The first shock delivered by this engrossing documentary is probably the queasy jolt of recognition. Hans Jürgen Höss, the now elderly son of the Nazi Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (who was executed in 1947), is taken to see his childhood home: the wartime house with its “paradise flower garden” just next to the camp, where the Höss family lived their grotesquely placid and innocent existence, all unaware – or so they said – of what was going on just over the wall. This is the house and garden re-created in detailed replica not far from the original site by film-maker Jonathan Glazer and production designer Chris Oddy for the chilling, Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest; for those who have seen that film there is a bizarre, intestinal shock in seeing the house again, like a satanic sequel.
But this documentary is also interesting in its suggestions that their eerie obliviousness was part of a larger postwar position chosen by many Germans to minimise guilt-by-association and that this dysfunctional blindness, though a brilliant metaphor in the film, may not have been the exact literal truth, even for the children. No one here is asked if they’ve seen The Zone of Interest, incidentally, but the phrase is used a couple of times in the introductory titles and the film undoubtedly casts its own shadow.
