A chilling portrait of evil

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An image from “The Zone of Interest” (A24)

Twenty years ago, I was part of the US delegation, led by Vice President Cheney, that commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Russian army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. 

It is difficult to find the words that capture the experience of visiting such a place in the company of a moral giant like Elie Wiesel and the distinguished statesman Congressman Tom Lantos, who was the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress. His wife’s family was saved from death by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Mrs. Lantos sat next to her husband as our van snaked through the Polish countryside drawing ever closer to humanity’s most depraved and shameful exhibit towards the capacity of evil to take shape and form. 

There is a feeling in the air — a malevolence and smoldering evil — that fills the spaces where the giant crematorium and gas chambers once stood at Birkenau. It is a chilling place. 

Auschwitz was a sprawling and interconnected series of slave labor camps that were built up around the main camp, which is remembered today as Auschwitz 1.  This is where the only surviving gas chamber remains at the death camp, as well as scores of barracks, cells and torture chambers where Jews, political prisoners, gays, and other enemies of the state were held, tortured and enslaved. 

Next to the exterior brick wall, topped with barbed wire that marked the boundaries of the camp, stood a large villa, a house, with two cars in the driveway. I remembered being shocked by the incongruence of a family home so close to the camp and was astounded that it remained. This was the moment I first heard the story of the people who once lived in the house, and the woman who called the place a “paradise.”

Her name was Hedwig Höss. She raised five children there with her husband, the commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was executed there in 1947 for crimes against humanity. Höss was responsible for more than one million murders. 

Over the years, I have often thought about that house and the people who lived there. More than anything I have ever experienced, the concept chilled me. I’ve read everything I could about Rudolf Höss and his family, including the stories about what happened to them.  

I knew the story about the German Jews who returned as British soldiers and captured Höss after the war. I knew about his grandson Ranier Höss, who had claimed to dedicate his life to Holocaust remembrance and atoning for crimes committed by his grandparents 17 years before his birth. Proving the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Ranier Höss was exposed as a fraud. He defrauded a businessman of €17,000 for a Holocaust film that he never made. Similarly, I knew the story of Höss’ daughter Brigitte, who spent her life in Washington, DC, working in a fashion boutique for a Jewish woman and her co-owner husband, who escaped Nazi death after Kristallnacht.

When I first heard that a movie would be made about the Höss family and their paradise bordering the wall that marked the boundary of Auschwitz, I was struck by a flood of memories and resolved to see it as soon as it was released. The movie is called “The Zone of Interest,” and is directed by Jonathan Glazer. 

When the audience at the Toronto movie theater where I saw it reached the end it sat in stunned silence. I have never seen any movie like it, ever. There are no words.

Simply, “The Zone of Interest” is the greatest meditation ever made on film about the banality of evil and the capacity of human beings to be indifferent towards cruelty that beggars imagination. 

Some people may say this movie has nothing to do with an American presidential election taking place 79 years after Russian soldiers crashed through the gates and destroyed Hitler’s mad dream, but they would be deeply wrong. How did it come to pass that more than one million people were murdered on one side of a wall where the murderer’s family lived in “paradise” on the other side? How did that happen? 

I have used this platform to write about the subject and bear witness to what I saw, felt and deeply know. The evil that came to pass in Auschwitz first came to pass in an election. The Nazis didn’t run on Auschwitz. In fact, they kept it a secret. Their issue was national greatness, inflation and jobs. It is always important to be able to distinguish between what extremists will say to get power, and what they intend to do with it. 

Before he was executed, Rudolf Höss wrote a letter to his wife. It stands as a permanent monument to delusion, complicity and the lies people are able to tell themselves. 

What does evil look like? It looks like this letter. Can you see it ? Can you feel it ? Evil is real. Extremism that manifests this evil remains with us. These are what the last words look like. It is a view from the abyss, a last look back after everything has happened and there are no longer questions around what will happen. 

April, 1947.

My dear good Mutz!

My path through life is now coming to a close. Fate has worked out a truly sad ending for me. How fortunate were the comrades who were allowed to die an honest soldier's death.

