BY ROGER WATSON
I only recently came across The Zone of Interest, released in 2023 to critical acclaim and solid box office returns. With its limited UK cinema release, I might have missed it entirely if not for Cathay Pacific’s in-flight entertainment system.
Filmed in German with English subtitles, the movie explores the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. Although it shares a title with Martin Amis’s novel— which I haven’t read—its connection to the book is reportedly minimal. While Amis’s novel is fictional, director Jonathan Glazer spent two years researching real historical figures to create a film grounded in disturbing reality.
The focus is on Höss’s family life in an idyllic home next to the Auschwitz camp. He has direct access to the facility from his garden. The film is profoundly unsettling—not through graphic violence, but through implication. We never see prisoners, trains, or gas chambers. One powerful scene shows a guard watching new arrivals, with screams and gunfire echoing off-screen.
Most of the film unfolds in the house and garden. Frau Höss tends a lush garden, their children play, servants cater to their needs, and prisoners (non-Jewish) maintain the grounds. Gunshots ring out in the distance, and smoke continuously pours from the camp’s chimneys. Those outside the wall of the camp seem inured to the visual and auditory backdrop. In one scene, Frau Höss and her servants sift through clothes taken from victims.
Höss is portrayed as both a devoted family man and a committed Nazi. These identities, disturbingly, coexist. He’s considered an exemplary officer and is promoted to oversee the Final Solution on a larger scale. When sent to Berlin, he dreads telling his wife—who reacts with dismay. It’s claimed she initially knew nothing of the atrocities, only learning of them in 1942. Her reaction remains unknown.
During his absence, her mother visits but eventually leaves—the smoke from the crematoria is too much. In an earlier scene, while the family swims in a nearby river, they encounter incinerated body parts. Höss gives those responsible a piece of his mind and, presumably, the children never swim there again.
A subplot hints at Höss engaging in affairs, possibly part of the regime’s eugenics program. We also see him attending meetings, issuing orders, and being praised by Nazi leadership. Before returning home, he falls ill with unexplained gastric issues.
With his work in Berlin finished, he is due to return to his family at Auschwitz. He absents himself from a lavish party to phone his wife. Having gazed, deep in thought, over a balcony at the party below he reveals to his wife, who can sense something is bothering him, that he was trying to work out how he could gas them all. In the final scene, he descends into a dark stairwell, retching—a possible, if ambiguous, sign of guilt and, possibly, the darkness in his soul.
Just prior to the final scene we are taken to modern-day shots of Auschwitz, now a site of remembrance, in the early morning while it is being prepared for the day’s visitors. A reminder that this crime against humanity will not be forgotten.
Before his execution by the Polish authorities, Höss made a full confession and expressed remorse, detailing staggering numbers of victims ‘processed’ at Auschwitz. Accused of killing 2.5 million Jews, he admitted to 1.5 million claiming that the capacity at Auschwitz had its ‘limits’.
The confessions were published, at the request of the Poles as his memoirs and titled: Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. While not, I imagine, the best bedtime reading, it remains a powerful rebuttal to Holocaust deniers.
While I’m not a proponent of the death penalty, it clearly focused his mind—and perhaps spurred his repentance. In his own words:
I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity… I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done.”
The term “zone of interest” has entered modern parlance as a chilling euphemism for those involved in the Final Solution. Ironically, it is now being used to describe Israeli actions in Gaza.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.