In the fifth episode of World War S.H.E., hosts Mary Ellen Page and Angélica Cordero dive into the Zone of Interest, a film directed by Jonathan Glazer based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel. The movie, starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, explores the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, an SS officer and Auschwitz commandant, juxtaposing his familial roles against the backdrop of the Holocaust's horrors. The discussion highlights the film's portrayal of the banality of evil, its evocation of resistance, and the moral complexity of the perpetrators' lives intertwined with the systemic genocide. Delving into history, the hosts provide context on the Holocaust and Auschwitz, emphasizing the disturbing normalcy within the Höss household despite its proximity to atrocities. The episode critically reviews the film’s artistic choices, symbolism, and impact, ultimately contemplating the broader themes of genocide, moral accountability, and the importance of vigilance against hatred and inhumanity in any era.
This episode was recorded February 2, 2024. Transcript included below.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Mary Ellen Page: Hello and welcome to World War S.H.E., a podcast that shares the human experiences and the forgotten aspects of World War II that rocked the world then and echo still today. Hi, I'm Mary Ellen Page, and I am here with my buddy, Angélica Cordero. And today we're going to be talking about not reviewing, but talking about the film Zone of Interest. Angélica, why don't you give us a little introduction to the film?
[00:00:26] Angélica Cordero: Sure, okay, so this is a short little description about the Zone of Interest.
Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, Director Jonathan Glaser's Zone of Interest focuses on the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel, and his wife Hedwig, played by Sandra Huller, who also starred in the motion picture Anatomy of a Fall. The two were beneficiaries of Lebensbraum, whose family home, nestled between train tracks and gas chambers, is spitting distance from Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp located in occupied Poland, where Rudolph serves as commandant towards the final days of the Holocaust. Hedwig is fixated on self-preservation. While Rudolph is increasingly burdened by his duties, we reside inside the family’s encampment with background voices of ghost-like prisoners muffled by the perpetrator's quotidian musings. At one point, Hedwig and her atrocious friends joke about their new luxury goods received from Canada, the nickname of the storage facilities, where such items after being confiscated were stored at the demise of their former neighbors shot on location, the Zone of Interest weds banal and overt acts of evil with unforgettable reminders of resistance.
You know, Mary. The Holocaust is not my area of focus as a World War II historian, and I know that you spend a lot of time in Holocaust studies. So, I thought it would be cool if you could give not only myself, but our listeners, a little context on who Rudolph Höss was.
[00:02:20] Mary Ellen Page: Well, Höss was an SS officer who was tasked with basically creating the industrialized mass murder of Europe's Jews, Russian soldiers, Poles, everyone that they hated was possibly subject to this type of violence. And something important is that Auschwitz and the Auschwitz Birkenau camp complex was the largest of all of the camps throughout Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe and even North Africa.
This is a statistic that most people don't know, but the Germans created over 44, 000 ghettos, camps, and incarceration areas across Europe and Eastern and Western and Southern, as I've said before. And it shows you the determined effort it was to make sure that no Jews survived the war.
There were almost, no, there were a million people killed at Auschwitz. not just in the gas chambers, but by shooting, starvation, neglect, that kind of thing. But Höss was an unapologetic SS officer who was determined to fulfill his duty, which was to kill Jews. He streamlined the process of the trains, the gas camps, the showers, and the crematoria. He was so successful at it, and he actually was determined to have a better camp than Dachau, and that kind of thing, so I think it's really important to know that this was a person who wasn't just taking orders. He helped create what ended up happening at Auschwitz.
[00:03:52] Angélica Cordero: It was his brainchild, pretty much.
[00:03:55] Mary Ellen Page: It was and I think that's what's so important to realize in this film is that we're not seeing him so much with his superiors or even people who are working for him. We are seeing how he is able to basically bisect himself into two people, a loving father and husband and a mass murderer.
I was just reading an interview with one of his daughters who died recently. She basically said, “Oh, he was the best dad ever. And he was loving and this and that.” She actually even said he was doing what he was told to do as an excuse. Even knowing what they know now, they're still able to somehow put these people into two separate parts that one did have had no effect upon the other. And that's something I think that the show, the film actually really exemplifies; that here's a person basically living two separate lives right next to each other.
[00:04:49] Angélica Cordero: Mm hmm. You said just a minute ago about how he, I suppose, was in competition to have a better concentration camp, which sounds really weird to say, but why was that that he wanted to have a better concentration camp than Dachau?
[00:05:09] Mary Ellen Page: I think because they all wanted to share in that glow of Hitler, to be approved of. When you think about it, they were committing mass murder and they weren't having second thoughts about it. So, it shows you at that point how they had dehumanized the people that they wanted to incarcerate, especially the Jews and the homosexuals and the gypsy Roma. These were subhuman people. That's very much how it plays out that you have these people who think that they're in the right, that what they're doing is noble and necessary, and yet not realizing that he is killing the same aged people as his children, and as his wife and his friends.
And there's an interesting thing at the very beginning of the film. There's a river that's very close to Auschwitz, and they're all at the river and they're having this beautiful sunny day swimming and all of that. And then all of a sudden, Rudolf notices bones, human bones floating down the river. He gets everybody out and they go back home and they wash themselves off. That is, to me, the perfect allegory for the entire film. They experience it and then when they come up close to it, they wash it all off of them.
I read the book called Into That Darkness about the commandant of Treblinka, which was the number two most deaths. It had 900,000 Jews killed at Treblinka and how he basically said, “No, I was a strong, good Catholic. I was a loving parent this and this and this. And I just ran the camp. I didn't actually send people to the gas chambers. I was just in charge of the camp,” and how they are just so good at kidding themselves about the reality of what they were doing.
[00:06:54] Angélica Cordero: Mmm hmm. What I find most interesting about this movie is that we are not inside the camp at all.
[00:07:29] Mary Ellen Page: That is really important that everybody knows you're not seeing Jews going into the gas chambers or the crematoria. You're outside of the walls. And I think that's something that I think is so effective about the film. The Hösses lived on the Auschwitz campus. It was part of the Auschwitz complex. In reality, the film is not exactly accurate as to where the house was, but they were within viewing distance of the crematoria and the showers. I think artistically it was more effective to have them have the garden on the back wall of Auschwitz. Even though that's artistic license, it's actually true. It ends up being a truism that they were there, they were hearing, they were smelling, they were letting it wash over them, and yet not letting them it wash over.
