Daughter of Auschwitz commander Höss "I don't repress it anymore"
Bruno Bötschi
8.3.2024

The film "The Zone of Interest" reconstructs the life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Malte Herwig was in regular contact with his daughter until her death in 2023. An interview.
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- In the feature film "The Zone of Interest", director Jonathan Glazer reconstructs the life of Rudolf Höss and his family.
- Höss was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May 1940 to November 1943.
- Malte Herwig spoke regularly with Höss' second eldest daughter from 2014. He visited Ingebrigitt Höss several times in Arlington, USA, where she lived until her death last year.
- Herwig spoke to Ingebrigitt Höss about her childhood, her memories of the time when she lived next to the Auschwitz concentration camp and her love for her father, the mass murderer.
- "Together we did a very careful, cautious dance around the dark places in her memory," says Malte Herwig in an interview with blue News.
Malte Herwig, the film "The Zone of Interest" has been showing in Swiss cinemas since last week. How did you feel after seeing the movie?
I was dazed by the coldness and gloom of this movie. But I soaked up every second, watching the actors as if I was standing in the room with them. The sound unfolds a tremendous suction effect, while the images almost only show banal events.
In "The Zone of Interest", director Jonathan Glazer reconstructs the life of Rudolf Höss and his family. Höss was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May 1940 to November 1943. What do you think of the movie?
I was surprised at how authentic everything seems - with only a few exceptions. The movie was not shot in the original house of the Höss family, but in another building nearby. I was in the real house a few years ago and the atmosphere is very well captured. There are so many interesting details and ideas that the movie implements.
Which ones?
The way Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss holds a knife and fork, for example, shows that she is not used to such a bourgeois ambience. Or the crematorium manufacturers at Topf and Sons, who want to sell Rudolf Höss new ovens for the cremation of human bodies. They come across like vacuum cleaner salesmen, the same gestures, the same sales arguments. You could turn Hannah Arendt's famous words around: This is the viciousness of the banal.

In recent years, you spoke regularly with the second eldest daughter of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. You also visited Ingebrigitt Höss in Arlington, USA, where she lived until her death last year. When did you meet Mrs. Höss for the first time?
I visited her in Arlington for the first time in August 2014.
What was your motivation for the conversations and meetings with Mrs. Höss?
I wanted to understand what it felt like to live right on the edge of the "largest human extermination facility of all time", as Rudolf Höss called his work. Did you really not notice anything? How did you interpret what you saw? How did they make sense of it? The most amazing and frightening characteristic of us humans is that we can get used to anything at some point.
Ingebrigitt Höss was six years old when her family moved into the house right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940. What memories did she have of that time?
She remembers the music in the house when her father played the gramophone at the weekend. Of the turquoise waters of the Sola, a tributary of the Vistula, where she and her siblings would watch the frogs. To the beautiful garden.
What kind of person was Ingebrigitt Höss? How would you describe her character?
She was a friendly old lady who spoke an interesting mix of German and English with a strong German accent. She was already ill, but pretty tough, and once declared: "I can't die yet, my children still need me." She hated Donald Trump and loved Prince.
How did your meetings go - and were there any arguments between you and Mrs. Höss?
No arguments, but we had to sort things out: What does her memory say, what do the facts say, how do we bring it together? You can't simply dismiss subjective memories by referring to the facts, but you have to put them into context in order to understand what is going on in such contemporary witnesses.
Did Ingebrigitt Höss change during the time you met her?
We did a very careful, cautious dance together around the dark places in her memory. At the beginning she said what was said in many German families after the war, including the Höss family: Dad had to follow orders, maybe he didn't even know what bad things others were doing in the camp.
That's not true, of course, it's a protective claim that was told to the children and which they probably readily believed, because the reality wouldn't have fit in at all with the loving father they knew. I then read to her, when we already knew each other a little, from the notes that her father had written down in prison before his execution in Poland.
In it, he recounts all the details, including how he himself was present when people were herded into the gas chambers. How these doomed men begged him for mercy for their children. He was not a desk perpetrator, on the contrary: he turned desk cruelty into reality.
She listened to this very attentively and quietly and at some point said: "Thank you, now I've heard enough. Now I know what it was like." And then came the meaningful sentence: "I don't repress it anymore."
In your "Spiegel" essay "The eye is a blind spot", you write about the moment when Ingebrigitt Höss stopped "denying Auschwitz".
There is a lot of repression involved, how could it be otherwise. I have often heard this from both perpetrators and victims. How else are you supposed to live with reality? But the repressed often resurfaces in one form or another. For Ingebrigitt Höss, it was the headaches that plagued her again and again.
There is now a great deal of research on the transgenerational transmission of trauma, which shows that unresolved issues become entrenched over several generations and that children and grandchildren still suffer without knowing what they are suffering from. They don't have a concrete experience to which they can link sadness, feelings of guilt and the like.
I am not a psychologist, but I have found that talking does help. Ingebrigitt Höss and I kept in touch in the last few years before her death and spoke to each other on the phone from time to time. She told me that she couldn't talk to anyone else about her memories of Auschwitz and was happy to talk to me about them.
Basically, do you believe that the Germans knew more about the Holocaust than has been repeatedly claimed?
The question is: what exactly did they know about? Certainly only a few insiders knew about the industrial extermination of human beings in detail. Hence the Nazi bureaucracy's efforts to conceal the true events under a cloak of trivializing terms such as "final solution". It is a particular perversity that the Nazi bureaucrats gave some of the most horrific places in human history such nature-romantic names as Birken-Au or Buchen-Wald.

But no one can tell me that grandma and grandpa didn't notice that their Jewish neighbors were disappearing after they had already been publicly disenfranchised and humiliated for many years. I can show this, without any pretentious apportioning of blame, using the example of my own father, who was told one day as a child that the Jewish dentist was no longer there and that he was now going to another one.
The question is the same one that must be asked after every great misfortune: What questions did the Germans ask at the time - and what answers did they settle for?
The conclusion of your "Spiegel" text: "We look away and in the end tourists come." Do you think the film "The Zone of Interest" will change that?
No. But we can change things by caring more about the people we have to live with. Getting more involved in the lives of others without being judgmental. Being less afraid of change, but looking closely when something changes.