- In his post as Commander of Auschwitz, Rudolph was ultimately responsible for the killing of nearly one million Jews and others held in the camp.... In inviting viewers to the perpetrator’s side of the wall, he invites us to reflect on our similarities with these people, to see that we are all capable of such evil....insisting...he was simply following orders.
- The Barbarossa operation was accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign coordinated by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Reich. One of the most notorious pamphlets was Der Untermensch ("The sub-human")
The Real-Life Inspiration Behind The Zone of Interest’s Chilling Holocaust Tale
By Armani Syed January 12, 2024
By Armani Syed January 12, 2024
The Höss villa in southern Poland is an idyllic two-story building with a garden landscaped to perfection. It is also located in the shadows of Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest concentration camp of the Third Reich. The former house of Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss, who served as Camp Commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 to December 1943, shared the home with his wife Hedwig, and their two children. And the building is the locus of the action in Jonathan Glazer’s insidious Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, his first film in the decade since Under the Skin (2013), and the winner of the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
The film, adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name and releasing nationwide in the U.S. on Jan. 12, depicts the domestic bliss of the Höss family, who have built their Eden on genocidal foundations. And it never contrasts this utopia with the victims of the Holocaust on the other side of the wall. Instead, we stay with its perpetrators. The film opens with a family enjoying a lake-side picnic, the sunshine ripe. But in the home setting, we learn that Rudolf (Christian Friedel) is at the forefront of exterminating European Jews. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who chillingly dubs herself “Queen of Auschwitz,” runs a strict household that she places above all else—even her husband. The family tries its best to drown out the sounds of screams, cries, and gunshots, but the atrocities taking place beyond the wall are undeniable, and seep in through the cracks....
Instead, we are offered a detailed and frankly mundane insight into their domestic routine; the children play, the husband and wife reminisce about old memories, and Hedwig dolls herself up with lipstick and clothing taken from Jewish women. We come no closer to knowing these perpetrators, yet their lives don’t appear dramatically different from our own.
“Typically we may think of Nazis and people who commit atrocities as monsters and therefore not us, not humans[…] which actually teaches us nothing,” says Glazer. “It leaves us feeling a very safe distance, imagining that none of us are capable of that.” In inviting viewers to the perpetrator’s side of the wall, he invites us to reflect on our similarities with these people, to see that we are all capable of such evil.
By spending time on this side of the wall, we come to see how effortlessly the Höss couple compartmentalize the material success they’ve built on suffering. “They were ordinary people who managed to separate their brains in such a way that that wasn't troubling them,” says Oddy. “They sort of reveled in the nouveau riche lifestyle that they'd carved out for themselves on the back of this and didn't bat an eyelid.”....
In his post as Commander of Auschwitz, Rudolph was ultimately responsible for the killing of nearly one million Jews and others held in the camp. After the war ended, he lived under a false identity before British intelligence tracked him down and arrested him. Rudolph testified in the Nuremberg Trials—a joint tribunal ordered by France, the Soviet Union, the U.K., and the U.S. between 1945 and 1946—before he was tried in Poland and hanged on April 16, 1947 at the site of his crimes.
Rudolph never admitted guilt for his actions, insisting until the end—in a refrain that became hauntingly familiar as the justification of so many other Nazis—that he was simply following orders.... https://time.com/6554425/the-zone-of-interest-true-story/
Auschwitz Exhibition @auschwitzxhibit
The Barbarossa operation was accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign coordinated by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Reich.
One of the most notorious pamphlets was Der Untermensch ("The sub-human"), published in 1942 by the SS & displayed in @auschwitzxhibit
The Barbarossa operation was accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign coordinated by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Reich.
One of the most notorious pamphlets was Der Untermensch ("The sub-human"), published in 1942 by the SS & displayed in @auschwitzxhibit
