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The villa where Rudolf Höss and his family lived stood immediately next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The garden wall of the villa was the wall of the camp.
At Christmas time, they put up a tree in the living room and festooned it with ornaments and candles. In the garden, there was a pond, a sandpit, a slide, several picnic benches and a greenhouse with exotic plants. At night, Höss tucked his sons and daughters into bed and said: “Schlaf schön meine Kinder” – sleep well my children.
All of this took place just a few yards from the horrors of the Holocaust. The camp where more than one million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered during the second world war.
It was Commandant Rudolf Höss who set up the Auschwitz camp in 1940 following the orders of Heinrich Himmler, and it was Höss 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 killing in a single location in history.
The villa will be made open to the public for the first time on Monday, to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
The commandant lived at the villa with his wife Hedwig and their five children for four years. The boys, Klaus and Hans Jürgen, shared a bedroom on the second floor. Next to them were the two eldest daughters, Heidetraud and Brigitte. While the baby Annegret slept in a small basket in the parent’s bedroom on the same floor.
From the villa’s second-floor window, they could see the old crematorium where Höss experimented with Zyklon B gas. Prisoners from the camp worked in the house and the garden. Hedwig would later tell her husband that the villa was like “paradise”.
This is the same villa that was featured in the Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest, which captured the banality of the Nazi family who lived next to the death camp.
Not long before she died, I interviewed the commandant’s daughter Brigitte, who told me she enjoyed living at the villa. “We had fun together,” she said. She played with her turtles Jumbo and Dilla in the garden. Her father took them for boat rides on the Sola River behind the villa. He played them records on the gramophone. He asked them about their day.
“There was a difference between home and … ,” Brigitte told me, unable to speak the name of the camp or the atrocities that took place there. “But we didn’t know it then at all. Later, we found out what was going on.”
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In March 1946, Höss was arrested by British forces (including my great-uncle Hanns, a German Jew, who didn’t talk about it till shortly before his death). The British handed the commandant over to the Americans who had him appear as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials. Höss’s testimony was the first to provide a detailed account of the mechanics of the Holocaust and changed the course of the trial.
The commandant was then taken to Poland where he was himself 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.
After the war, a Polish family bought the villa at 88 Legionow Street. In the decades since, they turned away visitors who knocked on the door. The house remained a curiosity, visible to those who came to the camp (last year, 1.83 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau), a symbol of darkness hidden behind a tall concrete wall.
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 57-year-old former ambassador to the UN under President George W Bush. The Counter Extremism Project’s mission 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, they are opening what they are calling the Auschwitz Research Centre on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation (Archer) at House 88.
Wallace has been working on the project for years. “It hasn’t been easy,” he says, “it’s been a bit of a saga.” But, he continues, it has been worth it. “The place is remarkable. When you are in the house, in those quiet moments, you can really feel it. Your skin crawls.”
Not everyone is convinced by the plan to open the villa to the public. One of those is the historian Simon Schama. “This is an absolutely appalling idea,” he wrote on social media, after I posted a story about the villa’s opening. “It will be all about the movie and the perpetrator leading a ‘normal’ life and do nothing to teach anyone about the ordeal of the Jewish victims. Just a perpetrator attraction. Repellent.”
Wallace is adamant that their project will do the exact opposite: it will honour the survivors of Auschwitz by fighting extremism today. He mentions the rising tide of radical politics around the world and then explains: “Hatred lurks in the ordinary house next door.”
“Our plan is to convert the ordinary house of the greatest mass murderer into the extraordinary symbol of the fight against antisemitism and extremism.”
He then points out that when Höss was living at the house the windows were glazed to prevent anyone looking in. “The house,” he says, “will now be open to the public.”