Calmly and composed I look toward the end. From the beginning I was completely clear about the fact that I would perish with the world to which I had pledged myself with all my body and soul when that world was shattered and destroyed. Without realising it, I had become a cog in the terrible German extermination machine. My activities in performing my task were out in the open. Since I was the Kommandant of the extermination camp Auschwitz, I was totally responsible for everything that happened there, whether I knew about it or not. Most of the terrible and horrible things that took place there I learned only during this investigation and during the trial itself. I cannot describe how I was deceived, how my directives were twisted, and all the things they had carried out supposedly under my orders. I certainly hope that the guilty will not escape justice.

It is tragic that, although I was by nature gentle, good natured, and very helpful, I became the greatest destroyer of human beings who carried out every order to exterminate people no matter what. The goal of the many years of rigid S.S. training was to make each S.S. soldier a tool without its own will who would carry out blindly all of Himmler's plans. That is the reason why I also became a blind, obedient robot who carried out every order.

My fanatic patriotism and my most exaggerated sense of duty were good prerequisites for this training.

At the end it is difficult to have to admit to myself that I have chosen a very wrong path and, because of it, I have brought about my own destruction.

But what good does all the weighing and balancing do? Was it right or was it wrong? In my opinion all our paths through life are predestined by fate and a wise providence, and are unchangeable.

Painful, bitter, and heavy hearted is the separation from all of you, from you, dearest best Mutz, and from all of you, my dear good children, and that I have to leave you behind, poor unfortunates, in poverty and misery.

On you, my poor unfortunate wife, destiny has put the heaviest burden of us through our sad fate. For in addition to our unlimited pain of being torn apart, there is the burdensome worry about your future life and the worry about the children. But dearest, be consoled! Don't despair!

Time has a way of healing even the deepest, most serious wounds, which you cannot believe you can survive in the first painful moments. Millions of families have been torn apart or have been destroyed by this wretched war.

But life goes on. The children grow up. I only hope that you, dearest, best Mutz, may be given the strength and health so that you can care for all of them until they all can stand on their own two feet.

My misspent life places on you, dearest, the holy obligation to educate our children so that they have, in their deepest heart, a true humanity. Our dear children are all naturally good natured. Nurture all of these good impulses in their hearts in every way. Make them sensitive to all human sorrow. What humanity is, I have only come to know since I have been in Polish prisons. Although I have inflicted so much destruction and sorrow upon the Polish people as Kommandant of Auschwitz, even though I did not do it personally, or by my own free will, they still showed such human understanding, not only by the higher officials, but also by the common guards, that it often puts me to shame. Many of them were former prisoners in Auschwitz or other camps. Especially now, during my last days, I am experiencing such humane treatment I never could have expected.

In spite of everything that happened, they still treat me as a human being.

My dear good Mutz, I beg you, don't become hardened by the heavy blows fate has dealt us! Keep your good heart for yourself! Don't be led astray by troubles or hardship and misery through which you are forced to endure! Don't lose your faith in humanity.

Try, as soon as possible, to get away from those dreary surroundings.

Start the proceedings to change your name. Take back your maiden name again. Now there should not be any more difficulties about that! My name is now disgraced throughout the whole world, and you, my poor ones, have suffered unnecessary problems time and again because of my name, especially the children, who will be held back from future advancement. Certainly Klaus would have had an apprenticeship long ago if his name had not been Höss. It is for the best that my name disappears with me.

I also received permission to enclose my wedding ring in this letter to you.

With sadness and happiness I think of that time in the spring of our life when we exchanged the rings. Who could have guessed this kind of end of our life together?

Days in the sun were not granted us, but instead there were difficult toils, much sorrow, and worry. Only step by step did we get ahead. How happy we were through our children, whom you, dearest, best Mutz happily bore for us time and again. In our children we saw our life's task. Our constant concern was to create a home as a steady foothold for them, and to raise them to be useful human beings. Time and again during my imprisonment I have gone back over our life together, remembering all the events and happenings, over and over. What happy hours we were allowed to experience, but we also had to suffer a great deal of deprivation, illness, grief, and heartbreak.