[00:08:00] Angélica Cordero: So, it didn't in reality share a backyard then?
[00:08:05] Mary Ellen Page: A back fence, right. However, unless the walls to the back fence were 10 feet tall, they could see the camp from their garden and from their second floor of their house. Again, they were part of the entire area, the acres and acres and acres of Auschwitz. The movie was made to show a different aspect of what we call the banality of evil. That ordinary people can do unbelievably cruel and horrendous things, and yet still are able to say, “I'm a normal person, I'm a good person.” And I think that's something that is very effective, that it shows that that's not the case. That they might think it's the case, but it's not the case.
[00:08:52] Angélica Cordero: The thing that I really enjoyed about the creative license that was taken in placing us inside of the home, the Höss home, instead of inside of the camp, is the notion and the idea that challenges us to think things like this happen under our noses without us truly paying attention.
[00:9:20] Mary Ellen Page: Yes. And when the director was talking about the film, what he was saying was that the movie is as much about the Holocaust as it is about today. That here we all are and there are still genocides happening right now in the world, but there is also all this other madness going on. And yet every day we're ignoring it. I think one of the messages of the film is “Watch out. Even if you're in this safe little backyard, there's still craziness and inhumanity and everything swirling around us and we're not paying attention.”
[00:09:59] Angélica Cordero: In Spanish, there's a phrase, it was actually used as a movie title back in the early aughts. The phrase is “abre los ojos.” It means “open your eyes.” And for as simple and straightforward as that seems, really what it has is much more significant meaning of being, of saying “Pay attention to the things that you have happening right in front of you.” And that's a lot of what I felt like the movie was really trying to get at. Granted, a lot of other things as well, which I know that we'll probably discuss ad nauseum.
[00:10:39] Mary Ellen Page: In watching the movie, and if you haven't seen it, where you are is that you're in this beautiful, pretty house and an enormous garden that has a pool for the kids, a slide. It has garden vegetables that are bursting with food and nutrition and they're all outside playing. And then you hear yelling or screaming or you hear guns.
[00:11:05] Angélica Cordero: The juxtaposition of what you're talking about is what is also supposed to be very shocking, I think, because on one side of one fence is darkness. It's gray. It's brown. It's dusty. And then on the other side you have this liveliness of color, this liveliness of life. There're these two sides to the same coin, almost, is what's happening, right? Where within 30 feet of each other, you have death, and then you have life happening.
[00:11:41] Mary Ellen Page: Right. And you have way more death happening than life happening at this place. I mean, it's off the scales that way. And I think, also, it's a movie of sound. Again, if you haven't seen the film, one of the most effective things they did was you could see that the smoke coming out of the train of the trains, chimney, and it didn't, it wasn't done right away. They kind of led you into it. Then all of a sudden, you start seeing the black smoke coming out of the chimneys and the ever present, in the backyard, the guard tower is always there. It's all the barbed wire is visible. The guard towers are visible. So even they're under scrutiny, even though they're not. I think it's a very artistic and effective way of telling the story.
My son noticed that, uh, when we were watching it and this was in surround, but the openings credits and the end credits were in surround. But the film itself was mono. and he talks about the front speakers, which are behind the screen. He was saying that they wanted you to concentrate on what you were seeing, even though you were supposed to be concentrating on what you were hearing. Not having it in stereo doesn't affect what you're hearing. And so I think it was a very deliberate artistic choice to basically make you focus on not only what you were looking at, but also on what you were
[00:14:06] Angélica Cordero: This is a really funny thing that was caught by your son for two reasons. Firstly, what bothered me in the first two weeks five, ten minutes and made me uncomfortable. In hindsight, I realized it's because there's this sound that's in the background. It's very kind of low. I don't know that you can really hear it in prominence. And I swear to you, I kept telling my husband, “Don't you hear that? Can't you hear it?” And I swear to you, it sounded like either the train tracks coming, like a lower rumble of the train, or a low rumble of furnace. I kept hearing that at the same time that on screen what I'm seeing is something that is totally in opposition of what my ears are hearing. And that, I had a really hard time watching the entire movie. Because [within] the first 5 to 10 minutes, I was done. I legitimately was uncomfortable. I know so much and I know that that's another thing to it, is that it was provocative in that manner, and in a way that I obviously have some background, I understand all of what this whole thing is about, and just to see the banality of their daily life and them kind of operate in this place of “nothing is going on[…],” absolute sheer ignorance. And then to hear that and know it was in the background all the time, I kept thinking, “How could you live within 30 feet of this and hear that sound all the time? Because I'm barely here and watching it as a movie, and it's bothering me.” And that really hurts. That really sucked.
But the other thing I was going to tell you is that the second thing, to his point on like getting the audience to rest their focus[….], I don't know if you noticed this, but visually, a lot of the shots are static shots. They did a lot of what is called in the film world, “mise-en-scène”
[00:16:06] Mary Ellen Page: “Mise-en-scène!”
[00:16:06] Angélica Cordero: “Mise-en-scène!”
Mary Ellen Page: We love it!
Angélica Cordero: We do! It literally means everything that's happening on the scene happens within the frame of the camera. So there's no panning. There's no camera movement whatsoever. Everything that's moving is everything that happens within the frame of the static shot. And I really appreciated that as well because you could tell it was a deliberate choice. They were really, really, really wanting you to focus. Really, really wanting you to focus.
[00:16:38] Mary Ellen Page: And there are some other elements in the film that we need to talk about and we can come back to but, one of them is that[…] If you don't know, Yad Vashem is the largest Holocaust center in the world and it's in Jerusalem and if you were a non-Jew during the war that helped Jews, Yad Vashem will plant a tree in your honor and name you righteous among the nations. In the film, and was this, was this the monochromatic segments when…So there's this young girl; the film is in color, but this is almost in negative?
[00:17:09] Angélica Cordero: It's inverted. The way I explained it…I don't know that we need to get technical, but it was basically inverted. So, you were saying like a negative of the color version.
