The Commandant's Shadow (2024) Movie Script
It feels strange being here with my father
in the Judean Desert,
which his own father crossed in 1917,
during the First World War,
when he was the youngest
non-commissioned officer
in the German army.
30 years later, when he was
nearing his death, he wrote,
"The life and death of the Jews
is truly a riddle
I have not been able to solve."
By then, he had killed more people
than any other man in all of history.
Okay.
I'm not a writer.
Writing has never been my strength.
I've recorded everything as I remember it.
My life has been colorful and varied.
My fate has led me through
all the highs and lows of life.
I have had two guiding stars
since I returned as a man
from the war I entered as a schoolboy,
my fatherland and my family.
I became the Commandant
of a new camp, Auschwitz.
I, myself, hadn't expected to be promoted
to Commandant so soon,
and it wasn't an easy task.
Out of nothing, and without any resources,
I was to build something enormous
as quickly as possible.
Russian prisoners of war
were meant to build the camp.
They arrived in a totally decrepit state.
We were constantly giving
them additional rations,
but without success.
They were dying like flies.
Cases of cannibalism were not uncommon.
Of more than 10,000
Russian prisoners of war
who were supposed to make up
the main workforce,
by the summer of 1942,
only a few hundred were still alive.
Himmler visited Auschwitz
and had a thorough look at everything.
We drove through the entire
Zone of Interest.
I was constantly drawing
his attention to the shortages.
He, too, saw them.
He shouted at me when
I could not stop talking about
the atrocious conditions.
"I don't want to hear anything
else about difficulties.
"For an SS leader,
there are no difficulties.
His task is to resolve them."
The enormity, I mean,
of what he do-- what he did,
what he conceived.
For years, planning,
making this concentration camp
the most efficient
extermination machine ever--
that ever existed, right?
I mean, that's his plan.
Auschwitz was his
kinda his brainchild.
Auschwitz became a Jew camp,
a gathering camp for Jews
to an extent not known before.
For the Jews of Auschwitz,
there was no more hope.
They knew that, without exception,
they were condemned to death.
Zyklon B was in constant use
for pest control in Auschwitz.
We decided to use this gas
for the mass extermination.
"I, myself, watched a killing,
protected by a gas mask."
"The door was closed,
"and the gas was poured
in through the openings.
"Some shouted, 'Gas,'
and a mighty yelling..."
...and pushing towards both doors ensued.
But they withstood the pressure.
They were only opened after a few hours
when the chamber was aired.
How long this killing took,
I'm not sure of,
but you could still hear a
humming noise for a long time.
That is when I saw gas corpses
for the first time in a heap.
I did not give any thought
to the killing itself.
It had been ordered,
and I had to execute it.
When I first read
my grandfather's memoirs,
what struck me was, he was
like a clinical observer,
just looking at himself,
looking at what he was doing.
It was a very clinical, like a scientist
that looks at a lifeless experiment,
and that had showed me some
kind of a coldness of his soul.
There wasn't much conversation
about Auschwitz in my family.
I think my dad was always
pretty quiet about it.
That's just silent generation, right?
They don't really talk
about stuff that much,
and he's not a big talker today either.
So, yeah, it's hard.
I mean, it freaks me a
little bit when you think about,
like, there's this, you know,
this joyful family life
going on with, you know, actually
quite beautiful presence and
joy, fun, having toys, and enjoying life.
And then, just a couple of hundred yards
behind the walls, you know,
and barbed wired walls,
there would be people being murdered.
That is just mind-blowing
when you think about it.
For me, it's pretty difficult to kind of
imagine that they did not actually smell,
or hear, or see anything.
I think my dad probably, subconsciously,
suppresses some of
the experiences he's had.
Put it in some very deep layers
of his conscience
where he just really doesn't remember,
like protecting himself, his mind.
In Auschwitz, you were killed
in the most sophisticated manner.
People got gassed in a gas chamber.
The place is full of black smoke,
horrible smell.
Hell.
Hell on Earth is Auschwitz.
When I arrived in Auschwitz,
it transpired that there was a band there
that needed a cellist.
