The Zone of Interest: Master of Genocide
*Spoiler Alert* I discuss scenes, themes, and meanings from Johnathon Glazer's film The Zone of Interest. Please be advised before reading if you still need to watch the Oscar-winning foreign film.
"The KL system was a great transformer of values. Its history is a history of these mutations, which normalized extreme violence, torture, and murder. And this history will continue to be written, and it will keep on living, and so will the memory of those who were its witnesses, its perpetrators, and its victims."
THE ZONE OF INTEREST
In an early scene in Johnathon Glazer's Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest, we meet Hedwig Höss, a married 30-something German woman living in a Polish town 70 miles east of Krakow. We see her pulling a mink fur coat out of a crinkled garbage bag. As she goes to try it on, she reaches into a pocket and finds some lipstick. She gleefully sets it aside for further inspection. She marvels at the luxury of the fur coat through a floor-length mirror in the corner of a drab-colored bedroom. After a lifetime of lower-middle-class disappointment and FOMO, Hedwig has finally attained the power and influence she so desperately feels entitled to.
As the camera pans, you hear shrieking cries and sporadic gunfire in the distance, with black smoke drifting East outside Hedwig's bedroom window.
The film's score might be where its most considerable magic lies. It curates emotion and feeling without any human faces portraying them while weaving haunting operatic dread and terror with jagged cuts of calm tranquility and birdsongs—the former stays at odds with the idyllic images displayed on screen throughout the film. Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, the magicians of this magic, recently walked away with the Oscar for Best Sound at the 96th Academy Awards. It was much deserved.
THE COMMANDANT
Hedwig's husband is Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. The man responsible for innumerable deaths, as well as the implementation of the mass extermination of the Jews, and one of the "architects" of the Holocaust. Hedwig's fur coat and lipstick, along with all the furniture in the Höss villa—were stolen from Jews just before they died in the gas chambers a few blocks away from the Höss' front door.
In a scene a few minutes later, you see Rudolf paddling a canoe with his two oldest children down a small, calm river. It's a panoramic scene of tranquility with high mountains and indescribable beauty, typical of central Europe's countryside. Rudolf is shown fly fishing as the children play in the picturesque scene 50 yards away. Something rubs up against Höss' foot. He reaches into the waist-deep water, briefly searching for the culprit, and soon pulls it out and up to the surface for examination. He realizes it's a small human bone. He abruptly exits the water, throwing his fishing pole to the side as he races to get the children out of the Jewish-bone-infested water. The camera flashes to the children crying in a bathtub being scrubbed raw by Hedwig and a Polish prisoner who works in the Höss villa.
A central pillar of a caste system is the belief in purity and pollution, the assumption that the dominant caste is "pure" and must be protected against pollution by the inferior castes, as illustrated in the example in the 1950s Jim Crow South when African Americans were not allowed to use public swimming pools, and the vast majority of white Americans believed that once a black American had entered the water, it was polluted and contaminated. The Nazi's caste system felt the same about Jews even after they had been gassed and their bones and ashes dumped into the Sóla River.
Sometime later, it cuts bluntly and points up at Höss from his waist. His face bares no emotion. He stares blankly into the distant Earth as if he were supervising something irrationally mundane. The camera is transfixed as you slowly start to hear the guttural cries of men, women, and children in various octaves, coming from many directions. Black smoke rises over Höss' head as the cries become weaker and sporadic until the eerie hollow silence eventually returns. We are never shown the victims; we only see Höss and his expressionless face silently carrying out orders to murder innocent men, women, and children. It is a scene that intimately and accurately captures the man who supervised the mass murder of 1.1 million people. As the scene ends, it fades to white, lingering longer than expected, and the delay feels symbolic as it echoes the terror that those on their way inside the gas chamber might have experienced.
LIVING SPACE
Rudolf and Hedwig's ascent into the upper strata of Nazi-SS society is a straightforward love story to National Socialism. As Rudolf tells Hedwig that he has orders to transfer back to Berlin with a promotion, she demands that she and the children stay in their villa at Auschwitz.