[00:17:23] Mary Ellen Page: But you could clearly see what she was doing and what she was doing was, and I thought this was a beautiful nod to the fruit that's growing in the garden itself in the house and the Höss garden, but she's hiding fruit for the prisoners. And she was a true person. She was part of the Polish resistance and she has been named righteous by Yad Vashem.
I thought that was a big beautiful way to show what was happening with people who were trying to help or who were acknowledging what was happening in the camp. And I think that in just terms of, art, but also in just in terms of the way the message was given, it was a perfect way to present that story.
[00:18:08] Angélica Cordero: They actually met that woman on location. So, the initial plan for the movie did not include those segments. Glazer actually met the woman while filming and made the decision during production to actually do it. At one point, Dorian, my husband, he asked me, “How is it nighttime? Or are they doing this at nighttime?” And a lot of shots like that are typically not necessarily done at night. They're usually done during the day, but the idea about the cover of night, right? In the shadows, what's happening in the shadows. He's deliberately making an artistic choice to show the resistance. And that was another thing. I immediately, as soon as we saw those segments, I immediately knew what he was talking about. He was immediately evoking resistance because it's an inversion, right? Inversion. And when you think about that and what symbols of inversion usually are supposed to be, in eliciting, it's usually resistance. And then you see her making that action of resistance by leaving the fruit along the paths. I think, that [path that the prisoners were walking.]
[00:19:33] Mary Ellen Page: were and interestingly enough, He uses a child, not an adult. In this aspect, the adults have totally failed to protect anyone. And here you have this child who's saying, “I know something's wrong and I'm going to do something.” I thought that was a really kind of beautiful way to do it too.
[00:19:52] Angélica Cordero: The other thing to your point is that we do see a lot of Höss children behaving as children. There is also that juxtaposition of the young woman in the inverted segments acting…
[00:20:10] Mary Ellen Page: Her age.
[00:20:12] Angélica Cordero: Well, not necessarily.
[00:20:13] Mary Ellen Page: Actually, not acting her age. Being an adult.
[00:20:14] Angélica Cordero: Right, exactly. She's behaving in an act of defiance. She's not playing. She's not joyous. She's not laughing. She is absolutely betraying quote unquote, as some people would probably think, her country.
[00:20:34] Mary Ellen Page: Yes and she is a child and she could be murdered for leaving an apple. Not just a bunch of stuff, but even one piece of food could get you killed. And so that actually, you talk about bravery. Well, the bravery in the film isn't with the soldier or with the family. It's with this young kid.
[00:20:57] Angélica Cordero: Which is also interesting.
[00:20:59] Mary Ellen Page: Which is also very interesting.
[00:21:00] Angélica Cordero: Yeah. The other thing to it as well is the idea of what youth symbolizes. And so, there is that aspect, too. To your point, I do agree. I hadn't thought, honestly, about the fact that he had made a choice to include a young woman in a position of resistance. But now that you bring it up, it does actually add a whole other aspect that I really honestly hadn't thought of before. It's really interesting.
[00:21:29] Mary Ellen Page: I've talked to a lot of people about this film and everyone has had a different reaction to it. I mean, I talked to, we call in the Holocaust world, the children of survivors are called 2Gs, second generation or 3Gs. So, I've talked to 2Gs and 3Gs, and many of them say, “Why are we learning about this useless family when we should be learning about the victims?” And I think that's a fair question, but I think it's important that we do know about the perpetrators. Because first of all, it shows you how quote unquote normal they were. Which I hate it when people say that because you're not. Even if you were normal or doing normal things. The fact that you could do what you did makes you not normal, makes you abnormal.
[00:22:17] Angélica Cordero: We've talked about this before, because usually in entertainment, Nazis are depicted as incredibly villainous, mustache twirling villains. The fact of the matter is that many Nazis were everyday individuals. This brings them into context in a more realistic manner that I don't think a lot of people [know.] It's almost as if they weren't ready for it because we've portrayed them so much as villains and they've never seen them in this context before. So they're having a hard time grappling with the fact that they were just people.
[00:23:03] Mary Ellen Page: And yet when I watch it, and of course, you know, you and I come at it from a historical perspective. But when you really think about it, these are not normal people. They're not normal. And even if, when you say, “Well, they were this and that.” You could say that about anyone who ends up committing horrific crimes. They were nice or normal until they weren't. And it doesn't mean that they were nice beforehand. It's just that we didn't see that part of them. When I look at Rudolf and Hedwig in the film, I never look at them as normal people. I never look at them as ordinary because of what we know. We know about the two of them. We know their thoughts; we know their opinions. And so, we can't divorce that from what we're watching.
But there's something else. And I wanted to ask you about this, and then we can get more into the kind of the whole thing of the movie. But Hedwig, I thought at the end of the film, by the end of the film, she was portrayed as quote unquote more evil than Rudolph. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. First of all, I think that they focused on the family and the wife because of what was happening in the camp. That juxtaposition, having a healthy five person family, whose husband is running this gas death camp and that's an evil thing.
And yet, you don't hear Höss making anti-Semitic comments, but at a point in the film when one of the servants makes a mistake, [Hedwig] says, “I could have your ashes spread in my garden.” Part of it just from a woman's point of view is that why is the mother always the evil, when he was the one running the camp? But I think it makes more sense when you think that she was a housewife and this house has been created by a housewife; the garden, everything, this comfort. When Hedwig's mother comes to visit, they both basically saying, “You've made it to the top of the mountain. You, you're now a success.” The whole insanity of what's happening in this home juxtaposed to even more insanity happening on the other side of the wall, I think is just an effective way to show you how insane it was.
[00:25:18] Angélica Cordero: To your point about Hedwig, the thing that just came to mind for the first time that I have thought this, is that what they were deliberately showing are where the variations of the absurdity of what these people were doing. Because you're right, Rudolph may not have verbalized it so matter of factly the way that Hedwig did, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't a perpetrator. It doesn't mean that he was a part of the problem. It doesn't mean he didn't have anti-Semitic views. It didn't mean that he had ascribed himself to any of this kind of mass death that he was the culprit of doing. The architect. I think it's a really interesting thing to consider that there are many opposing aspects to the movie where you see one and then another. And one and another, but they're the same coin, two different sides. and I think you see that even in Rudolph and Hedwig.