They didn't have a cellist.
So, my arrival seems to have been a,
you know, a great event.
So I became the only cellist
in the camp orchestra,
which was a very,
very lucky position to have.
Absolutely saved my life.
My mother survived
the murder of her parents,
witnessed the murder
of millions of others,
being starved,
every imaginable horror.
We had the job of playing marches
for the thousands of people
who were working in the factories
that surrounded Auschwitz.
Because the Germans like
everything nice and neat,
so we had to play marches
so that the working people could,
you know, walk out to the music.
But, this was also conceived as
a sort of entertainment for the guards.
Very boring places, you know, for us
all just to be guards in Auschwitz.
Those were times long before television
or any entertainment.
I found out after the war
that there were orchestras in every camp.
And the camp commander
of Birkenau where I was
suddenly is all,
"They all got music.
I want music as well."
We played. Hopefully,
next day, we are still alive.
That's how it was. Yeah.
I was just looking, Mom,
at your cello case.
It's such
- a monument, isn't it?
- Yeah.
A symbol to your life as a cellist.
I know.
The way in which my mother
found some kind of way
to be in the world after the Holocaust
was by not speaking.
She had settled into a kind of silence.
I only had one thought in mind
when I came here to catch up with lost--
my lost life, my lost youth.
When I arrived in England,
nobody asked any questions
about Auschwitz.
So, we decided,
"What's the point here?"
So, we didn't talk about it.
It took nearly-- I think it was 50 years,
and then my children said to me,
"Mom, you never actually
told us anything."
As a child, I was very aware
that there were no-go areas.
Anything German was bad.
So, you kind of settle into
a limbo of not knowing,
not knowing facts,
but a sense of knowing that
there is something really awful
in the hinterland.
I know now, as a psychotherapist,
that those born to Holocaust survivors,
as I am, can inherit a traumatization
that it sort of sits inside the psyche
and has no shape,
has no form, has no words
because words-- it hasn't
been given a context.
And I felt this from being a tiny child.
But nobody in those days
understood the impact of the Holocaust
on the second generation.
And this was my room.
It was the first room of my own,
but it wasn't a happy place.
When I look at the pictures of myself,
probably aged under 2,
I'm overwhelmed with sadness.
See, these are snaps
of a child in deep despair.
A child, which who is not sweetly plump,
but a misshapen child.
My struggle through life
is somehow symbolized
in these early pictures.
My mother wasn't there.
They are pictures of an inability
to take care of me
in the way that I needed.
And that, certainly for me,
was a consequence
of my mother's experiences
in the Holocaust.
I'm the wrong mother for my daughter.
I'm very basic.
Traumatized? Forget it. Get on with life.
If you have lived through
the unbelievable horror
that I've lived through,
it's quite difficult to actually
sympathize or empathize.
Do you know that
I'm somebody who needs nothing?
I could never understand
why you needed everything.
Completely anathema to me.
And it's still anathema to me.
What I needed just wasn't available.
I think what you needed
is to have your mother at home.
- Right.
- That's what I thought. But for me--
- Yeah.
- Your mother wasn't at home because we had
- to put bread on the table, you know?
- Yeah.
- But how can a child understand that?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Of course.
I think you think
that you and I are very different.
Do you think that there
are any similarities?
I would have to look a long way.
I would have to look a long way.
- Really?
- Yeah.
It's really interesting, isn't it?
That my whole life,
which chunks of it have been
about a feeling of not belonging,
in any sense, in British society or
just not belonging,
and everything always
being a huge struggle--
But, I was lucky because I had a very
fulfilled life in England, which...
which you didn't manage.
For you,
- this has been a place of refuge.
- Yeah.
Well, one must realize also, looking back,
what was the situation like in Germany.
A lot of unemployment,
and then this lovely Mr. Hitler appears.
Suddenly, we are somebody again.
So, yeah.
National Socialism became a big success.
I considered the National
Socialist worldview to be
the only appropriate one
for the German people.
Antisemitism is nothing new.
It has always existed all over the world.
It becomes more apparent
when the Jews push themselves forward
too much in their quest for power.