HEDWIG:
"They'd have to drag me out of here. You know that. This is our home, Rudolf. We're living how we dreamed we would. Since we were 17. Beyond how we dreamed. Out of the city, finally. Everything we want. On our doorstep. And our children are strong, healthy, and happy. Everything the Fuhrer said about how to live is how we do. Go East. Living space. This is our living space. This is our living space."
LEBENSRAUM & THE VOLK
Hitler's fanatical demand for Lebensraum (living space) and the Nazi Party's entrenched belief in Volksgemeinschaft (the Volk) or a "national community" are both significant pillars of the Nazi Party ideology. Threaded throughout other policies and texts, living space and the Volk appear over and over in the Nazi's quest for an Empire. However, like most National Socialism scripts, Lebensraum was lifted from pre-existing political philosophies. As early as 1901, it had been a geopolitical goal for the Weimar Republic and was an aim of WWI. At its core, Lebensraum is about German territorial expansion in the East and found its most extreme iteration with the Nazi Party during WWII. Attaining this living space was a significant motivation for The Third Reich, and its demand helped initiate World War II. Among their aims was an order to "clear the East" of Untermenschum (subhumans) so new German settlers could take up the land and act out their destiny of racial superiority and agricultural utopia. In many ways, this is what the Höss family was doing at Auschwitz, except for them, the proximity to the mass murder of these "subhumans" and their idealized Nazi utopia converged into one single time and place. For survivors, it is a place defined by untold suffering, loss, dehumanization, and debasement. Still, for a small contingent of others, it is a place of upward mobility, filled with fond memories spent with colleagues and family, and a beacon of national pride.
THE PANTHEON
The Zone of Interest is another vital contribution to understanding the Holocaust through cinema. It joins Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Roman Polanski's The Pianist and James Moll's Oscar-winning documentary The Last Days, among many others. All of which are in the pantheon of Holocaust film history. The Zone of Interest has a unique cinematography style and a vibrant ethos wrapped in a type of modernity unseen before in Holocaust historical films, shadowing the evolution that has occurred in academic consensus since the 1990s. The film's color palette speaks to the distinct dichotomy that governs the movie. Its sets and backgrounds are a concoction that combines Alice In Wonderland, The Hunger Games, and The Handmaid's Tale, weaving effective storytelling tactics from each. However, this story is not fiction or a grandiose dystopian concept created in an author's mind; it's real, and it happened. It happened and was perpetrated with the help of thousands of ordinary people.
The film won the Oscar for Best International Film just yesterday, solidifying it as a much-needed next stone toward remembrance and understanding. Released amid a resurgence in xenophobia, anti-semitism, and far-right fascist ideology in the United States and abroad, its message and delivery offer many lessons. The significant public interest in the (German-language) film also indicates a broad desire from the public to understand this history, sometimes for the first time and from younger generations.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
By Nikolaus Wachsmann
Nikolaus Wachsmann gifts us with a deeply entrenched complete history of the Nazi concentration camps and the KL system as it evolved through the lifespan of The Third Reich. There is no insight too small for Wachsmann, and his writing style employs a patterned cadence that makes the 880-page book incredibly readable.
Rudolf Höss is just one of many aspects Wachmanns presents in his rich and fascinating study of the camps. Auschwitz doesn't play a prominent role until the early war years. Still, Höss is an authoritative figure in the history of the KL system. He did not stumble into the role of mass executioner or, as he called himself, the "master of genocide." His worldview and murderous mentality are a case study in the school of Camp SS and the escalating violence of the Nazi KL system. Born in 1900, Rudolf Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1923 after spending the post-WWI Weimar years among far-right paramilitary groups like the Freikorps, where he forged connections that would later bring him to the gates of the KL and then to the doors of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
KL SYSTEM: MAJOR FIGURES
From its founding in 1933 to its demise in the spring of 1945, the concentration camps, or the KL system, reflected the political priorities that faced the Nazis during World War II. Behind these constantly shifting aims were four notable SS figures: the "father" of the KL system, SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, Auschwitz Commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl Head of the WVHA, and Höss-adversary SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik who was responsible for the death camps; Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka. These four men conceived, conceptualized, developed, implemented, and oversaw the systematic murder of millions of human beings. Two are of higher interest to us for this analysis.
