Hedwig and Rudolf Höss – The Family of Horror Behind "The Zone of Interest"

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz. But he was not alone. Rudolf and Hedwig Höss – a couple who lived a seemingly normal family life directly next to the largest extermination camp in history. While Rudolf Höss organized industrial mass murder, Hedwig Höss enjoyed a privileged life in a house with a garden, servants, and proximity to power. Auschwitz was not an abstract place to her, but part of everyday life. Both benefited from it – both suppressed, justified, and accepted the system.
The film The Zone of Interest (2023), directed by Jonathan Glazer, makes this perpetrator perspective visible. Christian Friedel portrays Rudolf Höss, while Sandra Hüller embodies Hedwig Höss. The film shows no explicit atrocities, but rather their constant presence in the background of a bourgeois domestic life.
This video complements the film with historical statements, witness testimonies, and Rudolf Höss’ own accounts, placing into context what the film deliberately leaves unsaid: responsibility, complicity, and the active role of the family.
How did the Höss family live directly next to Auschwitz? What role did Hedwig Höss play in the everyday life of the perpetrators? Why is separating “the perpetrator” from “the wife” historically false? How accurate is The Zone of Interest in its historical context?
This video makes one thing clear: Auschwitz was not run by men alone. And guilt does not end at the garden fence.

Recommended for viewers of "The Zone of Interest" as well as for anyone interested in perpetrator studies, Nazi history, and the banality of evil.

An excerpt from the three-part TV documentary “Strafsache 4Ks 2/63”:

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