I'd like to stress that, personally,
I've never hated Jews,
but I considered them
the enemy of our people.
Once, two little children
were so absorbed into their game
that they absolutely did not
want to allow their mother
to pull them away from it.
Even the Jews of the Sonderkommando
did not want to take the children.
I will never forget
the mother's expression
in her eyes, begging for mercy,
as she surely knew what was happening.
Those in the gas chamber
were already getting restless.
I had to act.
Everyone was looking at me.
I gave the non-commissioned officer a nod,
and he took the children,
who were putting up
a fierce struggle in his arms,
and put them into the gas
chamber with the mother,
whose screams were heartbreaking.
I also saw a woman
who tried to push her children
out of the gas chamber
as the door was being closed.
Weeping, she cried out,
"At least let my precious children live."
Seeing women walk into
the gas chambers with children,
I often thought of my own family.
I come from a completely assimilated
German-Jewish family.
My father was a soldier
in the First World War
with the Iron Cross and all the--
Yeah, we were Germans.
And Jewish, but we did not
practice the Jewish faith.
My father, unfortunately,
was a complete optimist.
He said, "The Germans
can't be that stupid."
And then, he realized
the Germans are that stupid.
In the 1930s, all Jews in Germany
were stripped of their nationality.
My mother, and father, for that matter,
were never interested in
reclaiming German citizenship
although they would've been entitled to.
Germany was finished for me.
I don't belong there.
I couldn't wait to become
naturalized British.
Life without a passport
is very complicated.
But I decided that it was time
to get my citizenship.
When my German passport
was delivered to my house,
I remember just feeling
a huge sense of elation.
I felt triumphant.
Do you want this?
Will your home move
be within the next 28 days?
Yes.
Will your home move be
within the next 28 days?
Yes!
So now, I'm embarking on a new life.
I've decided to try and live in Germany,
a country that I've never lived in
and don't even speak the language.
But my bones belong there.
I should never have been born here.
I should have been born in Germany.
Hi, Mom.
It's gonna take me a bit of time to load.
Can you just move forward a bit?
No, stop!
Would you like these lights?
- Well, just bring it or whatever.
- Okay.
I'm doing my best, Mom.
Immigrating to Germany was met
with some incredulous responses
'cause, after all, this was the country
that my grandparents had been murdered in,
as so many Jews were,
and it was the country
that my parents had fled from.
Indeed, my mother didn't
set foot back in Germany
for many, many years.
- Mom.
- Well, well, well.
So this is where you're living?
This is it.
Well, well, well. Oh, my goodness.
Oh, this looks beautiful.
Do you wanna sit down
- and have a cigarette?
- Yeah.
Oh, yes, a whole gallery there.
Yeah.
Very, very impressive.
Now, you gotta take
all these schnukies away,
so they can see the books.
Is it an exhibition place or a bookshelf?
No, I like my schnukies.
I guess, in some way,
making this home here
has something to do with an idea of trying
to reclaim stolen lives,
and also my unlived life.
Yeah. It also shows
what could have been
and was destroyed for no reason
other than stupidity.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
But, alas, the stupidity
seems to be perpetuating.
You know, obviously,
people need scapegoats,
and seeing the world is
in such a mess at the moment,
it is typical, it was the fault
of the Jews again.
I kept experiencing being here,
this terrible cultural dissonance,
and I was confronted with
unconscious antisemitism.
- You sure you don't imagine that?
- No, I don't imagine it.
And it's hard sometimes not just want
to turn round and run away.
- But where to?
- Exactly.
- That's the Jewish fate.
- That's the Jewish fate.
- You don't belong anywhere.
- Yeah.
And where you do, where you should belong,
you got the biggest problem.
The process of selection on the ramp
was full of incidents.
When families were ripped apart,
the men separated from
the women and children,
great agitation and turmoil
rippled through the transport.
And the separation of those fit
for work added to this
because the families wanted
to stay together by all means.
The Jews have a strongly
developed sense of family.
They cling to each other like limpets.
This gave every one commanded
to do this monstrous work
a lot to think about.
