Rudolf Höss was a war criminal complicit in the Holocaust. And also a figure today’s corporate world might appreciate. What can his character teach us about today’s society?
Today, we’ll examine one peculiar figure from world history whose fate might prompt us to reflect on our own role in shaping the world we live in.
Rudolf Höss was the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. A meticulous, conscientious, hardworking, and efficient individual, he would undoubtedly be snapped up by today’s corporate sharks. But he was also born in the wrong era, and so he ended his life as a war criminal, hanged for his crimes.
Life and Death
Born on November 25, 1901, in Baden-Baden to a strict Catholic family, his father, Franz Xaver Höss, demanded strict obedience rooted in his religious convictions and former military experience. Rudolf was raised to obey orders from his elders and superiors unconditionally—something that, as it turned out much later, would define both his rise and fall in life.
In 1922, Höss left the Catholic Church and shortly afterward joined the NSDAP. In 1934, Himmler persuaded him to join the SS. He became a member and was later assigned to the Dachau concentration camp. Initially serving as an ordinary guard, he later became a block leader. In 1938, he attained the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer and was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he served as the adjutant to the camp commander and later as the camp leader. On May 4, 1940, Heinrich Himmler officially appointed Höss as the commander of the newly established Auschwitz camp, where he was tasked with overseeing its construction.
Höss served as the camp’s chief commander until November 1943, when the camps at Birkenau and Monowitz became independent units with their own commanders. Höss himself, from December 1, 1943, became the head of Department DI at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, a position he held until May 1945. However, in May 1944, he returned to Auschwitz, primarily to assist with the extermination of approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews during the operation named after him—Aktion Höss.
After the war, Höss hid under a false identity in Germany but was captured by the British on March 11, 1946. During the Nuremberg Trials, he was one of the few commanders who did not deny guilt and willingly testified. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death and hanged on April 16, 1947, at a symbolic location—the gallows near Crematorium I in Auschwitz, a place he had so meticulously helped construct.
Film Representation
If I were writing a review, I might say the film offers a captivating microcosm of a family with five children, a mother beautifying the garden, and a father who takes his children on boat rides and reads them bedtime stories. A father who also happens to be a successful manager, workaholic, diligent employee of the largest machinery of evil humanity has ever known—the Holocaust.
I might also mention that, despite being a realistic portrayal of fragments of Rudolf Höss’s life as Auschwitz’s commander, the film Zone of Interest doesn’t show a single prisoner, act of violence, or suffering. There are no atrocities typically depicted in films on similar themes. The entire film stays outside the walls of the death factory, focusing instead on the space in front—where Höss lived, kept a garden, and where his children played in a small pool.
If I were writing a review, I might note that in this film, inhumanity is hidden and implied. Occasionally, you hear distant noises, the thud of footsteps, a muffled gunshot, or a scream—subtle details that, contrasted with our knowledge of the atrocities committed within Auschwitz’s walls, create a suffocating tension, an unbearable atmosphere. The banality of the era, the everydayness of evil, genocide as a purely logistical process managing “cargo,” and Nazism as a version of the modern corporation with efficient managers who are merely cogs in the system, dutifully performing their jobs. All of this resonates with the mechanical precision and detachment of cleaning crews who, decades later, vacuum and polish the exhibits in Auschwitz daily.
I could write all of that. And in the meantime, you could watch the trailer for the film:
But none of it would capture the feeling you might leave the film with, as I did—a chilling unease at the routine so familiar from our jobs, from the repetitive moments of our daily lives that, by sheer coincidence, take place in happier times. An unsettling awareness of how we often fail to notice the larger, more significant contexts of the history being written around us, to which we contribute through our indifference and self-absorption.
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