The Zone of Interest

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I watched the film The Zone of Interest last night. This is a film about the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss or to be more accurate, his family and their time at the infamous concentration camp.

If you're hoping to see SS men running around murdering innocent people or masses being herded into gas chambers, you're going to be disappointed. If anything, the film is far more chilling than that.

"Nothing happens!"

But that's the whole point; the film was written to show how ordinary these people were and how Höss, his wife and five children lived an idyllic life on the other side of a wall to Auschwitz!

The house they live in is really nice, but the garden is stunning! With a swimming pool, slide, greenhouses, lawns and beautiful flowers. His wife Hedwig is portrayed as being very proud of everything they have in an almost We've worked really hard for this." kind of way, but it becomes apparent that she's not only fully aware of what happens on the other side of the wall but willing to benefit from the misery therein. There is one scene where she receives packages of clothing presumably taken from murdered Jews and spreads them out on a table, instructing the staff, they employ maids, etc., from the local village, to "Help themselves." to what they like while she retires to the bedroom to try out a long mink coat in which she finds a lipstick in one of the pockets and proceeds to coat her lips with it! I was like, "Some woman was wearing that coat earlier and, probably, as most women do, made herself look nice for her arrival off the train with that lipstick."

The two other chilling sequences for me is a scene where you hear, remember, I said you don't really see any of the camp horrors, a commotion going on from inside the camp, Höss demands to know what's going on and a voice says: "He was fighting over an apple." Höss replies: "Drown him in the river!" The man was obviously starving, and yet Höss still had him killed for fighting! The other telling event is a scene where Höss is on the telephone issuing an order that any SS man caught damaging plants will be severely punished. This clearly shows that Höss cared more about plants than human life.

The film doesn't show you what eventually happened to Rudolf Höss. A year after the war, his wife revealed his location to the British. He was handed over to the Polish and, after a trial, hanged at Auschwitz

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The Höss children in the garden of their house next to the concentration camp Auschwitz.

The most chilling fact you can learn about the Nazis is that, on the whole, most of them were not evil or beasts or crazy they were like you and me, perfectly normal.