The Zone of Interest shows what happens when mass-murder is normalised in the final stages of fascism (Source: here)
About half a year ago, close friends asked if I had seen The Zone of Interest and what I thought about the movie. At the time, I had not yet seen it, but yesterday I finally caught up. This short note is about my impression of the film.
For those who have not seen it, The Zone of Interest is based on a novel by Martin Amis. The title refers to an area of land 40 square kilometres in size surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. The land was confiscated by Nazis to isolate the camp from the surrounding areas, enhance security, reduce the likelihood of escapes by inmates, and house camp staff, including Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant.
Most of the movie is set within the zone of interest, although some action also takes place in Berlin.
There is not much of a plot. The film depicts the daily lives of the members of the Höss household, who live in a large house directly adjacent to the concentration camp wall.
The main development in the film is that Rudolf Höss is promoted to role of deputy inspector for all concentration camps in the Reich. The new job takes him to Berlin, but Höss is eventually able to return to Auschwitz towards the end of the film after being put in charge of organising the transport of 700,000 Hungarian Jews for forced labour or extermination. Those who wish to learn more about the plot can go here.
A defining feature of The Zone of Interest is that it never depicts the atrocities taking place within the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Instead, the film hints at the horror through a constant hum of distant gunshots and muffled screams, dogs barking, occasional shouting, snippets of kill-orders, smoke billowing into the sky from crematorium chimneys, the orange light from the furnaces in the night sky, and clouds of ash from the ovens drifting down a nearby river.
The absence of pictures from within the camp complex is deliberate and supports the main message of the film that mass-murder is banal in the final stages of fascism.
By not showing any of the atrocities within the camp, but only referencing them indirectly through background images and noises, the viewer is forced to focus on the daily routines of the Höss household, which – and this is the point – turn out to be utterly mundane.
In their daily lives, the members of the Höss family are entirely unremarkable. Like most families, they are a close unit that struggles with usual problems of balancing the ambitions and desires of its members. Like any senior executive, Rudolf Höss works hard to the best he can be at his job, while at the same time being a good husband and father. Frau Höss takes an active interest in the kids, manages the household and the garden, and ensures that the family’s social circle thrives. The Höss children go to school in the mornings and play in the garden in the afternoons, just like children anywhere in the world.
There is, in other words, almost nothing to set the Höss family apart from any other successful German family in this period – or indeed any successful European or American family, anytime.
Yet, Rudolf Höss and his family were far from what we today would regard as normal. Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz, one of the worst mass-murders in history. In an affidavit made at Nuremburg on 5 April 1946, Höss stated that:
"I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead.” (Source: here)
By depicting the home-life of Höss and his family in very conventional terms, The Zone of Interest makes the point that even the most inhumane actions can become entirely conventional with the right amount of conditioning.
By the early 1940s, the Nazis had normalised the practice of mass-murder of Jews and other ‘sub-humans’ to the point where being camp commandant of Auschwitz was regarded as no less worthy or legitimate than holding any other prestigious senior executive position in business, industry, or government.
The Zone of Interest is a warning precisely about this normalisation of evil. It is a reminder of what happens in the final stages of fascism, a very dark place far beyond the clumsy attempts we, for now, still employ in Europe and the United States to isolate minorities like Jews, Muslims, or refugees, although these policy fumblings are of course exactly how all periods of fascism begin.
When Rudolf Höss was running Auschwitz, the German population had gone much further than what we have seen in modern Europe an the United States; Germans had by then completely bought into the idea that Jews were animals, who could be disposed of without any moral scruples whatsoever. They had also accepted the idea that anyone who did not agree with this view would either share the fate of the Jews, or better go about their business of resistance with extreme caution (as indeed the film illustrates by including scenes with a Polish girl - who actually existed - who risked her life at night to leave apples for starving slave workers from the camp).
Numerous scenes in the film illustrate how mass-murder has become mundane. I will highlight just three, which made particular impressions on me:
Throughout the film, the members of the Höss family barely notice the constant din of death from behind the camp walls, but on one occasion you do get a reaction. This is when one of the Höss sons overhears an order to drown a camp inmate, who has been caught fighting over an apple. When the son hears the punishment metered out to the inmate, he mutters to himself, “He should not have done that”. To the son, the criminal act is that the starving Jew fought for an apple, not that the Jew was incarcerated, forced into slave labour, starved, and sentenced arbitrarily to a gruesome death by drowning merely for trying to get something to eat.
In another scene, Rudolf Höss comes close to panicking, when he his children play in the river as the waters suddenly fill with ash and bone fragments from incinerated prisoners. Höss has no concern whatsoever for the incinerated Jews; his sole concern is that his Aryan children may have come into contact with body parts of Jews. The children are rushed home and scrubbed to ensure they are 'clean'.
Finally, in one of the last scenes in the film Rudolf Höss finds himself at a party in Berlin. He has just been assigned the mammoth task of organising the Hungarian transport. As he makes to leave the party, he suddenly bends over and vomits. My naive first thought was that maybe he had developed a sense of remorse, but then the film cuts to modern-day Auschwitz and shows Polish employees cleaning the gas chambers and the ovens for visitors. It dawned on me then that remorse was the last thing on Rudolf Höss’s mind when he was throwing up; he was just temporarily overwhelmed by sheer magnitude of the task before him – which he subsequently went on to complete successfully, to the detriment of millions.
It takes a lot of hard work and persistence – and the full force of the state – to brainwash an entire population into accepting as natural the annihilation of an entire population. Yet, we see this happening today. Having vilified and oppressed Palestinians for decades with policies far worse than anything Apartheid South Africa ever produced, Israelis have become so de-sensitised that they too are now treating another people like animals. And killing them indiscriminately in large numbers.
Gaza.
The majority of Israelis appear to feel no empathy whatsoever with their Palestinian neighbours. Earlier this year, the New York Times cited polls showing 94 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the level of force being used against Gaza is appropriate or even insufficient. Another poll found that most Jewish Israelis oppose food and medicine getting into Gaza.
With attitudes like these so widespread among ordinary Israelis, it is no wonder the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have had carte blanche to kill. So far, IDF has killed more than 25 Palestinians for every Israeli killed on 7 October 2023. The vast majority of those killed are children and women with no connection to Hamas. The true death toll is likely much higher, because IDF is barring anyone from excavating the destroyed buildings in Gaza. More than 100,000 Palestinians have been injured.
Any neutral observer can see that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza; the wholesale slaughter of civilians, the UN being kicked out. Israel is deliberately targeting hospitals and education facilities. It is purposefully engineering famine by holding back food and medical assistance. The total destruction of infrastructure and housing are a precursor for Israel’s own version of Lebensraum as it plans to annex the territory of Gaza to gain greater access to the sea.
It is straight out of the Nazi playbook.
The Zone of Interest is also highly relevant on this, the eve of the US election. Unlike previous US elections, this election is not just a battle between Left and Right. Rather, voters must choose between systems, democracy or authoritarianism. If Trump wins, he will dismantle the remaining independence of the US judiciary and, from then on, he will rule above the law. That is exactly what Hitler did. It is what all dictators do. If Trump is allowed to assume dictatorial powers, the US will have taken a huge leap towards precisely the type of reality, depicted with such chilling accuracy in The Zone of Interest.
The End
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