THEODOR EICKE
After falling out of favor with high-level Nazis in the late 1920s, Himmler stripped Eicke of his rank and unceremoniously booted him from the SS, and he was placed in a mental asylum. Typical of Himmler with his SS men, he gave Eicke a second chance and 1933, reinstated him into the SS, promoting him to SS-Oberführer (Senior Colonel). Less than a month later, Himmler appointed Eicke as the Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp. During his early tenure as its second Commandant, he would go on to become the father of the KL system, laying the foundation for what the camps would become at various stages and under different political priorities, as well as what they would devolve into and what the world would eventually see when Allied soldiers liberated them in 1945.
Eicke's vision for the KL system was founded on his belief in the "political soldier." First popularized by the Sturmabteilung (SA) in the Weimar years but co-opted by Himmler and his SS, "political soldiering" had several components, including the hallmark dichotomy of "cordial comradeship" and "decency" coupled with protracted brutality and "harshness" towards their enemies.
Eicke's terror-infused camp dogma influenced the KL system in its early years when it still looked unclear if the camps would survive the turbulent pre-war political waves as Nazis feverishly lunged at power.
Many of Eicke's accomplishments during these formative years in the KL system were still present and evident in the war's final years, becoming increasingly depraved in the war's final months.
RUDOLF HÖSS
The Camp SS school of violence and "political soldiering," taught and formulated by Theodor Eicke, is where Rudolf Höss and other notorious camp Commandants learned how to harness and exert brutality and terror. In April 1934, Höss joined the SS and Eicke's Death's Head Unit assigned and sent to Dachau as a Block Leader. His entrance into the Death's Head Unit would begin a period of rapid promotions for Hoss and a time in which he helped shape the Camp SS and the KL system and would build his legacy at Auschwitz.
There's a scene in The Zone of Interest where Höss is seated at his conference table in his office at Auschwitz. He shares the company of two men, most likely construction managers, who are there to demo the new gas chamber and crematorium plans to an engaged and attentive Höss. The three men are crouched around a small round pedestal table as the two men explain the blueprints and how the mechanics of the destruction procedure would work. Höss had been tasked with implementing the Final Solution in early 1942, but at that time, the method of destruction had not yet been found. Höss and Adolf Eichmann worked together to find such a method. For his part, Eichmann was responsible for the deportation and transport of the Jews Höss would gas on arrival. The two men had similar worldviews and worked in close conjunction in executing the Final Solution. Höss described his feelings at the first trial gassing in Auschwitz:
At the time I did not worry about the killing of the Russian prisoners of war (the victims of these trial gassings); It had been ordered and I had to obey. But I must confess that this gassing had a calming effect on me. After all, in the near future, the mass extermination of Jews had to be started, and neither Eichmann nor I had any clear idea of the way in which the expected masses were to be killed. Now we had discovered the gas and the procedure.
In different environments and in contrasting roles, these two "desk murders" give us two instructive examples of the "banality of evil."
CONCLUSION
It is historically lazy to suggest that the eventual outcomes of World War II were inevitabilities. It is easy to see how difficult each year of the war was and how individual events could have played out differently. By 1944, the concentration camps were in a death spiral, and conditions inside reached their most depraved and deadly. When liberated in April and May of 1945, camp populations had shrunk considerably compared to figures for January 1945. Death marches fleeing eastern camps, disease, and sporadic violent massacres of prisoners contributed significantly to the population decline.
It is also historically lazy (and untrue) to argue that all perpetrators of the Holocaust, both Camp SS and “desk murderers," were evil and sadistic, especially since academic consensus has made it increasingly apparent for the last three decades that very few of those convicted had a psychopathy that supports this. As Christopher Browning did with his pivotal study, Ordinary Men, he presented definitive evidence that concluded that "most" perpetrators were likely to be regular, ordinary people who found their way into mass murder from a variety of means and for varying motivations.
