They called it a “paradise” but, these days, the former home of Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss and his family is a pokey, depressing fixer-upper.
Step inside and the entrance hallway floor – dirty terrazzo with a thick black border – resembles an outsized condolence notice. The rooms have creaking parquet floor, stripped plaster walls and unmatched views of the Auschwitz I death camp.
Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the notorious Nazi death camp outside Oswiecim, 70km west of Kraków in southern Poland.
Alongside official ceremonies, for the first time Auschwitz survivors will visit the house – and take in the perpetrator perspective – previously reserved for Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children.
The reality on display here is even more shocking than the 2023 film The Zone of Interest. It used a similar house elsewhere – and cinema trickery – to recreate the absurdly disturbing daily life of the Höss family. They rattled in and out of their modernist house and into an lush garden that backed on to the camp, within earshot of the grinding machinery of death.
Hans-Jürgen Höss, who died last month aged 88, maintained that facade when he revisited the former family home in the 2024 documentary The Commandant’s Shadow. Rather than the cries, gunshots or crematorium ash, he recalled a “really beautiful, idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”.
His selective memory was all the more remarkable when you taken in the view from his former childhood bedroom. The Auschwitz I camp is right there, on full display: the wooden guard towers, redbrick barracks, three-metre walls and twin barbed wire barriers.
The grey concrete house predates the Nazis, built in 1937 and then was seized and remodelled as the occupying commandant’s home for four years from 1940.
Today the vast garden is a mess of scrub while a new, busy road runs between the house and the adjacent river. But the Höss-era house number – 88, code for HH or Heil Hitler – remains.
By the time Höss was executed nearby in 1947, the house was back in private ownership. It remained that way until last October when, tired of growing numbers of gawkers, the family sold up.
The new owner is the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), an organisation that studies global extremism and advises state actors on how to push back.
It has big plans for the former Höss house, renamed the Auschwitz Research Centre on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation (ARCHER) at House 88. It hopes this authentic site can help retool for the 21st century the “never forget” mantra of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
“Some 80 years on, ‘never forget’ is not enough to prevent the hate and anti-Semitism that grips our society, we need to do more,” said Mark D Wallace, CEP founder and former US ambassador to the United Nations. “The ordinary house of the greatest mass murderer will now be part of the fight against extremism and anti-Semitism.”
The CEP’s radical plans will see the house interior gutted and transformed into a memorial space, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.
Other parts of the garden, where the Höss family had their pool and greenhouse, will contain new meeting, office and research spaces.
The CEP’s most pressing challenge is not the long list of repairs in the dilapidated house, team members say, but reversing the Zone of Interest effect. The Oscar-winning film by British director Jonathan Glazer attracted praise for its clinical, imagined observation of the Höss family.
But some wonder if its single-minded pursuit of authenticity, rather than challenging audiences, allowed them to lean back and fetishise distant Nazi-era aesthetics.
“People are so distracted these days by the so-called banality of evil,” said Jacek Purski, director of the new centre, in the house on Sunday. “But there is always a process behind evil and extremism. Exposing what is happening today is far more important than ‘where was Rudolf Höss’s bed?’”
Before the big renovation begins, the CEP made small, significant moves to banish any lingering ghosts. Both entrances now boast Jewish mezuzahs. On Monday, visiting survivors will hear live performances of music composed in the camp by fellow prisoners.
A clear-out of the house in advance of Monday’s anniversary turned up a striped prisoner uniform used to block a hole in the attic roof and a crumpled pile of newspaper scraps. One 1944 edition warns of “Soviet aggression in the Balkans” while another torn fragment insists that “only victory will end our...”.Someone in the Höss family retained several pages of black-framed condolence notices, like the hallway floor, of soldiers who “gave their lives for Führer, Volk and Reich”.
The house throws up occasional ironic clues to the former German owners, including a historic toilet lock that switches between “Frei”, free, and “Besetzt”, occupied.
Partnering with the adjacent Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, which focuses on the war era, CEP directors say their centre will have a greater freedom to expose extremist networks today.
“This is the house where genocide was developed on an industrial scale, to an industrial model, where people died on a schedule,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, a CEP director and terrorism expert.
He is also a descendant of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, credited with saving 1,200 Jewish lives during the war.
“My family name has been a motivating factor for my career and involvement in this project,” he said. “Believe me: today’s Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites are not at all shy. In the future, the former home of the worst murderer has to scream: j’accuse.”
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