by Geoffrey Churchman

While there have been several movies made about the Nazi concentration camps of World War 2 — the standout being Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List from 20 years ago — this one has a distinctly novel focus as it dwells on the daily life of one of their most notable Commandants, Rudolf Höss, and the personal lives of his family who lived with him.

The Nazis created camps around occupied Europe, but primarily in Germany and Poland, some as penal and slave labour operations, and others that were specifically intended to eliminate deplorables as Hillary Clinton would say, and went about doing that on an industrial scale.

Auschwitz in the Polish town of Oswiecim, about 70 km west of Krakow, was in all three categories as there were three main camps — the original, Auschwitz 1, the extermination camp at Birkenau, Auschwitz 2, built a couple of years later about 3 km away and a slave labour camp: Monowitz or Auschwitz 3 which was created to make synthetic rubber.

Rudolf Höss had a wife and 5 children and they took over a villa near a corner of Auschwitz 1. Frau Höss set about making it as pleasant an abode as she could with an impressive outside garden of flowers and vegetables, a gazebo and even a swimming pool. The result, as it appears in the movie, could easily have had a place in Waikanae’s annual garden trail. However, there is that wall close-by topped with barbed wire.

To supplement what they could enjoy in their garden, the family made excursions to the countryside and the opening scene shows the 7 of them on the shore of a lake (below).

Höss was the first and longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz: from 4 May 1940 to November 1943, and again from 8 May 1944 to 18 January 1945 when the Nazis fled before the Russians arrived.

It’s clear that Höss was highly regarded by the Nazi leadership. A member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Deaths Head Regiments) which ran the concentration camps, initially he was assigned to the Dachau concentration camp in December 1934, north of Munich. After a brief stint in the Waffen-SS during the invasion of Poland, he rejoined the Totenkopfverbande and was given the task of creating Auschwitz around an old Austro-Hungarian (and later Polish) army barracks.

After his capture in 1946 he wrote his memoirs in prison. He also appeared as a witness at the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) trials that year. Allied interrogators found him cooperative and willing to answer everything that was asked of him. The following year he was tried for war crimes in Poland and hung in the grounds of Auschwitz.

The overall picture that emerges from both his biography and his autobiography (which I have a copy of) is of a dedicated functionary who believed all the indoctrination given him by the totalitarian regime and did his best to carry out the leadership’s orders. Nevertheless, although cruel at times he does not come across as monstrous; he saw his role to kill rather than torment victims of the Nazis and wasn’t into torture.

The movie presents the contrast and contradictions between a loving family life (he also had a Polish mistress in the camp, however, which is allocated a scene) and the odious nature of his work. It also appears he was fond of animals, and again there are a couple of scenes to show that. When the Nazi heirachy wanted to transfer him to an Inspektorat post in Oranienburg north of Berlin (which he fought) the rest of the family stayed put.

The movie’s director sought to make the family interactions authentic wth up to 5 cameras without crew present influencing their acting.

The obvious intent of the film is to examine the issue of whether being fully aware of what was happening on the other side of the wall (we hear the sounds from there only) also made the wife and children brutes and neurotics. The Nazis generally made clear that in their ‘Thousand Year Reich’ there would be no place for inferior bloodlines. Nevertheless, Jewish workers the Hösses used seem to have been treated properly. Although the actual house used by the family still stands, it has been a private residence since 1945 and the crew recreated a similar house, even closer to the actual Auschwitz wall.

The general effect is both a subtle and powerful character study, and manages to be disturbing without being too negative and depressing — which is the impact of visiting the two Auschwitz complexes as I discovered myself in 2007. Some ‘creative construction’ was inevitable as it always is, but the director and scriptwriter did a lot of actual archive research to give an authentic portrayal as they could.

I had mixed feelings about the occasional ‘artistic interludes’ of black and red colours, and thermal imaging with sounds, but they don’t last too long.

Nominated for 5 Oscars this year, including Best Picture, The Zone of Interest (105 minutes) is screening at the Shoreline.