The Zone of Interest is a horror film without the horror.
Based loosely on a Martin Amis novel and directed by Jonathan Glazer of Sexy Beast, The Zone of Interest portrays the idyllic family life of the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss in his home adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
But we, the audience, never see the evil that exists over the cloistered garden wall. It’s only heard and talked about. Like the shark you rarely see in Jaws, its unseen presence only serves to heighten the terror.
Höss and his wife, played by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, are portrayed as a frighteningly normal couple as they create the bubble of a safe and affluent home at the very gates of hell. The “banality of evil”, a phrase coined by the writer Hannah Arendt, has rarely been so devastatingly portrayed.
Every morning, Höss’s children wave their father off to work. His wife asks him to bring home “goodies”, their code for chocolate or diamonds hidden in the discarded clothes of the victims.
A child is drawn by the noise of screaming. We see him peer through the curtain and glimpse his momentary shock before he returns to his toys
In one scene their child is drawn away from his toys by the noise of screaming. We see him peer through the curtain and glimpse his momentary shock before he returns to his game of soldiers.
What happened to these Nazi families? How did those children of the Reich come to terms with the atrocities their parents committed and which they themselves might have witnessed?
This is the question that writers such as Gitta Sereny have sought to answer. For many it was an endless struggle, a mission, to disavow their evil inheritance and the shame of association.
The son of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s chief adjunct, entered the priesthood. His brother described their relationship with their father as merely a “biological accident”. Bormann junior concluded: “Our plans for the world were so wide-reaching, and so terrible, that we can only thank God we lost the war.”
Many chose not to have children in the belief that their blood was cursed. Hermann Göring’s niece and nephew chose to be sterilised to ensure the family name did not continue.
But not all felt the same way. Heinrich Himmler was the chief architect of the Final Solution. His daughter Gudrun was a devout Nazi right through to her death in 2018. She was a leading light of Stille Hilfe, an organization formed to aid former SS members.
Philippe Sands, author of the acclaimed East West Street, sought out the sons of Otto Wächter, governor of Krakow, and Hans Frank, the higher-ranking Nazi governor of Poland. Both of their fathers were ultimately responsible for the death of many of Sand’s relatives.
He relates the struggle of Horst Wächter to reconcile the horrendous facts of his father’s crimes with his “duty as a son to find the good in him”. By contrast, Niklas Frank had only pure hatred for his father. He remembered visiting him before his execution at Nuremberg; afterwards he cherished the photo of his corpse.
Some writers have drawn parallels between the experience of the descendants of Nazis and the trauma and guilt experienced by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
Many in both groups grew up in houses of silence where, for very different reasons, the past was not discussed; the imperative was only to look forward. In Jewish homes that also manifested itself in the impulse to multiply, in part to replace lost relatives.
As a student I travelled to Germany for a conference bringing together descendants of Jewish survivors and descendants of Nazis. In my fantasy I hoped to meet a grandchild of the soldier who killed my own great-grandmother in the Lodz ghetto. But instead we all shared our stories, each one casting a small fragment of light onto the question of where we all came from.
Little is known of what happened to Höss’s own family. He was eventually hunted down by a group of mostly British (and Jewish) soldiers and brought before the Nuremberg trials. In his defence to the charge of murdering three and a half million people in the camps that he oversaw, he argued: "No. Only two and one half million —the rest died from disease and starvation”. Sidebar to Holocaust deniers: the Nazis themselves were not very shy about sharing their proudest achievements.
Like One Life, another recent film starring Anthony Hopkins, The Zone of Interest supplies another piece in a jigsaw that can never be completed. It is a sideways glimpse of a crime so horrifying it can best be brought to light through these unique and individual stories.
Zone of Interest is in cinemas now