It left lasting impressions.
Most of those involved often came up to me
during my inspection round.
I heard the same question again and again.
Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands
of women and children
have to be exterminated?
And I would ask myself the same question
countless times deep inside,
had to have fob them off
with the Fuhrer Order,
console them with that.
I had to tell them that
the extermination of the Jews
was necessary to free Germany
and our descendants
of our adversaries once and for all.
My grandfather, obviously
he somehow swallowed,
you know, Nazi ideology,
I mean, socio-Darwinism in a sense,
he swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
It made sense to him
at the time, the master race.
Auschwitz was given to him
and the way he was wired,
as a human being in his character,
was to do an excellent job.
Father, we just thank You
so much, Lord, for Your word.
Thank You for Your love for us, Lord.
Your patience with us, Lord.
You care for us like
we're Your children, God,
and just thank You
for blessing us this way.
I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Alright, tuck in, guys. Let's get it.
- I would say ladies' first.
- Dig in. Dig in.
I'm a pastor for
Bible Church for Stuttgart
and we serve an international community,
including personnel
from American military bases
and other expats.
We're our having monthly
men's prayer breakfast.
Just the men of the church
having a wholesome,
Godly good time together, that's all.
You guys, you have
enough space there, everybody?
On this study, I was just thinking about,
you know, men here today, men,
Christian men, any man.
Men in general in the,
in the 21st century, right?
What is our mission?
The Bible calls on us men to be leaders.
With leadership
comes great responsibility,
not just in what we teach at home,
but also how we act and walk with God
in each and every day, so...
When I became a Christian
and I read the Old Testament,
it's talking about
the sins of the fathers,
like how we revisit those, you know,
to the third or fourth generation,
and I thought, "Whoa."
My grandfather, he was a go-getter,
an ambitious man, a meticulous man,
but to the point where he, you know,
he turned into this monster,
this ruthless killer and, yeah,
he was not watchful.
And I don't think we can
become mass murderers,
but I think every human being, all of us,
have the propensity to go into a direction
that is totally wrong.
Thank you so much. So let's pray.
Thinking about it,
my grandfather's legacy,
there is blood on
the hands of the Hss family.
People are still suffering now.
I mean, even in my family,
you know, almost 80 years later.
Oh, and you have--
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Look at The Frog King.
Oh, God...
Oh, my God. Come on in.
I have to go on-- I'm a little
uneasy without the stick, you know?
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Oh, my God.
I'm happy now you're here.
My family had a lovely time in Auschwitz.
My wife had her flower paradise.
The children could lead
a carefree and pleasant life.
In summer, they splashed
in the paddling pool in the garden
but their greatest joy was
when Daddy bathed with them.
It often happened at home that
my thoughts suddenly turned
to some of the extermination processes.
Often when I saw
our children happily playing,
my wife being overjoyed with
the youngest one, I thought,
"How much longer will our happiness last?"
We had a beautiful mother and father.
- Yeah.
- Beautiful.
Many people don't have that good
- of a life.
- Yeah.
When he talks in his book,
he was outside gas chambers
when women and children were herded in,
how does that feel
when you think about it?
I was very sad, and I have
nightmares sometimes
because he was the only one who said
what was done there.
He was a good person.
You mean he was honest
about his role in mass extermination?
Yes, but he got into it,
and he couldn't get out of it.
And, what about your mother Hedwig?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't want to talk about it anymore.
Do you find it, you know,
- do you find that--
- Depressing.
- It's depressing?
- Yes, yes.
Sometimes, I even thought,
"Why do I have to...
suffer, like, physically, so bad?"
And I even sort of said,
"Is this God will be angry with me
because my dad did things?"
But, I said, "I will never
be angry with my dad."
He must've been a very strong person
to live like this
and do what he had to do.
So...
What he had to do was to basically kill
more than a million people--
I don't think that way.
And look at all the people
that say they died in the camp,
but all the survivors,
why didn't they die?
They're still living,
and they get money now
from Germany or from the Jewish people.
And, you know...
So, just whatever you want
to believe, you do.
Do you think you're in the denial?