[00:26:33] Mary Ellen Page: Even in…Rudolf, he's transferred to another camp. He's obviously at the top of his game. So, they're using him to make sure the other camps are running well and doing his little SS thing. And Hedwig’s like, “Great. See you when you come to visit.”
[00:26:52] Angélica Cordero: She was pretty actually demanding and saying, “No way are we leaving. You're going. Bye. And we're staying.” It was actually, it made me laugh in many ways.
[00:27:03] Mary Ellen Page: But think about it. She's choosing to stay. A hundred yards from a mass killing center as opposed to going to another city where there's no smoke in the air, where there's no screaming, there's no shooting. She chose, and this is true, she chose to stay at that home even knowing what was going on on the other side. And I thought that was very, very telling. It was like this normal conflict. “Oh, I don't want to move. We just got the house fixed up and blah, blah, blah.” It was just about her comfort. It had nothing to do with what was happening on the other side of the fence. It’s that she felt that this was her prize, that this was, she had earned this. Basically, this gorgeous, beautiful home that just happened to be next to the largest death camp in the history of the world.
[00:27:54] Angélica Cordero: Well, the interesting thing about her that I took away was the engagement between her and her mother when her mother goes to visit. The idea that her mother, she's expressing almost kind of internal conflict that her mom was feeling about what was going on.
[00:28:13] Mary Ellen Page: And for her, it was gradual. So, she's there at the beginning. Remember? Hedwig is showing her around the house and the mother's like, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible. I am so proud of you and your family. I mean, this is success, right?” And then again, as you said, she's there. As her stay continues, well, go ahead and explain it because it was a very well done sequence.
[00:28:34] Angélica Cordero: Yeah, just over time, you hear her [mother] talking about neighbors or people that were friends of family that also Hedwig knew. And to hear her mother express this conflict about what was going to happen to them in general, and who they meant to her, and then Hedwig be so blasé and flippant about what her mother was saying, was really stark. You could see that in her mother, it wasn't sitting with her mother well, the way that Hedwig was being, Then when she falls asleep, I think it is that it might be that same evening. I forget, but she she falls asleep and she can hear the rumble of the furnaces and it wakes her up in in the middle of the night.
[00:29:24] Mary Ellen Page: Yes. Doesn't she start looking at the smoke from…and then, she vanishes overnight. The mother is suddenly gone and this was so well done. Hedwig finds a note from the mother. She opens it. She reads it and she burns it. We never know what's in the note. We know what's in the note. I think it shows too that Hedwig, and it confirms Hedwig is on board with what's happening. She's approving of what's happening on the other side of their garden fence.
[00:29:54] Angélica Cordero: It really speaks to the idea that I think a lot of us have a hard time really understanding somebody can be so callous in what they think of other people because it's absurd to think that the woman, she didn't care. She was like, “It doesn't matter.” She's just gonna, burn the note. “So what? So what mom is mad? So what I offended her? So what that she thinks that I'm a horrible person because I'm okay with this? So what if she thinks she can't believe that I'm raising my children like this? It doesn't matter, I'm my own woman. I'm gonna do whatever I want. I have my own thoughts. Blahdy. Blahdy, blah.” It's wildly insane to think that that is the mentality of that woman when it came to the idea of mass killing of human beings.
[00:30:48] Mary Ellen Page: You know, her kids, the two boys are in Hitler youth uniforms most of the time. Knowing what we know now, you talk to the relatives of like Himmler's daughter or the dog, they still don't or they refuse to appreciate, I would say, what people are upset about. They, say, “Well, he was a wonderful father,” as if that makes up for what he did to the millions of people that were murdered by their policies. That's the thing, As the film goes on, And I think people watching the film need to remember this because when Höss is then transferred and then he's brought back to the camp at the end, correct? He's then reassigned back to the camp.
[00:31:31] Angélica Cordero: It's the way the movie ends that he's going to be moved back. Mm hmm.
[00:31:35] Mary Ellen Page: Right. So, you have the kids, you have people coming to visit. When you mentioned, they're getting all these new clothes. Well, the clothes are from Jews. And so they get these beautiful, one of the boys is looking at teeth at one point from victims.
[00:31:51] Angélica Cordero: The thing that killed me is that there’s that one point when they made a delivery and she opens the delivery and it's a bunch of undergarments and she throws them on the table. I'm guessing it's her help staff that she, she basically goes over to them and she's like, “Just pick out whatever you want, whatever you want.” I just, I could, it's so…
[00:32:12] Mary Ellen Page: It's insanity.
[00:32:14] Angélica Cordero: It's insane.
[00:32:15] Mary Ellen Page: And you and I have a different opinion. I thought all of the servants in the house were Jews. But they're not?
[00:32:22] Angélica Cordero: I don't know. I'm saying it's unclear. It was unclear to me, but I think they were, but I'm not 100 percent certain that they were. Yeah.
[00:32:33] Mary Ellen Page: They were Polish Jews because you see that in other elements where they are used as servants. When she talks to this young lady who's made a very minor mistake or didn't tell her that her mother left or something saying, “I could spread your ashes,” that line means besides just the fact that she's living there, Hedwig is on board. She's anti-Semitic. She hates Jews and she wants them gone as much as everybody else does.
[00:32:57] Angélica Cordero: Did you see, I think it was early in, how there must have been prisoners whose responsibility was to do little tasks around the house, a couple of them being gardeners? And then I think there was one who had shined his boots or so forth. There was one point, to the point that you made about putting your ashes, her ashes in the garden. Did you see that one part where there was one of the prisoners who was one of the gardeners, discarding ashes into the garden?
[00:33:30] Mary Ellen Page: Yes. Yeah, and again, to draw their victims into the insanity too, you're seeing this entire organism playing out.
[00:33:39] Angélica Cordero: Do you know why ash is into the ground? I feel it's a weird thing. I guess I'm asking, is it a part of gardening that gardeners are like, “Hey, you should use this because it's good for the…” I just, I don't…
[00:33:54] Mary Ellen Page: I think that you could say, and I hate to be uninformed in a gardening sense, but you could also say that they were creating fertilizer. You could get that banal about it. You could say that, and I think that they might've used the ashes to make a point.
