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The Independent
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
What really happened inside the home of the monster of Auschwitz
Downstairs, there was a kitchen. Then there was a living room; there was a dining room, a guest room, I think. On the second floor, there were all the bedrooms.' This is Brigitte Hoess talking. Her voice, in a raspy German accent, is giving me a tour of her childhood house. This was not just any house. It is the villa where the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess lived with his wife and five children – including Brigitte, who lived there until she was 11 years old. She remembers her father as someone who tucked her in at night and would let her go downstairs on Christmas Eve to eat real cookies left under the Christmas tree. As he masterminded the mass murder of more than a million men, women and children in the camp next door, he would pat the family dalmatians, entertain friends and listen to records on the gramophone as he smoked his favourite cigars. Brigitte Hoess's childhood home was the home of the Holocaust. The house next door to where 1.1 million Jewish people, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners were murdered. I had first seen the Hoess villa 16 years ago when I visited the Auschwitz camp. I was with Rudolf Hoess's grandson Rainer and daughter-in-law Irene, the first family members to return to the camp since the Kommandant's departure in 1944. At the time, a Polish woman was living at the Hoess's former family home (located at 88 Legionow Street). She owned the house, but would not give us entry. I was surprised; it felt that this villa was a site of tremendous historical importance and should be open to the public. Over the past few years, an American non-profit organisation called the Counter Extremism Project has been negotiating with its Polish owner. In 2024, it was finally able to complete the purchase to open it to the public. The project has the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Unesco and the Polish Foreign Ministry. The story of this Nazi family was also told in the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest, though the actual house that was used to shoot the film stands a few hundred yards from the original villa. Now, I am back in Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and the official opening of the Hoess villa to the public. This is why I am walking around the villa listening to Brigitte giving me a virtual tour in my AirPods – from an interview she gave me before she died in October 2023. I stand in Rudolf Hoess's large well-lit bedroom. I walk down the stone steps he came down each day. I'm in the kitchen where he drank coffee, chatted with his wife, and asked his children about their day. The normality of it is disorientating, creepy. The new owners want to use the lessons of the past to confront the rise of extremism today. They point to escalating racist violence, abuse and antisemitism across the globe. The normalisation of populist rhetoric against migrants and permission to promote hate speech. All this is happening, just as the living memories of those who survived the Holocaust fade. I too have a personal connection to this house. My Jewish family was forced to flee Nazi Germany. At least five members of my family were murdered in the Holocaust. And my great uncle Hanns Alexander, a captain in the British army, arrested Rudolf Hoess in March 1946. Hoess gave testimony at the Nuremberg Trials and provided the first detailed account of the mechanics of the Holocaust: the transports, the selections, the gas chambers, the crematoria. His account changed the course of the trial. He was then taken to Poland where he was tried and then, in April 1947, hanged on a gallows a few yards from where he and his family had lived. It was while researching my book Hanns and Rudolf – a dual biography of my uncle and the Kommandant – that I tracked down Rudolf's daughter Brigitte, who lived just outside of Washington DC. For decades, she had lived a quiet life on a leafy street in Northern Virginia. Working in a fashion salon, nobody who knew her knew that her father was the man who had turned an old army barracks in Poland into a killing machine capable of murdering 2,000 people an hour. After tracking her down, it still took three years to persuade her to speak with me on the