No. Why?
I mean, it was the way it was.
It was the Third Reich.
It's a long time ago.
All that's history, I think.
What can I do? What can I say?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear, Mom
Happy birthday to you
Nothing wrong with
your breath or oxygen supply.
Well done.
I'm nearly 100 years old.
I don't know why
I should get so old, really.
There must be a reason somehow. I mean,
some of us, thank God,
who lived in those days are still alive.
But, when we've gone, finished.
Mom always says she hates birthdays,
she hates fuss, leave her alone,
so on and so forth.
But, today, she celebrated her--
she's celebrating her 98th birthday
and is surrounded by very dear people.
It's quite incredible, Anita,
to think that your parents
were such close friends
of my grandparents.
Yeah, we were tremendous friends.
My story's the typical Jewish story
because Judy's grandfather and my father,
we lived very happily in Germany.
And when the trouble started,
Judy's family had
the intelligence to leave.
And they encouraged my father
to leave as well.
My father went to Palestine,
and he came back and said,
"I don't want to live in the desert."
But Judy's family survived,
and my father did not.
And this is the place
where my family were from.
Now it's called Wroclaw, and it's Poland.
Although it's not Breslau anymore,
it will always be to me.
I want to, I have to, I must
connect the parts of our family history
into one narrative that lives on.
And so, I have to be here
because it's all part of one story.
The recollection of my youth
is a very happy one.
I had two sisters, Marianne and Renate.
My father was a lawyer,
and my mother was a very,
very accomplished violinist.
I mean, culture was written in
very big letters in our house.
We have a large collection
of Wroclaw photographs,
and the home that my mother lived in,
which was a residential,
beautiful outbound apartment house
with a wonderful terrace.
I knew that didn't stand anymore,
but I hadn't imagined what's in its place.
We were, yeah,
just a normal family really.
We became abnormal
with the advent of Hitler.
The front just closed, and
it was all too late for
a whole family to get away.
And then, the war broke out,
and then that was obviously
the end of everything.
And in 1942,
the deportation started.
And my parents were deported to the east.
My grandparents were given
24 hours' warning by the Gestapo
but they had to report the following day
to where the rounding up
of the Jews was happening.
So my mother spent that
last night packing, packing
and my grandmother
was in another room, crying.
And I know that my grandfather's hair
turned gray that night.
My mother wanted to go with her parents,
but my grandfather said,
"No. Where we're going,
you will get there soon enough."
My grandparents were deported
to a place called Izbica.
We need to leave something symbolic
to let you know that your
daughter, my mom's cello,
literally saved her life.
Miraculously,
my grandfather was able to smuggle out
two notes to my mother and her sister.
The last one being the psalm,
"I lift up mine eyes
from whence cometh my help.
A help coming from the Lord."
"Send food. Mutti can't write.
She isn't well."
Which I always understood
that she was dead already.
I've been driven by the need
to create some sort of
in perpetuity for my grandparents.
This happened, these people existed,
and these people happen
to be my grandparents,
and the millions of others
who have no graves.
I think I want to call my mom.
Hello, Mom.
Hi. Where are you?
Can you see?
Can you see?
What is it?
- Your parents.
- What?
Pictures of your parents
and the candles I've lit.
Yeah, I can't really
recognize it. Very nice.
But, I'd like to--
Oh, yeah, yeah. I can see now.
I was smoking in front
of my grandparents,
and I felt guilty.
So, where are you exactly now?
Standing in the middle of Izbica.
What village, is it?
No. I'm in like a big wood.
- What is that?
- Another memorial.
What does it say?
I can't read Hebrew or Polish,
but I did what I wanted to do.
- Good choice.
- Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Ja.
Nein.
I have memories of my grandma, Hedwig.
She would sometimes visit
when we were small.
She was like the lady of the manor,
where my mom always felt, like,
intimidated by her.
She'd wear this white apron,
her hair in a bun.
And she was kind of rigid,
too, in her views.
Now, I never talked to her
about the Holocaust
as a child, you know?
What my mom told me that there was,
you know, a sort of reluctance
to actually own up,
to call it for what it was,
you know, a mass murder.
