Image: spiegel
Last Monday, 27 January marked 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland by Soviet Red Army soldiers during the Vistula Order Offensive. The annual event remembers the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust, as well as the millions killed under Nazi persecution and those who died in subsequent genocides. This day highlights how important it is to tolerate other people’s beliefs and differences and not to exclude them or spread messages of hate.
This year to coincide with the commemoration, the former home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss has been transformed into a research centre devoted to fighting extremism, with the building officially opening to the public on the same day. The garden wall of the villa where Hoss and his family lived was the wall of the adjacent camp.
It was Hoss who set up the camp in 1940 following the orders of Heinrich Himmler, and it was he who two years later established the machinery of industrial murder – the transports, the selections, the gas chambers, the crematoriums – that resulted in the largest mass killings in a single location in history. Also, under Hoss’ watch in the basement of block 11, prisoner number 16770 was committed to a starvation cell before dying lethal injection. That prisoner was the priest and martyr St Maximilian Kolbe.
The commandant lived at the villa with his wife Hedwig and their five children for four years. He took care to hide the crematoria chimney from his children erecting a garden wall and planting trees that obstructed their view from the house. There was a pond, a sandpit, a slide, several picnic benches, and a greenhouse with exotic plants. His sons and daughters enjoyed an idyllic childhood while other little children nearby suffered the torments of hell.
A replica of the villa was featured in the Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest in 2023. This depicts how the Hoss family went about their daily life while beyond their garden wall, gunshots, screaming, and the sounds of trains and furnaces are often audible. Non-Jewish inmates work as servants and the belongings of the murdered Jews are given to Hedwig for use in the home. Their indifference to the suffering within ear shot is a chilling indictment of how inhumanity can be ‘normalized’.
After the War
In March 1946, Hoss was arrested by British forces who handed him over to the Americans. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hoss’ testimony was the first to provide a detailed account the mechanics of the Holocaust. The former commandant was then taken to Poland where he himself was put on trial, found guilty, and in April 1947 hanged on the gallows in Auschwitz, just a few yards away from the villa where he once lived.
Before the invasion of Poland by the Nazi forces in 1939, the villa at 88 Legionow Street had belonged to a local military family. After the war, it was bought by a Polish family whose widowed mother, bought up two sons there. Beneath the house, a tunnel connecting number 88 to the camp remained. One of the consequences of the film The Zone of Interest was the number of curious visitors who turned up at the house for a look, even on occasion trampling through the garden and approaching the windows. Mrs Jurczak was approached by far-right extremists and there were fears the home could fall into the wrong hands and become a memorial for Hoss.
In 2024, the American non-profit Counter Extremism Project, persuaded the Polish family to sell the property. The organisation is led by Mark Wallace, the former ambassador to the United Nations under President George W Bush. The mission of the Project is to combat the growing threat posed by extremist ideologies. With the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Polish Foreign Ministry, and UNESCO, the Auschwitz Research Centre on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation has taken up its headquarters at House 88. The Project investigates contemporary extremism from neo-Nazis to the Taliban.
Next door, at 88A, an education centre will house researchers, a fellowship, and university studies. Its aim is to combat extremist groups by putting pressure on financial support networks, countering the narrative of extremists and their online recruitment, and advocating for stronger laws, policies, and regulations around the world. Mark Wallace has said that his dream, and that of his colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic who visits the Auschwitz site will be inspired to take action to fight extremism wherever they come from.
When Hoss and his family lived in the house the windows were glazed to prevent anyone from looking in; now they are open to the world.
Written by Marie–Therese Cryan