The commandant and his wife live an idyllic life. They reside in a fairly large house in the countryside with servants. They have a garden and swimming pool. They raise their five children to swear fealty to Adolph Hitler. Rudolph and Hedwig Hoess live adjacent to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where they can hear the near constant screams of prisoners and the railroad cars ferrying Europe’s Jews to its gas chambers. Yet the Hoess family cares nothing about these horrors as they deal with mundane daily routines while Rudolph Hoess is at work.
This story is dramatized in the Oscar-nominated film “The Zone of Interest” directed by Jonathan Glazer. Hoess, who was executed in Poland in 1947 for his crimes against humanity, is depicted as a pen-pushing administrator rather than a raving fanatic. The film avoids directly showing the deaths of any Jews, although it is obvious what is happening beyond the walls of the Hoess home. It is the Holocaust through the eyes of one of its chief perpetrators, a man who, in Mr. Glazer’s rendering, employs coldly bureaucratic language and euphemisms to describe his responsibilities.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Christian Goeschel at the University of Manchester, a specialist in modern German history, discusses the film’s strengths and shortcomings, but also the long-running debate over how best to depict the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust of six million Jews.
“There is almost no reference or explanation whatsoever as to why people like Rudolph Hoess became mass murderers,” Mr. Goeschel said. “The film doesn’t give us any insight into Hoess’ ideology. The film peddles a facile interpretation of Nazi perpetrators which was summarized by the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt when she reported for The New Yorker magazine from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She coined the phrase ’the banality of evil.”
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