Rudolf Höss - Commandant of Auschwitz Documentary

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who’s here after “Zone of Interest”?

I have watched The Zone of Interest so this video brought it all together. I have visited Auschwitz. I have read Levi and Weisel and I have felt the agony. Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn ... God forgive us all.

Our guide in Auschwitz said he moved his family from Germany to live with him right by the camp and his wife described it as "paradise on Earth". Unbelievable.

I always used to wonder where they found such despicable chaps to carry out such work but the last two years have answered that question.

When I was a young man, in the 80's, I served with the US Army's 11th ACR in West Germany patrolling the Inter-German border. At the time, our command required every one of us who were new to Germany to visit Dachau. Now, Dachau was a work camp, not an extermination camp like Auschwitz was, but it was nevertheless one of the experiences that stuck with me the most in Germany. The docents walked us through the camp, showing us the displays and answering our questions in a dry, factual manner. There was almost no hyperbole in it at all, just a recitation of facts and figures. At the end of the tour, we were allowed to walk around the camp area for about 20 minutes or so, talking among ourselves. When we got back to the gates, the head docent told us, 'I will now ask you a question, but only answer to yourself. What do you think about all this?' He then turned his back and walked back into the 'Arbeit macht Frei' gates and closed them as we got back on the buses. When we got back, we were all taken to the unit day room and watched a video from the Regimental Colonel. In it, he said, "There is real evil in the world. There, just across the border that you'll soon be patrolling, is evil. Those guard towers, those minefields, that barbed wire isn't there to keep NATO out, but to keep the peoples of Eastern Europe in. Those towers aren't even manned by soldiers of the Soviet or DDR or Czechoslovakian armies. They're manned by Internal Security troops. And make no mistake, there are concentration camps in the Soviet Union today. They call them 'gulags'. Our fathers and grandfathers did a legendary job putting an end to Nazism, but the job isn't done yet. That job falls to you."

Wars are great for Psychopaths. It gives them a chance to indulge their pathology without the constraints put upon them by society. I think that describes Höss best.

A few years ago a group of kids from Bandera County,Texas went to visit Bandera's sister city in Poland. The itinerary also included a bit to Auschwitz. I talked to the father of one boy going on the trip. "The visit to this camp may overwhelm your son. Is he prepared to go to such an evil place?". We talked to the boy about the level of atrocities that happened there. When he arrived he realized we weren't joking. He felt it on him like a wet coat. He prayed for those who died and strength to get through the pain the place still possessed. I visited Dachau in 1965. It still had that smell 20 years after it stopped.Dont let things like this happen again. You might be the next guest.

To the authors of this well delivered documentary. My Uncle Herbert Ogden was an officer in the British Army and a Tank Commander. Herbert “Bert” went across at Normandy, fought his way through France as part of the “Pathfinders” to identify German artillery etc for the advancing allied forces. He will not talk about this but he open the gates of Bergen Belsen concentration camp and set free the prisoners. Of all the people I have got to know in life, My Uncle Bert is my real hero. He was kind, loving and a force to be reckoned with if you messed with his daughters. Above all he was a very good man. RIP Uncle Bert and all those who with you set free the people who were left after this awful, dreadful stain on humanity.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” —Primo Levi This is an extraordinarily well done documentary of the “Death Dealer” of Auschwitz. What drives my interest in the horrors of the Holocaust is a need to understand how ordinary men could become killers. I’ve accepted that I’ll probably never fully understand it, but I have a huge appreciation for documentaries like this that offer valuable insights into the perpetrators.

I know his grandson. He was among the first group of people I met after I moved to Germany. The family's known as a "große Nazi Familie." He said that if he could find his grandfather's grave, he would spit on it. For leaving everyone in the family who came after him "such a heavy burden to carry all through their lives."

his grandson Rainer is a righteous man who works against his grandfather's evil & helps the Jewish community

This documentary should be shown to high school history classes. These events should never forgotten or forgiven.

In 1946, young french writer and officer Robert Merle interviewed Höss. The result of his work was printed as " la mort est mon métier" (death is my job). The book can still be purchased nowadays, as part of Merle's work.

Fascinating. Thank you. I read Hoss's memoires and was struck, bizarrely, by how dull he came across. In another life time he would have been running, say, a car factory and I think viewed the concentration camp system in that light. It was a process to him, to be carried out with maximum efficiency. Nothing more. Very scary.

What I find fascinating about Höss is that unlike to for example Amon Göth (who was also in charge of a KZ), he was not a sadist. He didn't enjoy the killing, he didn't embrace it. If anything, he was proud about the efficiency. For him the killing was just a necessity, a job that needed to be done. And that's maybe even more scary than if he was simply a sadist. It shows that it didn't take an evil mastermind to commit such atrocities. He was not a special person. In another universe maybe Höss would have become the manager of a company, or maybe a simple worker. But in this one he became responsible for the killing of over a million people.

I often forget about all the children sent to these camps too. Seeing the pictures of them holding hands with their siblings while walking through the barbed wire pathways is chilling

@59:50 - Hannah Arendt’s words, “The banality of evil” are frightfully incisive. Horror and incomprehensible cruelty becomes as normal as getting up in the morning. Thank you for this well-written documentary. 💛🙏

Frighteningly, Hoss was so banal and simple, the concept that such an individual could be directly responsible for the murder of over one million people is a testament to how vile our species is. Having studied history for decades, I cannot put words to how vile one human can be. It speaks to all of us.

Best definition of evil I've heard is that it is a lack of empathy towards our fellow human beings. Hoss more than ticks that particular box. His autobiography gives us a valuable insight into the holocaust which only someone like him could have written.