record. Brigitte was seven years old when she first arrived at the villa next to Auschwitz in 1940. She would remain there till 1944 and still, after all those years, her memory remained crystal clear. I walk into what would have been her living room, a large space with parquet wooden floors and windows looking onto the street and beyond that the Sola River. The only thing in the room is a grand piano, being played by the Italian pianist Francesco Lotoro. The notes are upbeat and melodic, in stark contrast to the surroundings; Francesco explains the piece was written by Adam Kopycinski, a prisoner in Auschwitz. The living room was where the family had their Christmas tree. 'When the ornaments were done,' Brigitte recounts, 'my dad rang a bell and opened the door. And there was a tree with all the lights on, real lights, you know, white candles.' After dinner on Christmas Eve, the children were allowed to go to the tree where they found some treats. 'Always real cookies,' she continues, 'We could get some down. And eat some, not all, a couple.' I go outside into the garden. This is where in the summer the children spent a lot of time. 'We had fun,' I hear her say in my ears. 'We had a little swimming pool in the backyard. My mother had a beautiful garden house with flowers. She loved flowers.' The family had two big dalmatians. They also had a pair of tortoises, she remembers with a warm laugh, they were called Jumbo and Dilla. And they kept bees in little houses, their honey would be collected by one of the helpers. Brigitte's father would write that his wife, Hedwig, described the villa and the family's life at Auschwitz as 'paradise'. Near the front door, I head down a dark steep staircase to the bunker in the basement. 'Whenever the alarm went off, we had to go down,' Brigitte says, her voice growing quieter as she remembers the fear. 'We had a little suitcase next to our bed with clothes in it. And we picked it up and went downstairs when my mom said 'Let's go downstairs'.' I climb the grey stone stairs to the second floor. There are three bedrooms and a bathroom. Brigitte and her sister Heidertraud slept in one of these rooms. Her two brothers shared a room. Her parents slept in the room next door with the baby Annegret. Through the windows you can see row upon row of prisoner barracks, the camp's tall concrete wall and the guard towers. The horrors next door are all impossibly close; the prisoners would have been easily seen out of the windows as Brigitte and her siblings would simultaneously be clattering around the house. My heart races; the mixture of intimacy and persecution feels appalling. Brigitte's voice is still in my ears. At night, her father would read them bedtime stories and he was affectionate: 'Always a kiss, always hugging when we went to bed.' He would say 'Schlaf shoen, mein Kinder' – sleep well, my children. How did a man who oversaw the slaughter that was going just metres away sleep well, did she think? 'There must have been two sides to him,' she told me, 'the side I knew, and this other side.' The US psychologists who evaluated Rudolf Hoess in Nuremberg had found him to be without signs of mental illness such as psychopathy. In his memoir, Hoess wrote that he had been greatly distressed by the gassings, so much so that he often drank himself to sleep at night. In other words, this was a man capable of both human kindness and empathy. And yet, day after day, he woke up in the family villa and chose to carry out mass murder. It tells a stark tale of the human condition; how we are all capable of both extreme good and extreme bad. Standing all these years later in the Hoess family villa, the place where a loving father made abhorrent choices with such terrible consequences, I understand the urgency of opening the doors of 88 Legionow Street to the public. To breathe in its overwhelming ordinariness knowing the unimaginable horror of the camp next door is to learn an important lesson about our past. It stands as a warning: if we are not vigilant, a catastrophe such as Auschwitz can happen again. As I leave the villa, I notice the new owners have added some writing to the wall of one of the ground floor rooms. 'The aftermath of the Holocaust should have meant an end of antisemitism, extremism and hate,' they say. 'But 80 years later, all three are rampant and rising. 'Never forget' has proven not enough. Sometimes, we must interfere.'
