Descendants of Auschwitz survivors and its commandant inform of trauma

Descendants of the man who presided over the most notorious Nazi death camp meet with a survivor and her daughter to discuss their trauma in a shocking new documentary on the family of Auschwitz’s mastermind.

Hans Jürgen Höss, 87, delivers perhaps one of the most bewildering lines ever captured on film in the upcoming documentary ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ when he says without a hint of irony: ‘I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz.’

He is the son of Rudolf Höss, the infamous Auschwitz commandant responsible for the murder of some 1.1 million innocent victims amid the Nazi Holocaust. 

The documentary reveals how he spent his summers as a child playing in the grounds of the family villa – from which the chimneys of the death camp’s crematorium are visible – completely oblivious to the crimes against humanity his father was orchestrating mere yards away. 

It also sees him and his son Kai Höss, who only learned the identity of his grandfather in a school classroom, touring Auschwitz before meeting Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – a woman who survived the camp by playing the cello for guards – and her daughter Maya.

Director of the Commandant’s Shadow, Daniela Volker, said that when she first met Hans Jürgen, the elderly man was still living in denial.

He had spent a lifetime trying to repress the reality of what had transpired on his father’s orders just a stone’s throw away from where he played in the garden as a kid.

But after being pushed to read the first few pages of his father’s autobiography, ‘a lifetime of denial came crashing down’, she said.

Over the course of the film, the audience follows Hans Jürgen’s journey of acceptance as he walks the grounds of Auschwitz and stands inside the death camp’s crematorium alongside son Kai.

The pair are then is introduced to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – a woman who survived the camp by playing the cello for guards – and her daughter Maya, in a truly surreal meeting. 

Anita aims a few digs at Hans Jürgen, but the group generally treat one another with respect and kindness as they discuss the threat of history repeating itself.

‘It could happen again,’ Anita tells them, ‘because we humans behave atrociously badly.’ 

Maya recalls how her mother, who witnessed firsthand the darkest side of humanity in the camp, was so hardened by her experiences that she became a brutally cold and emotionally distant parent.

‘I was brought up with messages like, ”You’re not going to the gas chamber, you’re not starving. You’ve had a piece of bread. What’s your problem?”,’ Maya said.

A stoic Anita meanwhile acknowledges stoically: ‘I am the wrong mother for my daughter… Traumatised? Forget it. Get on with life.’ 

Kai, now a pastor from Renningen, Germany, grew up in Ludwigsburg not knowing of the murderous sins of his grandfather until one fateful day in school.

Today, he says he has been left with inherited guilt over his grandfather’s evil actions, and is cursed by his family’s attempt to avoid the subject for years – something he attempted to rectify by agreeing to participate in the documentary with his father after the pair had not spoken for three decades.

‘It was in sixth or seventh grade,’ when he learned the truth about his family, Kai recalled. ‘The Holocaust was a topic in class, and the name Höss came up. I went home and asked, ‘Mum, is that us?’

‘She said, ”yes, that’s us. Rudolf Höss is your grandfather”,’ he told Germany’s FOCUS magazine.

To his horror, this confirmed to him that he was indeed the mass-murderer’s fourth child with wife Hedwig Hensel.

Höss was the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp from May 4, 1940 to November 1943, and again from May 8 1944 to January 18, 1945.

He lived in a house on the grounds of the camp with his wife and family, and their life is depicted in Martin Amis’s novel ‘The Zone of Interest’ which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by the same name in 2023.

During that time, Höss tested and perfected methods to accelerate Adolf Hitler’s ‘final solution’ – the dictator’s plan to exterminate Nazi-occupied Europe’s Jewish population – including introducing the use of Zyklon B into gas chambers.

As a result, more than a million people were killed at the camp as part of what later became known as the Nazi Holocaust. In total, Nazi Germany killed an estimated 17 million people on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation, including six million Jews.

‘My dad and I never talked about it at home,’ Kai says in the film. 

‘It was never denied, but we just kept it quiet. But still it has very negative effects.

‘And that’s what happens when terrible things are not talked about and you don’t work through these things, and you just somehow try to pretend it didn’t happen.’ 

After the war, in 1947, Rudolf Höss was tracked down and captured by Nazi hunter Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled to England in 1936.

Höss was ultimately sentenced to death in Poland, and was hanged that same year at Auschwitz – 15 years before Kai was born.

‘I was born in 1962, so when I was young, Höss was no longer a big topic in public,’ Kai told Germany’s FOCUS magazine.

‘But when I was 16, I read my grandfather’s biographical notes, which he had written in prison. The book was on my parents’ bookshelf. I was shocked. My grandfather was the greatest mass murderer of all time.’

