Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss in «Zone of Interest»
The popularity of historical dramas in film and television has generated much controversy, as historians disagree with the idea that fictional scenarios are presented as fact and treated as such by audiences who lack the formal training to tell the difference. The Crown, much of which was pure fiction, is an obvious example. But this week another, apparently more insidious, film will hit our cinemas. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, Zone of Interest is loosely based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel of the same name (in fact, it borrows just one line of dialogue); the novel itself was inspired by the private life of Rudolf Hess, during his four years as commandant of Auschwitz, his wife and children.
The film was well received, but raised some concerns about the banality of its portrayal of the Höss family at Auschwitz. Critic Richard Brody argued that «Glazer keeps his hands clean» and said that the film, while moving and compelling, is an extreme example of «Holockitch,» comparing it to Taika Waititi's (terrible) 2019 satire Jojo Rabbit. But how accurate is Glaser's portrayal of the couple?
Hedwig and Rudolf met while Höss was studying to become a farmer and married in 1929, when she was 21. Apparently it was a shotgun wedding. In his thoroughly researched book on Höss, Hans and Rudolf, Thomas Harding describes Hedwig as “a stocky woman with an oval face and a body built for hard work.”
During Höss's tenure at the head of Auschwitz, two and a half million people, by his own admission, died in the camp. He was accused of killing three and a half million people, but he claimed that a million of them died from disease and starvation. It is now accepted that 1.1 million Jews died in the camp. Höss organized the worst genocide in history. However, Glaser's film treads a cautious line, going some way towards humanizing the family and showing that Hedwig has maintained a willful blindness to the camp and her husband's role. As Glaser told this newspaper, “those people could be us.”
It is likely that their five children, the youngest of whom was born in the camp, were shielded from the disgusting reality of their father's life. Harding, however, argues that «while the Höss children may not have noticed the gas chambers, their mother was aware of the massacre taking place on the other side of her garden wall» — and this is certainly true.
He recalls an incident when she heard from an SS officer about the extermination program, which seemed to upset her: but, as Harding points out, she was happy to stay in their villa, although apparently no longer sharing a bedroom with him. In fact, the film's main internal drama is when Höss is ordered to leave Auschwitz and Hedwig sees the comfortable life she has built there under threat.
Höss House in 1988 Photo: Getty
Hess came to power at Auschwitz in 1940, when it was not yet a death camp: this happened after Heydrich and his associates reached the so-called “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. However, murders were common. things in the camp long before that. Hoess settled his family in a bleak suburban villa, which, judging by photographs, was located on a corner of the 16-square-mile camp, a few hundred yards from the death factory itself: the crematoria were visible from the Hoess's second-floor bedroom. Glaser's film carefully recreates this setting, right down to the view of the chimneys. In one sickeningly underrated scene, Hedwig sunbathes in the garden as they spew black smoke into the summer sky.
Hedwig described her life in the villa as «paradise», adding: «I want to live here until the day I die.» There was a beautiful garden (which was her pride and joy) with a swimming pool for the long dusty summer days and cozy bedrooms for the harsh winters. The local countryside was attractive, and the family had picnics in the woods by the river (the locations in Glaser's film are correct) and lived what the children considered a happy, truly idyllic life. Ironically, they created an animal shelter on the territory of the villa.
What did they know? Hedwig and Rudolf with family
But the terrible realities were never far away. The villa was located some distance from the ramp where trainloads of Jews and other “enemies” of the Reich were brought and selected either for work or, more often, to die from gas poisoning; or, later, when the capacity of the gas chambers was insufficient, execution. However, part of the perimeter of the villa was built with an ugly concrete wall to prevent children from seeing the distant chimneys of the crematoriums, and trees were densely planted as an additional barrier. The wall was not something you would want to create a “heaven” around for your children. What did Höss tell his wife about the need for this? Its very existence and her acceptance of it suggest that she knew exactly what was going on beyond her.
She entertained the leading villains of the Reich: Hans Frank, the governor of Poland, Adolf Eichmann, who organized the transport of prisoners to the camp, Dr. Josef Mengele, who experimented on his patients, and the head of the SS Himmler, with whom her children were in prison. «Uncle Heiner» relationship. A frequent visitor was Hedwig's brother, Fritz Hensel, whose brother-in-law gave tours of the camp, proud of the efficiency achieved there.