I'm often asked why I am so fascinated and interested in World War II and the Holocaust, and I never have a concise answer. Like the war itself, it's hard to put into words. The scale of the catastrophe and the corrosion of morality within a "civilized" society are certainly at the top of the list. But my curiosity only seems to balloon with each new insight I learn. It often feels like I am building a mental puzzle. Navigating WWII's vastness is constructing a mosaic of a million things: topic by topic, insight by insight, detail by detail, filling in the gaps, and solidifying historical consensus in my mind.
I have read many books in the pantheon of Holocaust historical study, such as Peter Hayes' Why? Explaining the Holocaust, Timothy Synder's Bloodlands and Black Earth, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. And I can confidently tell you that most perpetrators were as ordinary and average as you and me. Just mundane people going about their lives trying to attain greater heights of social currency and material enrichment. Their gradual habituation to violence and mass murder was rarely ever rooted in some deep internal evilness or a morally corrupt pathology. It's because when any system sets out to dehumanize a group, it will always, 100% of the time, end up dehumanizing itself in the process.
An illustrative example of this is the SS-Einstazgruppen (mobile killing squads)—this 3,000 men-strong unit who successfully traversed the East during the "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union, murdering an estimated 1.5 million Jews. The method of murder for these killing squads was a bullet in the nape of the neck. A murderous forty-six-year-old SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jecklen invented the Sardinenpackung (Sardine packing) killing technique. A significant difference between the Einstazgruppen and the KL camps was mobility. The killing squads went to their victims; the KL system made the victims come to them, which removed civilian witnesses to the massacres and created a level of secrecy needed to exterminate tens of thousands of human beings. The death camps also contributed to the evolution of the destruction process when they made an elaborate deception plan to fool the frightened victims. This blueprint was used at the ramp in Birkenau throughout the destruction of the Jews.
A significant inflection point in the mass murder was when Himmler ordered his men to devise a less psychologically damaging murder method. As the Einstazgruppen murdered innocent men, women, and children day after day throughout the East, it became more difficult for the perpetrators. Killing children was most distinctly tricky, and many soldiers had mental breakdowns and abused alcohol, often drunk while carrying out their orders. Himmler's order to find a killing method that would allow his SS to carry out the Final Solution but that wouldn't tarnish their "decency" and "honor" was found in gassing. Using prussic gas chambers proved to be what Himmler had hoped for, as it created more distance between those being destroyed and the perpetrators doing the destruction. By taking the killing out of the hands of his SS and putting it into a systematic process of steps, often executed by victims themselves, this method provided an illusory sense of detachment from the killing. This evolution in the Nazi killing method eventually led to greater levels of destruction, disease, and death throughout the KL system. When you dehumanize, you are dehumanized in the process, no matter the distance to the killing or the method in which you kill.
Photographs of Höss at Auschwitz after gassing began do not show him as an unhappy man. Aside from the mass extermination in the gas chambers, it did not appear incongruous to Höss as he lived with his family in ease and comfort that tens of thousands of human beings, whom he had complete control had insufficient potable water, were dying of starvation, slept on straw, and boards covered with lice and suffered excruciating physical pain at the hands of unscrupulous Nazis. Not one shred of evidence exists demonstrating that Höss attempted to alleviate any of the demonic conditions perpetrated at Auschwitz.
The banality of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators and the ease with which they were habituated to enact violence is, in my opinion, the most significant takeaways that help explain the Shoah—essential lessons for today as new genocides are taking place against new victims and are being committed by new perpetrators.
In the years after the war, Hedwig Höss immigrated to the United States and died at 93. The Höss children, who spent their childhood living in the gates of hell, have contrasting views of their father and their time in Auschwitz. Inge-Brigitt, the oldest daughter of the Commandant, never read her father's memoir, saying it did not interest her and that "the Nazis always get a bad press." Höss' grandson, Rainer, presented himself as a researcher determined to expose his grandfather's crimes. However, he has been accused of trading on his name and defrauding the families of Holocaust victims for financial gain. Rainer has reportedly been criminally convicted 13 times, most recently for fraud in August 2020.
Hoss reminisced about his family's time at Auschwitz, saying,
"My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife and children expressed was granted to them. The children could live free and untrampled life. My wife's garden was a paradise of flowers. The prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children, and thus attracting their attention.
Four days before his execution, Höss wrote,
"My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
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