The Traumatic True Story Behind ‘The Zone of Interest’

Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest—a fictionalized study of the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp commandant whose family lived right beside his workplace—is a film about monstrous detachment, willful blindness, and moral rot. It’s apt, then, that The Commandant’s Shadow, a documentary about this true story, tackles similar themes, albeit from the unique perspective of the descendants of both Höss and one of the camp’s survivors. A powerful portrait of the need to face and investigate the past, and also the terrible difficulty of doing so, Daniela Völker’s non-fiction feature (May 29, in theaters) is an overpowering work of excavation and confrontation—as well as a timely and urgent warning about the continuing threat of antisemitism.

Hans Jürgen Höss had a happy upbringing alongside his siblings and his parents Rudolf and Hedwig, and at age 87, he claims that he knew little about what was going on outside the family’s Auschwitz villa, which sat less than 200 yards away from one of the concentration camp’s gas chambers. “As children we thought this was a prison and he was the boss,” he confides in The Commandant’s Shadow, further stating, “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz.” Though he seems sincere, his son Kai, a Christian preacher, cannot fathom his father’s supposed ignorance of the horrific events that took place next door to his home (the crematorium stacks were visible from Hans’ bedroom window) and the backyard garden and pool where the family played and entertained. “That is just mind-blowing when you think about it,” Kai says. To him, it’s clear that his dad is in severe denial. “I don’t think he dealt with anything personally. I can’t imagine it.”

As Kai persuasively surmises, Hans appears to have buried the truth so deep within his subconscious that it barely exists, and he’s perpetuated his obliviousness by avoiding all contact with tales about his father, including Rudolf’s autobiography Commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf wrote that confession while awaiting execution, and passages from it are read in voiceover in The Commandant’s Shadow by Klemens Koehring. Those passages detail his pride at being selected by Heinrich Himmler to construct the camp, and his dedication to overseeing every aspect of its operation first-hand (including being in the gas chambers themselves, with a mask on, during exterminations) because he believed that his work (i.e. saving Germans from their Jewish adversaries) was justified. In both traditional interviews shot against black backdrops (the better to cast him as adrift in darkness), and in conversations with his son Kai, Hans comes across as a man unwilling to grapple with the legacy of his beloved father as, per Kai, “the greatest mass murderer in human history.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.