The Independent
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Inside the commandant of Auschwitz's home, the secrets his daughter revealed to me came to life
Downstairs, there was a kitchen. Then there was a living room; there was a dining room, a guest room, I think. On the second floor, there were all the bedrooms.' This is Brigitte Hoess talking. Her voice in a raspy German accent is giving me a tour of her childhood house. This was not just any house. It is the villa where the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess lived with his wife and five children – including Brigitte who lived there until she was 11 years old. She remembers her father as someone who tucked her in at night and would let her go downstairs on Christmas Eve to eat real cookies left under the Christmas tree. As he masterminded the mass murder of more than a million men, women and children in the camp next door, he would pat the family dalmatians, entertain friends and listen to records on the gramophone as he smoked his favourite cigars. Brigitte Hoess's childhood home was the home of the Holocaust. The house next door to where 1.1 million Jewish people, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners were murdered I had first seen the Hoess Villa 16 years ago when I visited the Auschwitz camp. I was with Rudolf Hoess's grandson Rainer and daughter-in-law Irene, the first family members to return to the camp since the kommandant's departure in 1944. At the time, a Polish woman was living at the Hoess's former family home (located at 88 Legionów street). She owned the house, but would not give us entry. I was surprised, it felt that this villa was a site of tremendous historical importance and should be open to the public. Over the past few years, an American non-profit organisation called the Counter Extremism Project has been negotiating with its Polish owner and in 2024, were finally able to complete the purchase to open it to the public. The project has the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Unesco and the Polish Foreign Ministry. The story of this famous Nazi family was also told in the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest, though the actual house that was used to shoot the film stands a few hundred yards from the original villa. Now, I am back in Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and the official opening of the Hoess villa to the public. This is why I am walking around the villa listening to Brigitte giving me a virtual tour in my AirPods – from an interview she gave me before she died in October 2023. I stand in Rudolf Hoess's large well-lit bedroom. I walk down the stone steps he came down each day. I'm in the kitchen where he drank coffee, chatted with his wife, and asked his children about their day. The normality of it is disorientating, creepy. The new owners want to use the lessons of the past to confront the rise of extremism today. They point to escalating racist violence, abuse and antisemitism across the globe. The normalisation of populist rhetoric against migrants and permission to promote hate speech. All this is happening, just as the living memories of those who survived the Holocaust fade. I have a personal connection to this house too. My Jewish family was forced to flee Nazi Germany. At least five members of my family were murdered in the Holocaust. And my great uncle Hanns Alexander, a captain in the British army, arrested Rudolf Hoess in March 1946. Hoess gave testimony at the Nuremberg Trials and provided the first detailed account of the mechanics of the Holocaust: the transports, the selections, the gas chambers, the crematoria. His account changed the course of the trial. He was then taken to Poland where he was tried and then in April 1947 hanged on a gallows a few yards from where he and his family had lived, the Hoess villa. It was while researching my book Hanns and Rudolf – a dual biography of my uncle and the Kommandant, that I tracked down Rudolf's daughter Brigitte, who lived just outside of Washington DC. For decades she had lived a quiet life on a leafy street in Northern Virginia. Working in a Washington fashion salon, nobody who knew her knew that her father, Rudolf, was the man who had turned an old army barracks in Poland into a killing machine capable of murdering 2,000 people an hour. After tracking her down, it still took me three years to persuade her to speak with me on the record. Brigitte was seven years old when she first arrived at the villa next to Auschwitz in 1940. She would remain there till 1944 and still, after all those years, her memory remained crystal clear. I walk into what would have been her living room, a large space with parquet wooden floors and windows looking onto the street and beyond that the Sola River. The only thing in the room is a grand piano, being played by the Italian pianist Francesco Lotoro. The notes are upbeat and melodic, in stark contrast to the surroundings; Francesco explains the piece was written by Adam Kopycinski, a prisoner in Auschwitz. The living room was where the family had their Christmas tree. 'When the ornaments were done,' Brigitte recounts, 'my dad rang a bell and opened the door. And there was a tree with all the lights on, real lights, you know, white candles.' After dinner on Christmas Eve, the children were allowed to go to the tree where they found some treats. 'Always real cookies,' she continues, 'We could get some down. And eat some, not all, a couple.' I go outside into the garden. This is where in the summer the children spent a lot of time. 'We had fun,' I hear her say in my ears. 'We had a little swimming pool in the backyard. My mother had a beautiful garden house with flowers. She loved flowers.' The family had two big dalmatians. They also had a pair of tortoises, she remembers with a warm laugh, they were called Jumbo and Dilla. And they kept bees in little houses, their honey would be collected by one of the helpers. Brigitte's father would write that his wife, Hedwig, described the villa and the family's life at Auschwitz as 'paradise'. Near the front door, I head down a dark steep staircase to the bunker in the basement. 'Whenever the alarm went off, we had to go down,' Brigitte says, her voice growing quieter as she remembers the fear. 