[00:34:12] Angélica Cordero: Oh, here we go. Sorry, I went ahead and I looked it up because it has been bothering me. I won't lie to you. It was one part that I was very confused by. I didn't understand why exactly they would do that. Because, I mean, you see the richness of the garden. It's so wild to me that if they're gonna freak out about being in the water, and have their kids rushed home and wash it off, “You gotta wash it off.” But then, they go and they take the ashes and they put it directly in [the garden…] This is the part that I don't understand because then at that point if you're putting it into your garden, you're growing fruits and vegetables and then you're eating them. How is that? How is one okay, and the other not? It doesn't track with their philosophy. I guess [that’s] the part that I didn't understand.
[00:35:04] Mary Ellen Page: But it’s also about opportunism. If they hated the Jews so much, if they thought they were vermin and scum, then why would they wear their clothes? You know what I mean? Wouldn't they be contaminated by just being owned by a Jew? No, no, no, no. Because they needed all that stuff. they made their own hierarchy of what was acceptable.
[00:35:20] Angélica Cordero: But again, it's this whole thing of like, when it's convenient to them. Looking it up as far as why you would put ashes into a garden anywhere, apparently there is soil that can be very acidic. Actually what ashes can do, they have micronutrients that help the soil, which is great. This again is back to this idea of the absurdity of what we're talking about. The fact that on the one hand that they're eager to wash off whatever dirtiness they got from just being in the water when bones were coming down, but then they are totally okay with this part [of putting their ashes in their garden.] It tells you how ludicrous the philosophy was in the first place. It's incredibly flawed.
[00:36:07] Mary Ellen Page: It’s inexplicable and yet here we are. It's really important to remember that that's why the juxtaposition of the pretty garden and the very famous, the most used picture from the film is Hedwig holding the baby smelling a flower. Right? That is actually one of the best things to show, which is you have this precious little baby who's just new to the world and in the next door they're throwing babies into the fires when they run out of gas or they separate them from their mothers. This mother is able to keep her children, but everybody on the other side can't keep their children. So, it adds to the insanity of being able to live rationally in two separate worlds. That's why showing it in this way is important because there are different aspects of how to look at the Holocaust. The most important one is hearing the stories of survivors and making sure everyone knows what happened.
But I think it's also important to show how it happened. And when you get to the point where you have demonized, labeled, ostracized, separated a group of people who look just like you, by the way, because of their whatever their religion or their race, then that shows you how it's inhuman. They can't appreciate that separating children from their parents or elderly people who had been together their whole lives. I mean, the barbarity and the cruelty of what they were doing 15 feet away from their garden wall. And I just feel like that's the power of it, that you have this family that is 100 percent on board with what's happening on the other side of their garden, including the kids. Even though you can't blame the children. Well, like I said, I've read an interview with one of his youngest daughters, and she's like, “Oh, no. It wasn't like that. It's really shows you how, I believe this to be true, that anti Semitism is everywhere.
People don't realize this, but in the United States of America 60 percent of hate crimes are committed against Jews. Not Muslims. Not gays. Not Christians. And I think people forget that anti-Semitism is why the Holocaust happened, virulent, unchecked, encouraged anti Semitism and demonizing a whole group of people successfully.
To the point where even after the war, Jews would go back to their properties and be murdered after the Holocaust because, oh my gosh, they wanted their house back. That was theirs. Even knowing what happened in the Holocaust, we're still fighting some of these same battles.
[00:38:54] Angélica Cordero: The interesting thing to me is when you start studying history, and you start looking backwards to make sense of a given moment in time, it was surprising to me that there had been previous moments or instances of hatred that was directed towards Jews that was very similar to the same kind of sentiments that were around during the Second World War. but more importantly, and closer to that timeframe, I had not really actually known how when the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia, that Hitler basically turned that into an opportunity to conflate Bolshevik Russia with Judaism. And it was another reason that they did not like Jews was because they were conflating the Bolsheviks with Judaism.
[00:39:58] Mary Ellen Page: When you think about the commissar order that was what was put out before Barbarossa, which took place in June of ‘41; basically saying you can, without fear of reprisal from upper level officers, kill anybody that they suspect of spreading Bolshevism or being a Bolshevist leader. But the underlying message is we know all the Bolsheviks are Jews. This is a double, a double whammy. We get rid of the Jew and we get rid of the Bolshevist. Even today, Communism has got this kind of, “Oh, well, you know, it was all the Jews.”
[00:40:36] Angélica Cordero: Yeah. The other thing to this as well from looking back in history and trying to make sense of things at a given date is how Hitler himself also blamed the Jews for the loss of World War I, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles and subsequently was a stab in the back of Germans and was also the reason why they suffered a lot from an economic standpoint after the First World War, too. I find those little aspects to be really interesting to consider when you start looking at the Holocaust and understanding better as to why people they felt the way that they did.
Not to get off topic or change it up entirely…One thing that I know that we've talked a lot about ad nauseum, and I know even now in recording we've actually talked a lot about symbolism in the film, like the metaphors and really in the meaning of what they were doing creatively and about what it means beyond just the history of the Second World War. I've told Mary this, now I'll tell everybody else, that I actually thought the movie did a really good job of attacking the idea of genocide and why genocide is bad in the first place.
[00:42:02] Mary Ellen Page: My daughter said the exact same thing. She said, “Mom, this movie is about genocide.” And I think that's a really important point to make, Angelica. I love how you talk about this. So please, explain why you say this is not just a movie about the Holocaust.
[00:42:19] Angélica Cordero: Well, for me, this is just my opinion. The idea of seeing how Höss and Hedwig were just living their everyday life, their regular get up in the morning and brush their teeth and do nothing, right? Knowing what was happening and not having any issue with it whatsoever, to me was really indicative of what is going on technically referred to as the 10 Stages of Genocide. One of the aspects of the 10 Stages of Genocide is classification and another is dehumanization.
[00:43:03] Mary Ellen Page: Exactly. Otherizing.
[00:43:07] Angélica Cordero: Classification is when we classify the world into us versus them. We put people into categories of good and bad, or otherizing. And then dehumanization, I mean, that's pretty straightforward. Basically, perpetrators, they'll call their victims rats or cockroaches, they're cancers or they're disease.