After this discovery, he said, ‘I just wanted to get away.’

After leaving school, he trained to be a chef in Stuttgart before going on to join the German army. He was stationed in England for a time.

But his desire to escape his family history led him to Macau, Singapore, Thailand, Bali, China, Egypt and Dubai as part a career in the luxury hotel industry.

Although he lived a life of booze, women and high-end clubs, inside he was completely broken.

‘I was an arrogant, self-absorbed 28-year-old with a Rolex on my arm. Upscale nightclubs, double gin and tonics, parties, girls, bodybuilding, six-packs – that was my thing. But inside, I was broken,’ he told the magazine.

Kai’s turning point came after a near-death experience following tonsil surgery in Singapore. He lost so much blood, he almost died.

In hospital, he stumbled upon a Gideon Bible: ‘Faith saved me,’ he said, adding that he recognised himself in the story of King David.

‘I was an unscrupulous manager. Everything revolved around performance, success and profit. The end justified the means,’ he said.

But after meeting a Christian community in Singapore, he found solace and purpose and by Easter 1989, he had decided to follow Jesus, leaving behind his wild life of extravagance and eventually return to Germany with his wife and daughters.

Kai Höss returned to his homeland in 2000, where he now serves as a pastor.

But the family of Hans-Jürgen Höss had kept the truth hidden for years.

Hans-Jürgen was the fourth of five children shared by Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who he married on August 17, 1929.

Rudolf Höss and Hedwig famously lived in a villa on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau as he oversaw the camp and fine-tuned the horrific methods used by the Nazis to kill more than a million people during the Second World War.

Although Hans-Jürgen grew up in the villa, with the camp’s crematorium visible from their garden, he grew up ashamed of his father’s actions.

He hid the identity of his father from his wife (Kai’s mother) when they first met.

Hans-Jürgen’s wife eventually found out the truth from an aunt who had seen a newspaper report about Rudolf Höss’s execution in 1947.

As a result, Kai Höss’s childhood was marked by silence and repression, and this avoidance put enormous strain on his parents’ marriage, he said.

Today Höss still has his own vivid memories of his grandmother, Hedwig. She was a stern, disciplined woman who maintained strict order, he told FOCUS.

‘She was tough but also loving with her children’ said Höss.

Hedwig, deeply embedded in Nazi ideology, showed no remorse for her husband’s actions, believing that they ‘rose with the National Socialists and fell with them.’

Following his eventual parents’ divorce in the 1990s, Kai said he had no contact with his father for 30 years. That period of no contact ended around six years ago, he said, when his father called him.

The new documentary provided an opportunity for Kai and his father to address their family’s dark history, he told the German publication, as it allowed them to properly delve deeply into their past, and explore the effect it has had on them as men.

A powerful moment in the documentary sees Kai and Hans-Jürgen’s meeting with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a 98-year-old Auschwitz survivor.

It also sees them visiting the Auschwitz memorial, which was also an extremely emotional experience for Kai Höss and his father, he said.

This was particularly the case when the father and son stood in front of the gallows where Rudolf Höss was hanged. There, Hans-Jürgen acknowledged his father’s crimes: ‘He deserved it, he paid. What he did was wrong.’

‘I hate what he did, and to a certain extent I hate him. His heartlessness, the meticulous, clinical way in which he fulfilled his task.’

But he said it is important to learn the lesson from this in terms of how evil can take hold of people’s hearts.

‘The film is a reminder of where populism can lead. Hitler didn’t start out by saying ‘I’m going to murder six million people and overrun the world with war’. 

[Hitler] said ‘I will make you great again, I will give you back your pride’.

Today Kai also frequently wrestles with the question of whether his grandfather has been forgiven by God.

‘If he really repented, God forgave him. Then we’ll see each other in eternity. But I don’t know what really happened in his heart at the end.’

Kai’s younger brother, Rainer, was publicly active as Höss’s grandson but was later revealed to have exploited the family history for financial gain. 

The Höss family villa still stands on the Auschwitz grounds today.

Kai said he is ‘not looking for absolution’ for his grandfather’s crimes, but said he believes his family is cursed as a result of Rudolf Höss’s actions, but also his family going on to avoid the topic of their dark history.

‘I am not a perpetrator. But I believe in inherited guilt,’ he said. ‘There is a curse on families when something bad has happened and it is not spoken about honestly. Then the hearts are damaged, it changes the soul.

‘Then the children and grandchildren may become Nazis again because they say ‘What Grandpa did wasn’t so bad after all.’ 

‘That is also what the documentary ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’ is about. It is about the trauma in the families of the perpetrators and the victims.’

The Commandant’s Shadow will be released in selected UK cinemas from 12 July.