When the film-maker Daniela Völker met Hans Jürgen Höss, the 90-year-old son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, she had understood that he did not recall witnessing any of the horrors, despite spending almost four years of his early childhood living in the villa adjacent to the camp.
“At first, he really didn’t. I had a German cameraman who said I was wasting my time and money and to leave.” But undeterred, Völker hung around for a few days and on the last day of filming gave Hans Jürgen his father’s confessional autobiography, which he had never read. “I’d selected parts for him to read. And you could see the change in his face as he started reading.”
Extracts from Höss’s book, Commandant of Auschwitz, written while he was awaiting trial in a Polish prison, form the structure of Völker’s raw and compelling documentary The Commandant’s Shadow, in which two families explore the transgenerational trauma of the Holocaust on their lives from their two different perspectives.
Völker, 52, began developing the film in 2020, at the beginning of the first lockdown. She had initially been contacted, via a friend, by psychotherapist Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, who had written a book about her experiences as the daughter of Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. “I began researching and very early on, I came across the Höss autobiography, which really surprised me,” explains Völker, speaking in London over Zoom. “I couldn’t believe that no one had made a documentary about it.” Völker subsequently learnt that Rudolf Höss had a grandson, Kai, a Christian pastor for an English-speaking church in Stuttgart, who was of a similar age to Maya. However, meeting Hans Jürgen took a while, she says. “I had to really gain Kai’s trust.” Eventually, Völker realised she could tell the parallel stories of the families of the survivor and the perpetrator, as well as the story of a mother and her daughter, and a father and his son.
Haunted: Hans Jürgen with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch and Kai Höss
This is not the first time that Völker has examined the perspective of both perpetrators and victims in her work, which has included addressing the challenges of living together after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the consequences of Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976 to 1983. “You can’t have a survivor or a victim without having a perpetrator,” she says. “They’re part of the same story.”
The Commandant’s Shadow follows Hans Jürgen as he grapples with his father’s murderous legacy. As children, he and his four siblings had believed Auschwitz to be a prison that their father managed. They knew him as a different person: Höss took his children paddling in the river and was present for all family celebrations – dressed in a white shirt, bow tie and often smoking a cigar.
“I have to make this clear: Hans Jürgen had never denied the Holocaust,” Völker emphasises. “What he told me was, ‘My father deserved to be hanged because he was the boss. He was stamping documents etc.’” But until Hans Jürgen visited Auschwitz – accompanied by Maya and Kai – and read the book, he had been unaware of the explicit detail of his father’s role and crimes, although Kai stresses that there was a copy of the book in his home. “It’s quite possible that he suppressed the knowledge [of the book’s existence],” says Völker. “In the same way he suppressed the memories of smoke he cannot not have seen, [from his childhood bedroom]. To me, the book was like being in a true-crime story in which the criminal wrote his deathbed confession. What Hans Jürgen had convinced himself to be the case wasn’t true because it was there in black and white.”
The Commandant’s Shadow shares two of the same executive producers (Danny Cohen and Len Blavatnik) as the Academy Award winning The Zone of Interest – the fictionalised story of the domestic life of the Höss family in Auschwitz, directed by Jonathan Glazer. By coincidence, both films were released months apart. Given this, it is, perhaps, surprising that Völker and Glazer have never met. “A year and a half into making my film, I realised they had been filming near Auschwitz,” says Völker. “I [wondered] about asking if Hans-Jürgen could visit the set but what he wanted to see was his actual house. He didn’t know about Martin Amis’s book, [on which Glazer’s film was based]. So, in the end, I dismissed it.”
While Hans Jürgen enjoyed “a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”, on the other side of the garden wall, Jewish prisoner Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 98, played in the camp orchestra as the only cellist: a role that saved her life. The experience inevitably left an impact. “I’m the wrong mother for my daughter,” she admits on camera, “I’m very basic, traumatised.” Instead of dwelling on the past, she chose to look ahead.
But the past is never really in the past, it affects the present, says Völker. “And Maya and Kai have each been affected in different ways.” Maya’s expression of a lack of early maternal love drives her need to connect parts of her family narrative and although Kai fully accepts that his grandfather is one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he remains burdened by hereditary sin. But they are not asking for sympathy, says Völker. “I think what they’re asking for is for people to look at their stories and perhaps draw some sort of conclusion for the future. They have come together to try and lead the way, by engaging in dialogue.”
There are several striking scenes in the film, including Hans Jürgen’s visit to his critically ill older sister, Inge-Brigitt, known as “Püppi” (she died soon after filming) in America. When they meet, they regress. “It’s almost like those years before they left Auschwitz were the happiest and nothing burst the bubble.” Püppi’s denial and evasion about her father’s crimes makes difficult viewing and although Völker directed her crew to film everything without interference and as it happened, she admits she needed to intervene when the siblings discuss their “beautiful mother and father”. “Beautiful?” Völker repeats to me, sounding incredulous. “Höss did write that he was standing outside the gas chambers when women and children were herded in. It almost cried out for some sort of interference, which I hadn’t planned but felt I had to say something.” Also, she adds, Hedwig (Höss’s wife) cannot have been all that innocent. “In fact, I found a clip from Rudolf Höss where he admits that he told his wife what was going on in the camp in 1942.”
In the dark: Hans Jürgen Höss and his four siblings had believed Auschwitz to be merely a prison that their father managed
In another remarkable moment, Hans Jürgen meets Anita in her home; the first time he has met an Auschwitz survivor. According to Völker, it is the only meeting between the descendant of a high-ranking Nazi and a Holocaust survivor in this way. “He was really rather nervous beforehand. And what was special about this is that she met him in her own sitting room, surrounded by photos of her dead family, [some of whom had been killed by the Nazis]. It was highly symbolic.”
Speaking six languages, Völker comes from a devout Catholic, German/Argentinian family. She began her career in at the BBC in London in the late 1990s and, since then, has been making documentaries for several networks including Netflix, PBS, CNN and National Geographic. In May, The Commandant’s Shadow won the Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust-related documentary at Docaviv, the annual documentary film festival held in Tel Aviv. “I was incredibly moved,” Völker says. “I had been to Yad Vashem, perhaps two decades ago for work, and to receive an award from there for a film which tells such an important Holocaust story was an honour and very unexpected.”
Some audience reactions have been particularly interesting and unexpected, she says. “In Mumbai where the Holocaust isn’t part of the cultural hinterland, I had people come up after screenings and share their family stories of partition.” And Hans-Jurgen’s response? “He saw it for the first time at the Berlin premiere, as he’d been in hospital for quite a while. He told me he was very impressed, but he didn’t like that so much of it was in English. I had to explain that for Warner Bros to buy a film, we can’t have it mostly in German,” she smiles. Now the plan is to launch an international educational programme, using some of the sequences that did not make the final cut.
For Völker, getting to know the film’s protagonists and “play a part in weaving their stories together, making something new out of them, has been a real privilege”. Also, she continues, the imminent loss of direct witnesses leaves only experts and black-and-white news reel. “And having teenage children myself, I would like people to engage with this on a human level.”
Making the film was an intense, challenging process. “As a film-maker, you do detach yourself a bit because you must keep an overview and most of the time, I was worried about the sheer practicalities and logistics,” she says. “I think things hit me after filming. [Seeing] Rudolf Höss’s son, standing in the gas chamber and by the chimney he saw as a kid…” she trails off. “It’s only afterwards, you go, ‘That was extraordinary.’”
The Commandant’s Shadow is released in cinemas on July 12
