In seventh grade, Kai Höss discovered that his grandfather had overseen the murders of 1.1 million people. Holocaust education, including a visit to a concentration camp, is mandatory in Germany, and his class had just learned about Auschwitz. When he came home from school, Kai asked his mother why they had the same last name as the extermination camp’s infamous commandant, Rudolf Höss. “That’s your grandfather,” she told him. Decades later—now serving as the pastor of the Bible Church of Stuttgart—Kai still grapples with that family legacy, which was brought to the world’s attention once again last year in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
When he was 17, Kai pulled his grandfather’s autobiography Commandant of Auschwitz off his parents’ book shelf and read it. Written at the request of the Polish authorities prior to his execution by hanging on April 2, 1947, Höss painstakingly details how he built the Third Reich’s most effective killing machine, including the gas chambers and the use of Zyklon B. At one point, Höss was gassing and burning 10,000 Jews a day; during “Operation Höss” in 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jews were liquidated in 56 days. Höss’s memoir is a confession.
“When I read that book, it broke my heart,” Kai told me. “It is the perpetrator himself giving witness to what he himself did in great detail. It’s horrific when you read how he describes his work—in such a cold, clinical, calculating way.” He decided that if he ever had the chance “to do good to Jewish people, to say sorry in some way,” he would take it. An opportunity came when filmmaker Daniela Völker asked if he would participate in a documentary examining the intergenerational impact of the Holocaust. The Commandant’s Shadow, released last year, is an extraordinary film.
The documentary follows Kai and his 87-year-old father Hans Jürgen Höss and Maya Lasker-Wallfisch and her mother Anita, who survived Auschwitz by playing the cello as the transport trains were unloaded. Hans, Kai told me, had never read Rudolf’s book, and while ashamed of his family’s legacy, he was in denial about the extent of its horror. Hans is one of the children in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and grew up in the Auschwitz villa. In Rudolf’s final letter to Hans, he writes: “You’ll always be Daddy’s darling.”
“In some ways, he had a very nice childhood,” Kai Höss told me. “They had the house. Rudolf behaved like a normal dad when he was not ‘on duty.’ He remembers an enjoyable, fulfilling childhood. So he was in denial.” Hans was only 9 when Höss, who was working as a gardener under the false name Franz Lang, was tracked down by a Jewish Nazi hunter in 1946. On trial at Nuremberg, Rudolf admitted to all of it—although he characterized himself not as a key mastermind of the death camp system but as a “cog in the machine of the Third Reich” and shifted much of the blame to Hitler and Himmler.
Hans agreed to return to Auschwitz with Kai for the documentary for the first time since childhood. Everyone, Kai said, was in tears. Even with the cameras, the drones, and the film crew crowding the experience, it was brutal. The platform where the sorting took place struck them most. “Left, death; Right, life,” Kai recalled. “Left was little children, the aged, pregnant women. I have four kids. I couldn’t imagine—children being separated from their parents, screaming, in shock. An hour later, murdered. I couldn’t handle it. It was too much.”
Hans, too, was struck dumb by the scale of the horror. After the war, Rudolf’s wife Hedwig both denied the crimes of her husband and insisted that she and the children had been unaware of them, despite being ensconced in a villa staffed by slave labour. The families of other Nazi war criminals changed their names; Hedwig refused, stating firmly that “Höss will remain Höss.” Back in Auschwitz, Hans faced the truth. “He was no longer in denial,” Kai told me. “When he stood in front of the gallows, the place where his own dad was hanged, he said: ‘He got his just punishment for his crimes.’”
Hans still blocks some memories. He cannot recall the human ash that fell like snow or the black smoke belching from the chimneys despite living in the eye of the storm; people in nearby towns reported the stench, the smoke, and the cinder being omnipresent, and it is impossible that Hans did not see and smell it. “He probably suppressed that,” Kai said. “Children do. Children have an amazing capacity to suppress horrible experiences.” Kai has watched The Zone of Interest (which he became aware of after filming for The Commandant’s Shadow was completed) and found it powerful. It is, after all, family history.
Kai says that when Daniela Völker called him four years ago and asked him to take part in the documentary, he agreed on only two conditions. The first was that the Holocaust could not be sugar-coated or downplayed in any way. The second was that he could be open about his Christian faith throughout the film. Völker readily agreed, and Kai’s faith became a largely unremarked on sub-plot that runs throughout the documentary; one of the final scenes shows his father Hans sitting in amongst his congregation, listening to Kai preach.