The idea that he didn't tell his sister anything about what he saw boggles the mind. Fritz Hensel is not shown in Glaser's film, but Hedwig's mother is. She comes to stay and Hedwig proudly displays her new bourgeois lifestyle; however, her mother seems concerned about the proximity of the camp and her daughter's cheerful lack of curiosity and leaves in the middle of the night.
“I want to live here until I die”: Hedwig adored the house in Auschwitz
Indeed, there is plenty of other evidence from people who knew the family (some of them prisoners sent to work in the villa) that Hedwig was as committed a Nazi as her husband. She shared his rampant anti-Semitism and belief in Nazism: she preferred Jehovah's Witnesses as her closest assistants. Her use of prisoners as slaves is further evidence of her complicity, although Harding notes that some whose lives were saved through «work» in the villa called Hedwig the «Angel of Auschwitz».
Gardener Stanislav Dubel was sentenced to execution, but the Hösses intervened to stop it: although Hedwig, he said, constantly reminded him of how her intervention saved him — the implication was that if he did not work hard, he would not let you better luck next time. Lawrence Rees, in his meticulous book Auschwitz, makes clear that Hedwig knew for certain that her husband, and therefore she, had the power of life and death over such prisoners, and reports that she had a “working relationship” with Dubiel.
Rudolf Höss after extradition in 1946 Photo: Getty
Her intervention was because she knew that he was a prisoner in a camp where his death was not a possibility but a probability. Dubiel added that «Frau Höss often told me that all Jews must disappear from the face of the earth and that the time would come even for English Jews.» Glaser's Zone of Interest repeats this interaction with an unnamed maid: Sandra Hüller's Hedwig takes out her anger on the hapless servant, warning her that she knows she is Jewish and could indirectly kill her.
Some of the furniture in the villa was made by prisoners. The house was also full of looted treasures, and Hedwig seemed to benefit personally from their tragedies. She was seen wearing a luxurious fur coat, taken from a cellmate, presumably before her murder; and she had jewels, trinkets and other accessories acquired in this way. Perhaps even more disgustingly, she was seen sorting through the clothes of murdered children in search of something suitable for her own offspring.
The film shows her, with joyful boredom, inviting her friends to collect the loot brought from the camp to her home. Indeed, Hedwig founded a tailoring workshop at Auschwitz, in which 25 female prisoners designed and sewed fashionable clothing for Nazi women. It is clear that she knew about her husband's day job and was immoral enough to reap the benefits of that job; she was completely complicit.
Sandra Hüller in «Zone of Interest» Photo: A24
Hess eventually admitted his deep shame over what he had done and apologized. This repentance was not intended to save his life, and it was not done: he was hanged, quite rightly, at Auschwitz in 1947. No such attempt at atonement came from his wife. British intelligence, according to Rees, tracked her and her children down to a village near Belsen after the war: Hess himself disguised himself as a member of the Kriegsmarine and fled separately to hide on a farm. Hedwig was arrested in March 1946 and, after days of interrogation, told her captors only that her husband was “dead.”
Eventually, her investigators grew impatient. Reece quotes the officer in charge of her interrogation as saying that a train crashed onto the tracks behind her cell. “We then informed Frau Höss that the train was to take her three sons to Siberia unless she told us where her husband was and his aliases. If she hadn't done this, she would have had two minutes to say goodbye to her sons… we left her for about 10 minutes with paper and pencil to write down the information we needed. Luckily, our bluff worked; she wrote down the information and she and her sons were sent home.”
She lived in Stuttgart in the early 1960s. But in 1989 she went to America to visit her daughter and suddenly died there. Her family claimed that her husband refused to talk to her about his work so as not to “point fingers” in the future. Glaser, meanwhile, said that by trying to «humanize» the Hösses, he hoped to make the viewer aware of his or her similarities to the criminals rather than the victims. The viewer must decide — but history, it seems, has already decided quite categorically.
The area of interest is now in cinemas
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