Kai Höss was 14 when he learnt that his grandfather, as he puts it, accurately, “killed more people than any other man in human history”.
“I was in a school history lesson and I heard the name ‘Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz’. So I went home and asked my mum, ‘Has that name got anything to do with us?’” Kai, 62, is talking from his home in Stuttgart, near where he grew up. He speaks in a matter-of-fact tone. “And she said, ‘Yes, that’s us.’”
Rudolf was Kai’s paternal grandfather and under his watch more than a million people, mainly Jews, were killed. Rudolf lived with his wife and six children, including Kai’s father, Hans Jürgen, in blissful domesticity mere yards from Auschwitz’s walls — an extraordinary set-up depicted in Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest. That film, based on Martin Amis’s novel, was largely fictional and covered only a handful of years, but The Commandant’s Shadow, a documentary about the Höss family by Daniela Völker, is entirely factual and spans a century. It is all the more devastating for it.
It certainly shows the weirdness of Hans Jürgen’s upbringing. “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz,” the now 90-year-old Hans Jürgen tells a disconcerted Kai as they walk through the home he grew up in. It looks astonishingly similar to the one in Glazer’s film, with its swimming pool and beautiful garden full of flowers lovingly tended to by Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig, who was known as “the Angel of Auschwitz”.
“It freaks me out when you think that just a couple of yards from this joyful life there were people being murdered,” Kai says.
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But the documentary is also about what happened to the family after the war and how Hans Jürgen, his elder sister, Inge-Birgitt, known as Püppi, and Kai processed being descended from a man responsible for the brutal deaths of so many Jews. “My father never denied who his father was but it just wasn’t talked about at all at home. I think maybe he was ashamed,” Kai says.
Rudolf was executed after the war — in Auschwitz — and Hedwig quietly got on with bringing up their children in Germany. She was largely left alone because it would have been impossible for the authorities to go after every person in Germany who had a link to the SS. It’s not clear how Hedwig supported her children, but Hans Jürgen remembers her receiving help from someone in South America, possibly Argentina. More than 300 Nazi fugitives, including Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, fled to Argentina after the war. Before he was executed, Rudolf wrote to Püppi: “You are yet too young to learn the extent of the hard fate dished out to us. But you especially, my dear good girl, are specially obligated to stand at your poor unfortunate mother’s side and with love assist her in every way you can. Surround her with all your childlike love from your heart and show her how much you love her.”
I tell Kai that because many members of my family were killed in Auschwitz (“Oh I’m so sorry, Hadley!” he says, his face crumpling), I thought by now I was relatively hardened to Holocaust stories. Yet there were times when watching the film that I caught myself holding my breath, such as when Hans Jürgen and Kai visit Püppi on the east coast of the US and her house is decorated with photos of their parents.
“[My father] must have been a very strong person to live like this and do what he had to do,” Püppi tells Völker. Does she mean, to kill all those Jewish men, women and children? “I don’t think that way. Look at all the people that they say died in the camp. But all the survivors! Why didn’t they die? [Those Jewish people] are still living and they get money from Germany. So whatever you want to believe, you do.” Püppi died aged 90 shortly after the film was finished. Their two other sisters also lived in Germany and their brother, Klaus, moved to Australia.
Contrary to reports on the internet, Hans Jürgen is still alive and his story is different from his sister’s. He became a car sales manager in Stuttgart. As Kai says, he never denied that Rudolf was in charge of Auschwitz, but for much of his life he told himself that he just signed papers.
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“When I first met him Hans really was in complete denial — to the point that the German cameraman said to me, ‘You’re wasting your time,’” Völker explains. She gave him Rudolf’s autobiography, The Commandant of Auschwitz, which Hans Jürgen claimed to have never read. Rudolf wrote it shortly before he was hanged for his crimes. In it he describes witnessing women and children being murdered and thinking of his own children while watching Jewish children being selected for the gas chambers. We watch Hans Jürgen’s face collapse as he finally accepts, at the age of 89, who his beloved “Daddy” really was.
Reverberations from the Holocaust judder through the Höss family tree. Kai is an evangelical pastor in a nondenominational Bible church in Germany serving American army personnel, and the film shows him sermonising about whether the sins of the father pass down to the son. “I didn’t seek God because I was afraid of God cursing me. But I know when sins are not confessed, when they’re brushed under the rug, that they will eat you and affect your children,” Kai says to me.