I thank you with all my heart, my dear good friend, for all the goodness and beauty you brought into my life, and which you, at all times, shared bravely and faithfully with me, and also for your endless love and care for me. Forgive me, you good woman, if I have ever offended you, or hurt you.

How deeply and painfully I regret every hour that I did not spend with you, dearest and best Mutz, and the children because I believed duty would not allow it, or there were other commitments which I thought were more important. A kind fate has allowed me to hear from you, dear ones. I received all eleven letters dated from December 16 to December 31. How happy I was therefore, especially during the days of the trial, to read your dear lines. Your care and love for me and the dear small talk of the children gave me new courage and strength to withstand everything. I am particularly grateful, my dearest, for the last letter, which you wrote Sunday during the early hours. It was as if you had a premonition that these would be the very last words that reached me. How bravely and clearly you write about everything. But what bitter sorrow, what deep pain can be found between the lines. I do know how intimately both our lives are intertwined, how hard this having to leave one another is.

I wrote to you, my dear good Mutz, at Christmas, on January 26, and on March 3, and March 16, and hope you have received these letters. But how little can be said in writing, and especially under these circumstances.

How much has to be left unsaid, which cannot be done in writing. But we have to make the best of it. I am so grateful that I could learn even a little about you, and that I could still tell you, dearest, essentially what moved me.

All my life I have been a reserved person. I never liked to let anyone look into me, to see what moved me in my innermost soul, and I always settled everything inside myself.

How often have you, dearest, regretted that, and found it painful, that you yourself, who stood nearest me, could be only such a small part in my inner life. And so I dragged with me all my doubts and depressions for many years about whether what I was doing was right or wrong, and whether the harsh orders given to me were necessary. I could not and was not allowed to express my opinions to anyone. You, dearest good Mutz, can now understand why I became more and more reserved, and more and more unapproachable. And you, dearest Mutz, and all of you loved ones, inadvertently had to suffer from that, and could not explain to yourselves my discontent, my absentmindedness, and my often grumpy manner. But that's the way it was; I regret it painfully. During my long and lonely imprisonment I've had enough time on my hands to think exhaustively about my life. I have thoroughly reviewed every aspect of my actions. Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day.

And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in god was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my god. Dearest, I cannot write more about these things. It would just lead to too much.

Should you in your misery, my dear good Mutz, find through the Christian faith strength and consolation, then follow the urge of your heart. Don't be led astray by anything. Also, you don't have to do what I have done. You should make your own decision about your lord. The children will in any case, because of school, walk a different path than the one we have taken. Klaus may later wish to decide for himself, after he has matured, and maybe find his own way.

And so there is only a pile of rubble left from our world from which the survivors have to build a new and better world with great difficulty.

My time has come.

Now it is time to say the final goodbyes to you loved ones, you who were dearest to me in all the world!

How hard and painful this parting is. You, dearest best Mutz, I thank with all my heart once more for all your love and care and for all that you brought into my life! Through our dear and good children I will always be with you, you my poor, unfortunate wife. I leave with confident hope that after all the difficulty and sadness, you, my loved ones, will be allowed to find a small spot on the sunny side of life, and that you will find a modest chance at life and that you, my dear good Mutz, will be accorded through our children a quiet and content happiness.

All my intimate good wishes accompany all of you dear ones on your life's journey to come. I thank with all my heart all of the dear, good people who stood by you in your hour of need and helped you, and I send my best regards.

My last dear greetings go to my parents, to Fritz and to all our dear old friends.

For the last time I send to you loved ones my regards, to you all my dear good children, my Annemäusl, my Burling, my Püppi, my Kindi and my Klaus, and to you, my dearest best Mutz.

Oh you, my poor, unfortunate wife, most, most dear and with a heavy heart.

Keep me in loving remembrance.

Until my last breath, I remain with all my loved ones.

Your Daddy

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Join me tonight on Scripps News for “America Votes 2024.” Live coverage of the Iowa caucuses results, with context, depth and an independent analysis, begins at 8 p.m. ET. I will appear from 9 p.m. ET onwards.

• Coverage anchored by Maritsa Georgiou and Del Walters

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