'We had a little suitcase next to our bed with clothes in it. And we picked it up and went downstairs when my mom said 'Let's go downstairs'.' I climb the grey stone stairs to the second floor. There are three bedrooms and a bathroom. Brigitte and her sister Heidertraud slept in one of these rooms. Her two brothers shared a room. Her parents slept in the room next door with the baby Annegret. Through the windows you can see row upon row of prisoner barracks, the camp's tall concrete wall and the guard towers. The horrors next door are all impossibly close; the prisoners would have been easily seen out of the windows as Brigitte and her siblings would simultaneously be clattering around the house. My heart races; the mixture of intimacy and persecution feels appalling. Brigitte's voice is still in my ears. At night, her father would read them bedtime stories and he was affectionate: 'Always a kiss, always hugging when we went to bed.' He would say 'Schlaff Shoen mein Kinder' – sleep well, my children. How did a man who oversaw the slaughter that was going just metres away sleep well did she think? 'There must have been two sides to him,' she told me, 'the side I knew, and this other side.' The US psychologists who evaluated Rudolf Hoess in Nuremberg had found him to be without signs of mental illness such as psychopathy. In his memoir, Rudolf wrote that he had been greatly distressed by the gassings, so much so that he often drank himself to sleep at night. In other words, this was a man capable of both human kindness and empathy. And yet, day after day, he woke up in the family villa and chose to carry out mass murder. It tells a stark tale of the human condition; how we are all capable of both extreme good and extreme bad. Standing all these years later in Hoess' family villa, the place where a loving feather made abhorrent choices with such terrible consequences, I understand the urgency of opening the doors of 88 Legionow street to the public. To breathe in its overwhelming ordinariness knowing the unimaginable horror of the camp next door, is to learn an important lesson about our past. It stands as a warning: if we are not vigilant a catastrophe such as Auschwitz can happen again. As I leave the villa, I notice the new owners have added some writing to the wall of one of the ground floor rooms. 'The aftermath of the Holocaust should have meant an end of antisemitism, extremism and hate,' they say. 'But 80 years later, all three are rampant and rising. 'Never forget' has proven not enough. Sometimes, we must interfere.'
CBC
27-01-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Auschwitz survivors warn 'world has become toxic' on 80th anniversary of death camp's liberation
The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend. Among those who was travelled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was six when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on Jan. 27, 1945. She believes it will be the last gathering of survivors at Auschwitz and she came from her home in New Jersey to add her voice to those warning about rising hatred and antisemitism. "The world has become toxic," she told The Associated Press a day before the observances in nearby Krakow. "I realize that we're in a crisis again, that there is so much hatred around, so much distrust, that if we don't stop, it may get worse and worse. There may be another terrible destruction." Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during the Second World War. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology. Elderly camp survivors, some wearing blue-and-white striped scarves that recall their prison uniforms, walked together to the Death Wall, where prisoners were executed, including many Poles who resisted the occupation of their country. WATCH | Holocaust educators dispel misinformation: Holocaust educators work to combat misinformation 11 hours ago Duration 1:56 They were joined by Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost six million citizens during the war. He carried a candle and walked with Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum director Piotr Cywinski. At the wall, the two men bowed their heads, murmured prayers and crossed themselves. "We Poles, on whose land — occupied by Nazi Germans at that time — the Germans built this extermination industry and this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory," Duda said to reporters afterward. He spoke of the "unimaginable harm" inflicted on so many people, especially the Jewish people. 'Our duty ... to remember' In all, the Germans murdered six million Jews from all over Europe, annihilating two-thirds of Europe's Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Across Europe, officials and others were pausing to remember. "As the last survivors fade, it is our duty as Europeans to remember the unspeakable crimes and to honour the memories of the victims," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is German, said on X. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leads a nation defending itself against Russia's brutal invasion, placed a candle at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial a day before in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation. On Monday he arrived in Poland to attend the commemorations. "The evil that seeks to destroy the lives of entire nations still remains in the world," he wrote on his Telegram page. Commemorations will culminate later Monday when world leaders and royalty will join with elderly camp survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s, at Birkenau, the part of Auschwitz where the mass murder of Jews took place. Politicians, however, have not been asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, about 50 of whom are expected, organizers are choosing to make them the centre of the observances. Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, will also speak. World leaders attend, including Trudeau Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was expected to be in attendance. Before the ceremony, Trudeau met with Canadian Auschwitz survivors who also made the journey to Poland. This may be Trudeau's last major international trip as prime minister before the next Liberal Party leader is chosen on March 9. In a statement posted to X Sunday, Trudeau wrote, "80 years ago, the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration and extermination camp was liberated, ending the systematic murder and genocide carried out there by the Nazi regime." "Tomorrow, I'll join fellow world leaders on the grounds of Auschwitz Birkenau to honour the victims of the Holocaust, stand against rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and reaffirm our promise: never again." Among other leaders expected to attend are Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never sent both of its highest state representatives to the observances before, according to German news agency dpa. It is a sign of Germany's continued commitment to take responsibility for the nation's crimes, even with a far-right party gaining increased support in recent years. French President Emmanuel Macron will attend after earlier observing a moment of silence at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, a symbolic tomb for the six million Jews who don't have a grave, and meeting with a survivor from Auschwitz and one from the Bergen-Belsen camp. Britain's King Charles III will also be there, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway. Russian representatives were in the past central guests at the anniversary observances in recognition of the Soviet liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, and the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But they have not been welcome since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to participants saying, "We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this dreadful, total evil and won the victory the greatness of which will forever remain in world history." "Russian citizens are direct descendants and successors of the generation of victors," Putin said. "We will continue to counter the attempts to rewrite the legal and moral verdict on the Nazi butchers and their abettors in a principled and firm manner." WATCH | Holocaust survivor disturbed by Trump's inauguration: Auschwitz survivor disturbed by what he saw at Trump's inauguration 2 days ago Duration 2:04 Eighty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, David Moscovic shares his story of survival and says he's disturbed by what he saw the day of U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Yahoo
Anti-extremism center opens in former house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss
OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — A U.S.-based organization is transforming the house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss into a research center devoted to fighting extremism, and is introducing it to the public on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday. The house, which belonged to a Polish military family before Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, lies next to the site of the former death camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 'My dream, and those of our colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic that comes here takes action to fight extremism and antisemitism wherever they come from," said Mark Wallace, the CEO of the Counter Extremism Project. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. His group bought the house from a private family and is creating the Auschwitz Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization in the house. It opened its doors to reporters on the eve of the anniversary commemorations, showing them the rooms in the three-story house that still need to be renovated. The project is being launched in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and under the patronage of UNESCO. Prominent architect Daniel Libeskind is also a collaborator. The house was featured in the Oscar-winning film 'The Zone of Interest,' which depicts the life of Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children in the house just next to the concentration camp. As commandant from 1940 to 1944, Höss orchestrated the industrial-scale slaughter at the camp, where gas was used to murder Jews. He was tried by a Polish court and was executed by hanging at the site of the concentration camp in 1947. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is holding observances on Monday for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet forces.
Associated Press
27-01-2025
- Associated Press
Anti-extremism center opens in former house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss
OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — A U.S.-based organization is transforming the house of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss into a research center devoted to fighting extremism, and is introducing it to the public on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday. The house, which belonged to a Polish military family before Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, lies next to the site of the former death camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. 'My dream, and those of our colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic that comes here takes action to fight extremism and antisemitism wherever they come from,' said Mark Wallace, the CEO of the Counter Extremism Project. His group bought the house from a private family and is creating the Auschwitz Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization in the house. It opened its doors to reporters on the eve of the anniversary commemorations, showing them the rooms in the three-story house that still need to be renovated. The project is being launched in partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and under the patronage of UNESCO. Prominent architect Daniel Libeskind is also a collaborator. The house was featured in the Oscar-winning film 'The Zone of Interest,' which depicts the life of Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children in the house just next to the concentration camp. As commandant from 1940 to 1944, Höss orchestrated the industrial-scale slaughter at the camp, where gas was used to murder Jews. He was tried by a Polish court and was executed by hanging at the site of the concentration camp in 1947. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is holding observances on Monday for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet forces.