Holocaust. Shoah. Millions of people
killed by, you know, by her husband.
My grandmother, Hedwig Hss,
she got a one-way ticket
to visit Aunt Pppi,
but the rumor has it that
she took this cyanide pill
that she had actually showed
to members of the family
years earlier, that she still
was in possession of this,
you know, suicide device
from the Second World War
that they were all handed
or all issued to commit suicide
if they were captured
by the enemy or something.
What do you think of the rumors
that she committed suicide
- by biting into a cyanide pill?
- Who?
- Your mother.
- No way!
No way.
Who said that?
It's not true.
I just would love to die the way she died,
just go to sleep and wake--
not wake up.
She had these ideas that
it just all went wrong,
that it could've been so good,
you know, if given the chance.
As she said, "We rose with that star,
and we fell with that star."
The Fuhrer was dead.
My wife and I had the same
thought at the same time.
Now, we, too, must go.
Our world had gone down with the Fuhrer.
Did it make any sense
for us to go on living?
We would be hunted.
They would search for us everywhere.
We wanted to take poison.
We did not do it
for the sake of our children.
Later on, I regretted it again and again.
We were bound and chained to that world.
We should have gone down with it.
I knew that the English Field
Security Police were looking for me,
and also that my family
was strictly monitored,
and that there were constant
searches of their quarters.
On the 11th of March, I was arrested.
My poison ampule had
broken two days before.
I was treated very badly
by the field security police.
I was paraded around
like a particularly interesting animal.
The interrogations were not very pleasant.
I cannot resent the interrogators.
They were all Jews.
I'm gonna see Mom now,
and I'm gonna show her
some absolutely remarkable papers
that I just received 48 hours ago,
and I think she'll be
kind of pretty stunned by.
"I, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hss,
"alias Franz Lang,
having been duly warned,
hereby declare that the
following statements are true."
They are, apparently,
the first interrogation documents
when Rudolf Hss was arrested
when he was found on the run.
God. Who sent that to you?
Somebody who wrote to me saying,
"My uncle, who died recently,
they were found in his attic,
"and I don't know what to do with them.
Can I send them to you?"
What a find. What a find.
He says here,
"I was ordered to report to Berlin
"in June 1941 to Himmler,
"where he told me
approximately the following.
"He wanted me to produce,
within four weeks,
"construction plans in accordance
with these directions.
"He added that the task was so difficult
that he could only trust me with it.
"Prisoners had to be gassed,
then the doors were...
"screwed tight, and two
canisters of Cyclone B
"were thrown in through small holes.
"People would die within three
and ten minutes.
"After half an hour, the doors were opened
and the bodies extracted
"by a special squad of prisoners
who were permanently
employed for this job."
What a find.
Now, you go and deny that.
On the 25th of May,
our wedding anniversary of all days,
I was driven to the airport
and handed over to Polish officers there.
An American plane took us to Warsaw.
You darling little fellow,
may you keep your affectionate nature.
Life, my dear boy, will wrench you
too soon from the world of childhood.
Now, you poor boy only have
your dear good mommy left.
You know, throughout my years of ministry,
I've spoken to a number of people.
People whose lives were marred
by trials and tribulations,
hardship,
calamity.
And some of them were wondering
whether their plight,
their suffering, was due
to a generational curse,
brought upon them by an ancestor.
This hits particularly
close to home in my own life.
I mean, being the grandson,
right, of Rudolf Hss.
The infamous, ruthless SS Commandant
of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Just imagine having
such a person as your grandfather.
I mean, you hear people say,
"Like father, like son."
And so, when I considered
my own ways, and I thought,
you know, "Am I like my grandfather?
Am I like him to some extent?"
When I first read
Exodus chapter 20, verse 5,
I was horrified by the thought
at having been born
into the second generation
after Rudolf Hss,
that God's wrath was upon me.
Because of the wicked, cold-blooded evil
that my grandfather
had inflicted upon the Jews.
God's people.
The people of Israel.
And, of course, many others.
Let me just read it again
what God says here in verse 5.