[00:43:27] Mary Ellen Page: Vermin.
[00:43:28] Angélica Cordero: Yes, that was also used pretty prevalently during the Nazi regime.
[00:43:36] Mary Ellen Page: And being used again today.
[00:43:38] Angélica Cordero: Mm hmm. Even in the telephone conversation that Rudolf Höss has in the movie, he does not make reference to the prisoners as individuals. In fact, he's making a phone call because what's happening is there are people or there are soldiers that are in the camp that are just willy nilly with no order whatsoever killing people. And he's been called and told that this is happening because the higher ups are upset.
Why are the higher ups upset? They're upset because that's labor. That's free labor to them. Those are resources. They're resources. They're workhorses. They're cattle. They are not individual human beings. They are seen very much like machine. It's very, very, very telling. It's not even that long, that phone call, but it was just so prominent to me next to all the other stuff that was happening in the movie that we'd seen that was doing very much of the same thing. It was really just kind of trying to show you that, “Hey, I think we want to believe that if we were in that instance, that we would never do that and that our family would never do that. And that people would never do that.” I think we want to believe wholeheartedly that we wouldn't do that. And that's just in the mentality, right? Where I'm not even talking about actually killing these people, I'm literally just talking about if you have a viewpoint in which you otherize somebody else and you make them out to be non human, that alone in and of itself, to me, is why the entire movie resonated as a movie about genocide and why genocide is bad. Period.
[00:45:43] Mary Ellen Page: Well, and also in order to make genocide work, you need Rudolf Hösses. You need Hedwig Hösses. I think people forget how truly antisemitic Europe was during the early part, even after the war. They still wouldn't let Jews into the United States. It was years, two or three years after the Holocaust. Even knowing what happened, Jews could still not get into other countries to escape Europe. And I think that people really need to realize this.
[00:46:17] Angélica Cordero: Well, it's a system. It's a system, and I think that a lot of people don't understand that until you actually start studying genocide. It really, honestly, for me, took me studying about Rwanda in depth to really understand that it is a system. It becomes institutionalized, and as soon as it becomes institutionalized is when things really start to hit the fan in a really bad way.
And so, I guess the movie to me was very much a warning, warning, warning, warning, [that] “Hey, you got to keep your eyes open. You got to watch what's happening.” It's really funny the movie is set in his home. But he is an officer. And he's a high ranking official. So, he has the power to be able to institutionalize a lot of things. You're seeing him in his family home. And I think that people have a hard time believing that these bad guys that do these horrible things could have a family and be a family man. And that's what makes the movie so powerful.
[00:47:23] Mary Ellen Page: Exactly, and that constant view of his kids loving him and Hedwig loving him and you could say, since he killed so many Jews or so many people at Auschwitz that technically he was a success, right? In terms of the Nazi mindset. I think the movie also in a kind of trite allegory “Look over your fence. See what's happening in your own community that you're just ignoring because it’s easier.”
[00:47:52] Angélica Cordero: It reminds me of the “if you see something, say something.” I know that that typically is the alert that comes on when you're at the airport, and it's usually in conjunction with, “Hey, if you see something like a bomb or something like that, you should, you know, say something.”
But I actually think of it more so from the perspective of […]remember, it was a couple of years ago in California on one of the Cal trains. A man attacked a woman, I think she was a Muslim woman, attacked her on the train. Somebody actually got involved, but the majority of the people on the train with them when this was going down did not do anything except for the one person, and to me, that is exactly what it is that they're trying to get at with this movie with us. [It’s] that we cannot sit quiet idly by as these things happen right in front of our eyes.
[00:48:50] Mary Ellen Page: I've heard a lot of survivors talk and I've met quite a few of them. One of our local survivors here in Arizona, Oscar Knobloch, his entire point to speaking is to be an upstander. Don't be a bystander. And being an upstander doesn't mean you have to take a bullet for somebody, but it means you have to speak up. You have to speak up. It is your obligation as a citizen to protect your own community. I think that when we really talk about the impact of the Holocaust, most survivors say we can't let this happen again. And yet, currently there are five genocide happening in the world.
[00:49:28] Angélica Cordero: Actually, no, there's a lot more. If you go to GenocideWatch.com…If you didn't know this, listeners, you can actually follow along to see all the different situations throughout the world and where they rank.
[00:49:41] Mary Ellen Page: China. Africa.
[00:49:42] Angélica Cordero: I mean, it's all over the world. They have it mapped out. They literally have every single one on there that you can look at. GenocideWatch.com will actually tell you what stages of genocide have been identified in conjunction with each one of those situations. They even rank it on is it a watch that we got to keep mindful of that that this could turn into something? Is it a warning like oh my god it's about to get really bad? Ir is it like things are really really bad and we need to do something ASAP? I really like the resource. The fact that it's there because then you can really know that this is really happening.
In studying genocide myself and my own personal values, I found myself really drawn to the notion of taking “the if you see something, say something” a step further. It may be very pollyanna to think, but I do think that even in bullying, basic bullying, just because you don't like somebody, is the beginning nuggets and seeds of not only discrimination, but classification and dehumanization. To me, it's the, to use a phrase from the 1980s, it's the gateway to genocide.
[00:51:11] Mary Ellen Page: When you talk about Holocaust education in the United States [… L]et's say something. Not even half the states in the United States have a mandatory Holocaust education. They don't. One of the things in Holocaust education that we recently passed [is] a mandate here in Arizona that the Holocaust has to be taught once between 7th and 8th grade and once in high school. And by the way, it's three hours each time. So, it's a fairly toothless, not a very motivating bill, but it's a beginning. They can start. At least it's in the books. It's for middle and high school. We're currently on board to build a new education center and it's for high school and middle school students.
But you start with bullying. I think that's where you start. And in the elementary school, when you start talking to kids about bullying and about otherizing, that's the vocabulary that they need when they get to middle and high school to understand the Holocaust. And so I think it's imperative. I think that they should expand the bill to include elementary school. Not necessarily talking about the Holocaust, but setting the knowledge that they need to learn about the impact and the negative aspects of genocide. It's so important. Every survivor I've talked to, they say education is the most important thing. And that's true. Education is the most important thing.
