The Zone of Interest

Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig cultivate an idyllic domestic life and garden in a house immediately adjacent to the camp walls, willfully ignoring the sounds and smoke of mass murder next door. The film depicts the chilling banality of perpetrators who normalize genocide as background noise to daily family life.

Rudolf Höss served as commandant of Auschwitz for most of its operation, overseeing the murder of over a million people; he was tried and executed after the war. The film is based on Martin Amis's novel inspired by the real Höss family's residence beside the camp.

The film deliberately withholds depiction of the camp's interior atrocities, focusing instead on documented details of the Höss household's proximity to mass murder.

Directed by Jonathan Glazer

Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller

Positioned at 1943–1944 within the Holocaust extermination camps phase of the war, as part of the Auschwitz camp administration. This is entry 91 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Auschwitz
• Holocaust
• perpetrator perspective
• banality of evil
• Höss family

• 

  Uprising

  19 April – 16 May 1943

• 

  Escape from Sobibor

  14 October 1943

• 

  Son of Saul

  October 1944

• 

  The Pianist

  1939–1945

• 

  Schindler's List

  1939–1945

• 

  Come and See

  1943