad that shot dead the first wartime conscientious objector to be killed by the Nazis.
At Sachsenhausen concentration camp his sadism included ordering prisoners to stand outside in temperatures down to -26 Celsius. When other inmates tried to help the dying men by taking them to the medical wing, Höss locked its doors and it is believed 145 prisoners died.
In 1940 he was sent to set up and run the Auschwitz camp. The “zone of interest” — interessengebiet in German — was the term used by the SS for the area around this evil conveyor belt of human destruction.
Those prisoners who were chosen to work in the Höss family home had a greater chance of survival. The couple had a cook, teacher, painter, tailor, chauffeur and hairdresser, while their gardener, Stanislaw Dubiel, had been spared execution in the camp by Hedwig.
But he said: “Frau Höss often reminded me about the incident, thus forcing me to be zealous in doing whatever she asked.”
It was even worse for political prisoner Eleonore Hodys, who was made pregnant by heavy drinking Höss and given an abortion in the camp hospital.
Meanwhile, Hedwig had an affair with prisoner Karola Bohnera.
These sexual entanglements formed a key part of the 2014 Martin Amis novel The Zone Of Interest, which inspired Jonathan’s film, but is very different.
The film looks more at the family’s everyday lives having picnics, picking berries, playing in the nearby river and making holiday plans.
Jonathan said: “I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr and Mrs Smith at No 26.”
The film does not show what happened inside Auschwitz. Those horrors were too terrible to recount on film.
But Höss’s own words reveal how cruel and devoid of empathy he was.
Describing the process of administering poison gas to his victims, he said: “It took from three to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.
“We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.”
Höss boasted of perfecting the process of mass killing, saying: “You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour.”
A large mound was created in the family’s garden to obscure most of the camp yet Höss still told his wife some of what was going on.
Even so, when he was transferred to Berlin in 1943, Hedwig refused to join him.
A servant overheard her saying something along the lines of: “They’ll have to drag me out of here — we’re living how we dreamed we would.”
Historian Ian Baxter, who wrote Höss biography The Commandant and visited the villa, told The Sun: “He saw himself as an administrator. He believed wholeheartedly that no one else could perform as well as him in such terrible circumstances. Within just three years of becoming commandant he had turned Auschwitz into the largest mass murder factory in the history of the world.”
When Germany surrendered in 1945, the Höss family fled to near the Danish border, where he changed his name and pretended to be a gardener.
The film does not cover the determined efforts of Nazi hunter Hanns Alexander to bring Höss to justice.
Hanns, whose Jewish family had fled to London from Berlin in 1936, joined the British government’s Number One War Crimes Investigation Team shortly after the war ended.
Höss had evaded capture for almost a year before Hanns discovered where Hedwig was living.
When she refused to reveal her husband’s hiding place, he threatened to send her son to the feared Russian prison camps in Siberia.
Hedwig relented and in March 1946 Hanns led 25 British soldiers to the farm where her husband was living under the false name Franz Lang.
When Höss produced forged papers Hanns told him to hand over his wedding ring, and he replied: “I can’t, it’s been stuck on my finger for years.”
“No problem, I’ll cut it off,” Hanns said before grabbing a kitchen knife. Höss then handed over the ring. Engraved on the inside were the names Rudolf and Hedwig.
At the Nuremberg military tribunal later that year Höss provided key evidence about the organisation of Hitler’s Final Solution, the elimination of all Jews. He admitted: “I commanded Auschwitz until December 4, 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about three million dead.”
The dead included political prisoners and prisoners of war, but it is believed Höss might have exaggerated the numbers, and the concentration camp’s museum itself puts the death toll at “over 1.1million”.
Höss was hanged at Auschwitz by the Polish authorities in 1947.
Nazi hunter Hanns Alexander’s heroics would have been forgotten if it was not for his great-nephew, British-American journalist Thomas Harding, who wrote about them in his 2013 book Hanns And Rudolf.
In 2010 he tracked down the Hösses’ daughter Brigitte to her home in America, where she insisted to him that her father had been “the nicest man in the world” and must have had another side to his personality.
Hedwig died aged 81 in 1989 and Hanns in 2006 aged 89.
With so few people who witnessed the Nazi genocide left to tell their tale, film director Jonathan felt it was important to make sure we never forget.
His movie, which was up for three Golden Globes on Sunday night, including Best Drama, has been named best film by the influential Los Angeles Film Critics Association and has been described as a “masterpiece” by critics.
He said: “We’re talking about arguably one of the worst periods of human history, but we can’t say, ‘Let’s put it away’, or, ‘It’s not us, we’re safe, it was 80 years ago’.
“We can’t think that it doesn’t relate to us any more. It clearly does — and troublingly, it may always.”
- The Zone Of Interest is in cinemas from February 2.
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