I love the stages genocide, but the 10th stage is “denial.” That after it's over, they will do everything they can to hide it. And that shows you, the Jews, they said, I mean, not the Jews, the Nazis kept saying, “We're doing this to benefit society, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Well, okay, then why did you try to erase some of the camps? Why did you try to erase what you did? You knew what you did was wrong and yet you still found reasons and justifications for what you did. It's madness.
[00:53:11] Angélica Cordero: Do you know what that sounds like to me?
[00:53:12] Mary Ellen Page: What?
[00:53:13] Angéilca Cordero: Wife beaters. Molesters. How is it any different? The thing about the 10 Stages of Genocide, and honestly, just studying genocide in the first place, that really it kind of shook me to my core, was that there are so many areas and arenas in in our lives that could escalate to be this bad. Because it all starts with how we other individuals. As soon as we start to dehumanize them is when it, to me, and I'm sure that possibly other scholars in genocide who, if they're listening, may have a different take on this than I do, but all I can say is that in everything I read and all the research that I did and understanding the differences between different genocides like Rwanda and the Armenian and the Holocaust and kind of comparing them to each other, it seemed to me that in the end, it came down to the fact that it was the minute that you start hating on somebody. The minute that you start hating on somebody else is the minute that [the potential for genocide begins.] It shows the capacity that we have as humans to even get to that place in the first place. The idea of prevention, in my opinion, starts at preventing us from othering each other.
[00:54:45] Mary Ellen Page: Exactly. That's why it has to start in kindergarten. And, or even preschool. There are ways that kids can learn about getting along and respect. And that kind of thing I think is so important. This is a kind of a spoiler alert. We know what happens to Höss. He's hung at Auschwitz. When Höss is going to be sent back to Auschwitz[…] Hedwig's still there with the family and he's now being sent back to Auschwitz to make sure that 430,000 Hungarian Jews died there. That was one of his last large [massacres] in May of ‘44. In the film, I'm not 100 percent sure if he's just been given these orders to go back, but he goes into a hallway. It's a multi level. You see the stairs up and down, you see the rooms, the hallways that go in every direction. And he begins to retch. He starts retching.
[00:55:43] Angélica Cordero: Throwing up. If you don’t know what retching is.
[00:55:46] Mary Ellen Page: Throwing up, vomiting. Okay. If you look down every hallway and up the stairs and down the stairs, it's darkness. Oh, and while he's vomiting, you're suddenly now at Auschwitz today. They're sweeping out the showers and they're going in. […I]t's showing the cleaning crew cleaning Auschwitz because Auschwitz now is a museum of the treachery that he started and completed and encouraged. And so I thought to me, that was a brilliant way to end the movie to show that, “Oh, here's Auschwitz as it's working now. The whole lie has been exposed. Everybody knows exactly what happened. They know that it was the worst criminal enterprise in the history of the world.” And he was the number one killer. They were all number one killers, but I mean, he was personally responsible at Auschwitz. And so I just thought it was a very effective way to show that you kind of like slam it up against today like, “Yeah, you lost.”
[00:56:50] Angélica Cordero: The interesting thing about the sequence that you're talking about is how you focused on one aspect and I can focus on another.
[00:56:58] Mary Ellen Page: Oh, good.
[00:56:58] Angélica Cordero: Because right before that whole sequence, he is on the phone with his wife and he's telling her about how he's going to go back. In that same conversation, he also starts to talk about a gala that he was just at.
[00:57:12] Mary Ellen Page: Oh, that's right. Oh yes.
[00:57:14] Angélica Cordero: So the gala he was just at was with a bunch of other dignitaries, other German officials. And he is basically standing over, well, it's not over them. It's on the second floor balcony. He's looking over them as they're at the bottom. They're dancing and they're schmoozing with each other, but the room is packed. It's a packed room. And when he has the phone call with his wife, he tells her that he found himself thinking about how to kill them, how to mass kill them.
One thing about that entire sequence, it is really, to me, brilliant, because you have him on a balcony, much like you would have the guard tower at Auschwitz. Also, this idea of them being packed into this room that almost you could argue, was a, what do they call it? A throw to the idea or to elicit the notion of it possibly being a gas chamber because he himself was standing at the balcony. He's looking down. It's a room and it's packed full of people. And it could easily be changed into a gas chamber as well. And then he goes and he says it. He verbalizes it to his wife, hangs up the phone, walks into the hallways that you're talking about, Mary, and then you see him going down a couple of stairs. He begins to vomit.
I saw the movie with my husband and he immediately [wondered,] “Why did he stop? Why did he stop?” And I said, “It’s because for one moment, one glimpse, for a second, he’s thinking, “Oh damn I was just thinking this about German dignitaries. This is wrong.” But then, what do you see him do?
[00:59:12] Mary Ellen Page: Pick himself up and leave.
[00:59:17] Angélica Cordero: So, everything is back to normal, right? It’s almost as if he talked himself out of it. For a moment that he was having a crisis of consciousness, literally fleeting moment, fleeting, and then all of a sudden snaps right back into it.
[00:59:39] Mary Ellen Page: And see that fleeting moment I look at as he knows that he’s going to get executed for what he's doing. He knows that the world is going to find out and everybody's going to know that he did it. And I think that too, because remember by the spring of ‘44, May, there was a month, then D-Day, [the Germans] were losing the war for two years by this point. And so everything was going downhill. Yet one thing that they didn't stop doing during the entire war was killing Jews. That's the one consistent thing they did throughout the entire war. And they weren't going to let some little losing the war little interference mess up with their determination to finish the job.
[01:00:21] Angélica Cordero: It's almost as if it goes to that notion of, well…I don't know where my dad got this, but my dad has said this phrase, “Every dog has its day.” And it's almost as if in that moment he recognizes he's damned. It's over. There's nothing left to redeem himself. He's gone way too far past it. It's over. It's just over. Back to the notion of [the movie] speaking to a more generalized theme, I think it also is telling us a lot about that. “Don't go so far that you cannot go back.”
