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It was released in Italian cinemas a few days ago The area of interest, among the European films that are receiving the most international awards and nominated for the Oscars for best film, best international film, best director, best sound and best non-original screenplay. The film is an adaptation of the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis, one of the most appreciated contemporary writers in the world, who died in May 2023, and its plot is inspired by the true story of Rudolf Höss, who for three and a half years was the commandant of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Without ruining it plot: The area of interest is set in 1943 in the house where Höss lives together with his wife Hedwig Hensel and their five children. The woman mainly takes care of the garden and vegetable patch, while her children play with the animals and do what all children do. Although Höss’s role as a Nazi officer is an important part of his character, in the film he is portrayed more as a family man. Along with images showing their idyllic family life, the audience hears what happens – but cannot see it – beyond the walls that separate the house from the extermination camp: gunshots, screams, the noise of trains and crematoria. However, the film does not tell what happens to the family at the end of the Second World War.
Höss and his family actually lived in a small house next to Auschwitz, which is located in southwestern Poland, halfway between Krakow and Katowice. From May 1940 to December 1943 Höss was in charge of the concentration camp, where the Nazis are estimated to have killed more than a million people, most of them Jews. In his autobiography, he wrote that “every wish expressed by my wife or children had been fulfilled”: his children “lived a free and unfettered life” while his wife’s garden “was a paradise of flowers”.
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According to historians and people who knew them, both Höss and Hensel were profoundly anti-Semitic. In his autobiography he claimed that his wife knew nothing about what happened in Auschwitz, but as she noted, Smithsonian Magazine seems rather unlikely. The Höss family was one luxury life, and used furs, jewelry, and expensive items confiscated from Jewish people; he also exploited some prisoners for work in the house and in the garden. Stanislaw Dubiel, a Polish man who had worked for them as a gardener, said that Höss had “built a house so spectacular and equipped that his wife said she wanted to ‘live and die’ in it.”
Höss was born on November 25, 1901 in Baden-Baden, in southwestern Germany. He fought during the First World War and then joined some nationalist paramilitary corps. In 1922, after hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler in Munich, he joined the Nazi Party. In 1923 he was sentenced to ten years in prison for the murder of a teacher suspected of having provided information to the French, but he was released five years later thanks to an amnesty. The following year he married Hensel and started a family. Annegret, their youngest daughter, was born in November 1943, when they were already living in Auschwitz.
Between 1934 and 1940 Höss had worked in the concentration camps of Dachau and Sachsenhausen, in what is now Germany, where at the time mostly political dissidents were confined. It was then that he was assigned the task of evaluating the feasibility of a concentration camp in western Poland, in a territory then annexed by Germany. He was thus appointed commander of Auschwitz, which he expanded and transformed into the main Nazi extermination camp, in particular thanks to the use of rooms a gas.
His family lived in the so-called area of interestan area of approximately 40 square kilometers around the camp, administered by the SS (the Nazi paramilitary police) and isolated so that no one could witness the horrors that were being carried out inside the camp.
Richard Baer, Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz in 1944 (Wikimedia Commons)
Amis’ book talks about a Nazi officer who falls in love with the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz, whose character is vaguely inspired by Höss, but has a different name; in the film however this love triangle does not exist. In any case, with his work in Auschwitz Höss earned an excellent reputation among the Nazi hierarchs: as seen in the film, which ends in 1943, he was sent to Berlin to supervise all the operations of the Nazi extermination camps, while the family remained in the area of interest.
In May 1944 he returned to Auschwitz for the so-called “operation Höss”, in which more than 430 thousand Hungarian Jews were killed in the space of 56 days.
Höss was later transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, north of Berlin, this time with his family in tow, who fled to northern Germany towards the end of the Second World War. Hensel and his children hid above an old sugar factory in the village of Sankt Michaelisdonn, northwest of Hamburg; Höss instead went to work as a gardener under the assumed name of Franz Lang in Flensburg, near the Danish border. British intelligence discovered his family in March 1946 and then him. Initially Höss he didn’t admit of being a Nazi commander, but then he was forced to do so because his name and that of his wife were engraved on his wedding ring.
During the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials, which took place between 1945 and 1946 and was probably the most famous trial in history, Höss provided accurate details about the functioning of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the crimes committed there. In a deposition he said among other things that «at least 2.5 million people had been killed and exterminated with gas and in crematoria, while at least another 500 thousand had died from hunger and disease». According to his testimony, this figure included approximately 70-80 percent of the people deported to Auschwitz, including Russian prisoners of war, German Jews and “a large number of citizens (mostly Jews) from the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece and other countries.”
Höss later revised his declarationclaiming that «even Auschwitz had its limits in terms of destructive capacity»: he said that he had never known the total number of actual deaths and that he had no elements to make a precise estimate, which he however quantified at around one million and 130 thousand people.
In May 1946 he was extradited to Poland, where he was tried for murder and finally sentenced to death by hanging. He was killed on April 16, 1947 in Auschwitz. Hensel, however, continued to live in Germany with his five children, until the eldest, Klaus, emigrated to Australia, and the third, Inge-Brigitt (Brigitte), first to Spain and then in the United States. In his autobiography, written after his arrest, Höss described himself as «a gear in the great extermination machine of the Third Reich.”
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