I’ve seen a number of WW2 movies over the years one of the more unusual, Europa, Europa, was based on the true story of a Jewish boy whose sister was murdered on Kristallnacht, 1938, and the parents felt it best to leave Germany and go to Poland. The son ends in a Soviet orphanage in the Soviet sector of Poland, and when the Germans invade the Soviet Union, ends up after a long story as an adopted son of a Wehrmacht Captain, who believed that he looked “Aryan” enough that he ended up in a Hitler Youth elite school in Germany. Of course nobody knew he was Jewish in his fight for survival.
The Zone of Interest is also based on a true story, but the British director, Jonathan Glazer, based the screen play loosely on a 2014 book by Martin Amis. Although based on a novel, I would put the movie in the “substantially true” column.
Why?
Because while we don’t know the exact circumstances of the home and family life of Rudolf Höss, the SS commandant who changed the focus of Auschwitz from a camp for political prisoners and POWS (as Dachau was originally), to a murder factory that killed over a million people, primarily Jews.
We do know that the wife, Hedwig, so loved the home the Nazis allowed her and the children to remain after Höss was transferred to Berlin.
The home was built with the perimeter of Auschwitz just meters away. The title comes from the Nazi term of Interessengebiet. They cleared within a certain radius of the camp all Polish civilians. The actual house was built in 1937, and they evicted the Polish owner to allow for the Commandant. Höss actually built a mound with a tall tree to hide a chimney of one of the crematoriums so his children couldn’t see it.
The home shown in the movie was a replica built right near the camp (as the original), as the original was in too poor a condition.
We do know that the family considered this home to be an idyllic existence, with a nearby river where they would picnic.
Hedwig referred to herself as the “Queen of Auschwitz”.
In the movie, a servant is bringing her a full-length fur coat which she tries on. At no time is it mentioned where the coat originated; it is left to the audience to draw their own conclusion.
At no time are we taken through Auschwitz, although the horrors seep through the cracks and the wall in their garden. One hears the distant sounds of commands barked, shots, and the sound of an incoming train.
In one short scene Hedwig threatens a maid, “One word to my husband, and you will become ashes”.
It was also innovative in the way they shot the home scenes. The cameras were discretely placed around the home, and the actors simply carried on “normally” with the script. As one of them quipped, “It was like Big Brother for Nazis”.
It was the goal of Glazer to show the banality of evil. He said in an interview that “we all think of Nazis as monsters, and thank ourselves that we could never be like them”. Here he shows how evil can exist in all of us.
The movie has been nominated for best picture, and you won’t see it in your typical cinema multiplex. I saw it in a neighborhood theater that shows a lot of independent films, and if it is in your city, I can recommend it.
The dialog is in German with English subtitles.
It will never get a broad showing. It is too close to the Covidians-cum-Vax-ers for comfort.
From burning war-zones to quiet hospitals where people were murdered …
A tweet, never banned, from the time (so, acceptable to “community standards” by Lew-somebody, read that it was past time for people to get the shot or be shot. We need to line them up in front of trenches”
This movie is currently showing at the big AMC theater in the mall here, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it being restricted in distribution.
I appreciate the review, but I don’t think I’ll go and see it– I have very little free time, and don’t want to spend what little I have on depressing subjects like this.
Subject coming to a place near you.
Death6
I do remember Sophies Choice which was largely based on William Styron’s work, Styron was a barrel of laughs, had a section about Rudolph Hoss and his wife, the lead character is put in as Hoss’s secretary for a time, in a similar vein is Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s List and Amon Goeth, played with brutal brio by a young Ralph Fiennes, the book gives a little more perspective into his background, before he comes to Krakow,, he was not only a murderous soldier but a smuggler of arms as well into his native Austria,
I find it’s possible to feel a bit of sympathy for the latest crop of Nazi War Criminals. After flying under the radar with the tens of thousands equally guilty for all these years until they are dragged into court with their wheel chairs so that one last class of prosecutors can prove their anti-Nazi bona fides. All while the politicians recapitulate the jurisprudence and suppression of the ’30’s.
Now that all but a handful of the minor functionaries of the Holocaust have succumbed to time, the unfortunate survivors provide an easy target while their attenuated numbers insure that things will not get out of hand and lead to places that present day pols would find uncomfortable. Each of these unfortunate nonagenarians represent thousands of others, equally guilty, that were milling about in plain sight after the war.
Much of this is in service to the great myth that almost no Germans knew what was going on in the camps. As if someone as smart as Wernher von Braun could see the living skeletons building his missiles and launch sites day after day without understanding that something evil was walking among them every day.