[01:01:00] Mary Ellen Page: Right. Here's the thing though, he all of a sudden [has] this realization in this dark hallway. And yet he decides, “You know what? I still am going to do it. I'm not going to be deterred.” He saw the reality. He came to his senses and just as quickly lost his senses because he decided, “Well, whatever, I'm just going to do it.”
[01:01:24] Angélica Cordero: Well, it's because he's already stepped in it. He's like, “I've already stepped in it. What can I do now? There's no going back.” It's almost, you know, when you just willfully surrender in those moments. You know it's bad. You know it's bad and you do nothing to stop it. You just keep going.
[01:01:40] Mary Ellen Page: Right. If you've read the book Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning about this police group that was basically shooting during the Holocaust by bullets was, which was before the gas chambers were introduced. And you have all these people generally like, you know, cost accountants and, you know, dentists and teachers and farmers murdering 20,000 people over a weekend and with guns and with their own gun.
There's so much psychology behind this. There's so much, but I believe when you think about, we were talking about the sex trafficking, you know, all of the materials in the schools for kids was grooming them to be anti Semites, right? This was all about grooming. And I think too, if you also think about it, Höss saw what he was doing and he knew what was wrong, but “at the end of the day, they're Jews. So I'm going to continue doing it.” I think there's also that this hatred made him, of course, hatred makes you insensible and irrational. But even with his realization, it did nothing to stop him. He just got sick for a couple of seconds. He cleaned himself up. He's left.
We've been talking about the Zone of Interest and, and there's lots of good Holocaust films out there and I highly recommend that you do watch them. I think one of the things about the Zone of Interest, and I've told this to people, it was mercifully only about an hour and 40 minutes. It wasn't the three hour Schindler's List. You were exhausted when the film was over, but it was quote unquote mercifully short and yet able to tell the entire message in a nice, hundred minutes. I recommend watching it. It's streaming now. Some movie theaters still have it because it was nominated for Best Picture. It won Best Foreign Film and Best Sound. And it should have won Best Sound. Although, I wish some of the sounds coming from the camp had been a little louder. But again, that's me being a purist and that kind of thing.
But I think that in terms of, we talked about this too, that someone said, if you didn't know about the Holocaust, could you watch this movie? And I think that the answer to that is yes. Do I think you'll get as much out of it? No. But I think you will understand the mentality behind what was happening, and I think that that's that's the most important thing. [It’s] that it's the juxtaposition of this idyllic suburban life juxtaposed to a massive criminal enterprise of torture and cruelty and murder. I think part of it is saying this could happen to any of us, either as a victim or a perpetrator, and that you can't let the majority, the outside, the strong voices detour you from doing the right thing. And I think this is a show about the failure of anybody to say anything that could stop it.
[01:04:31] Angélica Cordero: I have to agree with you. I don't think you need to know as much as we know about it. And look, you know a lot more about the Holocaust than I do. It's like I was saying before, we've notoriously in entertainment portrayed Nazis as these crazy villains that twirl their mustaches. I think when you see [the movie], he’s still wearing his SS uniform. You still see and understand that he is a Nazi and it is World War II. You understand, you know what it is. So, it's almost kind of like you're starting to see the human depiction of a villain that you're used to understanding and still seeing exactly how like you can be a villain and have these thoughts and views on the world and perspectives and do all these horrible bad things, but then on the other hand still be somebody that's just like you and I.
[01:05:26] Mary Ellen Page: And then everything surrounding you is people not intervening, too. Of course, most of the camps were in Poland and they were an occupied country, but there were camps in Germany. When you look at a map and again, I'm going to mention the 44,000 camps; and this is what I want to say, because we talk about these, there's always like a bunch of understanding Nazis, but then the really cruel, crazy one who they have to follow their orders, which is bunk. But when you see the amount of camps there were, even in Germany, and that there was really very little chance that most people wouldn't know [about them], I think that also is said to the story where you have this madness around you and everybody's like, “Okay.” Nobody took a stand. I mean, people did take a stand, but not enough. I just think that the show, like Glazer said, it exemplifies that we can get used to craziness, and that's the danger is getting used to craziness,
[01:06:21] Angélica Cordero: And making it out to be normal. Making the crazy, the absurd, normal.
[01:06:30] Mary Ellen Page: And even noble. That's the real danger.
We would love to hear from you out there. If you have some opinions, if you think that we saw it wrong, please write us and tell us because there's a lot to unpack in this movie. And we could probably talk for the next day and a half. Maybe we'll do a part two, who knows? But I think we've hit the major points which is that this is a movie that challenges you. It challenges you to look a little harder, to listen a little better, and to analyze what's happening a
[01:06:58] Angélica Cordero: Right. Right. It is definitely a movie that requires you to pay attention. Like you were saying, Mary, you have to analyze it. You have to think about more than just what the story is that's being told because they are deliberately making creative decisions in how they are depicting it on screen and in acting, in the dialogue, in the sound. Every element they have thought through and been very deliberate in the decisions that they've made. So, when you watch it, you gotta just think and analyze it. What does it mean? What do I feel? What is it [in] the way in which they're shooting this angle specifically making me feel? What are they trying to say? Blah, blah, blah. Right.
[01:07:44] Mary Ellen Page: And remember it was a British director, but it's in German. It's not Americans or British people with German accents. These are German actors or German speakers which I think makes it even more effective because it's then it's a real slice. I really encourage you to watch it and would love to hear your comments on it. Because again, everybody has a different perspective on it or even a different thing that they learned from it. But there's a lot to unpack, and I think it's a challenging movie that way.
[01:08:15] Angélica Cordero: Honestly, the fact that you've sat through all of this, Mary and I could talk about movies in this way probably all the time. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in. Make sure to connect with us. Follow us on Instagram @WorldWarShe. You can also subscribe to our newsletter on Substack at WorldWarShe (dot) substack (dot) com. Have a topic you want us to get into? Shoot us an email at worldwarshepodcast (at) gmail.com.
[01:08:51] Mary Ellen Page: Thank you so much for joining us for this now fifth episode of World War S.H.E. Angélica, it is always way too much fun speaking with you. I know we will meet again with our headphones and our microphones, and we will discuss some aspect of the war. So, whenever we get our next set of orders, we'll see.
[01:09:09] Angélica Cordero: Yes, ma'am.
[01:09:10] Together: Over and out.
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