He knows this for reasons that aren’t covered in the film: the Höss siblings — Rudolf’s children — fell out with one another over money as adults, and Hans Jürgen and Püppi, so close as children, hadn’t seen one another for decades before being reunited by Völker. Similarly, Hans Jürgen abandoned his children after he and Kai’s mother divorced, and for 30 years Kai had no contact with him. “My dad has always been a man of few words, and I think that was one of the issues in their marriage. He just could not communicate,” Kai says.
Kai reacted to his legacy by turning to Christianity in his twenties. His younger brother, Rainer, took a different path. He has over a dozen criminal convictions, ranging from assault to fraud, many connected to exploiting his family history (selling his grandfather’s photos) and conning Jews. He also claims to have a star of David tattooed on his chest in solidarity with his grandfather’s victims. His story is not in the film because Völker thought it would “overshadow everything”, but Kai is open about the pain his brother causes the already fractured family.
“I went to his last trial where they read out his rap sheet and it was just scary. As he was walking out of the courtroom, I said, ‘Hey brother, what are you doing?’ But he walked straight past me, not even any eye contact. But I’m not condemning him, I know he suffered greatly after my parents’ divorce. I hope he will come to me and say, ‘Kai, I know I was wrong, let’s pray together.’ He’s still my brother.”
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“When I came across Rudolf Höss’s autobiography I was astounded that no one had made a documentary about this family,” Völker says. “It just seemed so obvious.” Except, of course, someone was making a film about the Höss family: Glazer, who had already started The Zone of Interest when Völker approached the Höss family. By coincidence she went to the British producer Danny Cohen, who was working with Glazer. “When I told him about my project his jaw dropped. He said, ‘I’ve spent the past few years dealing with these people in fiction.’” Cohen ended up producing both The Zone of Interest and The Commandant’s Shadow.
“These two projects were produced separately. Yet they speak to each other. In The Zone of Interest we see a child playing, the smoke from Auschwitz’s crematorium visible from his window. In the documentary we see him return as an old man, haunted but curiously pleased to be back in the family home,” Cohen says. Kai quite liked Glazer’s film but when he saw The Commandant’s Shadow he was in tears. “My dad was with me but emotions are more difficult for him,” Kai says.
The way in which Holocaust trauma can be passed down is a significant theme in The Commandant’s Shadow, although not everyone in the film has much time for this kind of talk. “Traumatised? Forget it. Get on with life,” the survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, aged 98 and also in the film, says. She’s a German Jew who was sent to the concentration camp as a teenager but survived by playing cello in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
After surviving the war, Lasker-Wallfisch married a fellow Holocaust survivor and they lived in Britain, where they brought up their children and she worked, successfully, as a cellist. It is a triumphant tale of survival, but in the film her daughter, Maya Jacobs-Wallfisch, 66 and a psychotherapist, weeps over her baby photos, insisting they show a child who was emotionally neglected by her mother.
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“If you have lived through the unbelievable horror that I have lived through, it’s hard to sympathise,” Lasker-Wallfisch says. But Maya grew up in a Britain where no one, including her parents, wanted to talk about the Holocaust and this silence led to her feeling displaced in her native country. In a twist no one would believe in fiction, during the documentary she decides to move to Germany, to the astonishment of her mother.
The film ends with Hans Jürgen and Lasker-Wallfisch, accompanied by their children, meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s home, surrounded by photos of her parents who were killed in the Holocaust. It was the first time Hans Jürgen had met an Auschwitz survivor “and he was shaking with nerves beforehand. But she was so warm and what struck me was how these two people shared the same German cultural heritage. Their parents had gone on holiday to the same places, their fathers had won Iron Crosses in World War One,” Völker says.
Since Kai has started speaking publicly about his hatred for his grandfather’s crimes, he has received a lot of hate mail, calling him a traitor. He is understanding. “It’s hard if you have, say, a grandfather who sugarcoats the Nazi era, and because you love that grandfather you end up leaning into a certain direction. I understand that. But that’s why I loved going to Anita’s house: sitting together, not being antagonistic. That’s the direction we should go in.”
The Commandant’s Shadow is in cinemas from July 12