"I will visit the iniquity
the sins of the fathers
"upon the children
and the children's children,
to the third and fourth generation."
But God says that any generational curse
and the guilt and suffering
and the pain that comes with it
can be canceled by earnest repentance.
In other words,
what breaks the curse of sin
is the blood of God's spotless lamb,
and he is Jesus Christ.
Believe and you shall be saved.
When I am in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds
Thy hands have made
I see the stars
I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout
The universe displayed
Then sings my soul
My savior God, to thee
How great Thou art
How great Thou art
Then sings my soul
My savior God to Thee
The Holocaust throws a long shadow.
The trauma is not only
on the survivor side.
How many German families are traumatized,
who know or don't know
what their grandfathers have done?
With a very small "a,"
I think of myself as an activist.
And one of the key parts is to work with
and understand the experience
of the children of perpetrators.
This trip to London is very much
about seeing my mother,
and I come this time
with a very big request
which provokes some anxiety for me.
Hi, Mom!
I'm here.
I made it.
Good. Had a good trip?
Yeah, not too bad
compared to some times.
How are you?
- I'm okay.
- What's news?
News is that I can no longer drive,
and I feel a bit like a trapped animal,
but I'll get used to it.
Anyway, that's how it is. Can't be helped.
So, Mom.
I'm going to be meeting
the son of the Commandant
and grandson of
the Commandant in Auschwitz.
Yes?
Partly motivated--
Well, I actually would say
largely motivated by
what I've learned from you
and the things that you've said.
And what do you think about that?
Well, I think it's fantastic.
Since the hatred goes on
and antisemitism
is absolutely flourishing,
it's very important
to talk about these things.
I wanted to ask you whether
you would consider
coming to Auschwitz with me.
Not really, no. You know,
my Auschwitz is very
different from your Auschwitz.
You haven't actually been in it,
I mean, that's what I mean.
You haven't actually been
in this situation
where you didn't know whether
you're going to live another hour or not.
You don't know what my Auschwitz is.
And I want it left alone.
I want it left alone.
I have nothing against meeting
the son of Hss,
but I'm not going to Auschwitz.
He should come to my house.
You know, I'm pretty disabled.
If anybody wants anything,
has to come here.
- That's quite a thought.
- What?
Kaffee und kuchen in your house.
Yes, why not? If he brings the kuchen.
So this is Oswiecim,
infamously known
and will always be remembered
as "Auschwitz."
It's a very strange thing
that there is a town
so close to the actual concentration camp.
When this possibility came up
that I could accompany
the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz,
who had never been to the camp...
and his son, my contemporary,
that I could witness them witnessing
what they had never seen before
was somehow, in some perverse way, a gift.
The Hsses and I met for
the first time in the cafe
of the last remaining
synagogue of Oswiecim,
which used to have
a thriving Jewish community.
It was as if time stood still.
I felt we were all breathless.
- Ja.
- Hello.
It's difficult to find words.
- Yeah. I know.
- Yeah.
It's been a heavy on-- in my heart,
- you know, just--
- Yes.
Yeah. I understand that.
By the will of the
Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler,
Auschwitz became the greatest
human extermination facility
of all time.
When he personally gave me
the order to prepare a place
for mass extermination in Auschwitz
and to personally carry out
this extermination,
I did not have the slightest idea
of the scale and consequences.
This order was unusual.
Indeed, monstrous.
But the justification made the process
of extermination seem right to me.
So, this is the crematoria.
- The gas chamber.
- Right.
Which,
believe it or not, was maybe
100 steps from where my mother
and the women's orchestra played.
Transport after transport
would walk this way
and hear music, and people
who were coming to their deaths,
would come to this building,
be asked to undress,
thinking that they were
going to have a shower,
and told to put their shoes
and their clothes neatly,
so that they could find them again easily.
And within the next 30 minutes,
they were gassed.
It's just shocking how there
was this evil deception
that was kept up
for these people to believe
that there was something.
There was a silver lining,
some offer them safety, perhaps.
Even having, when you said sh--
you know, having to fold their clothes,
that they were gonna have a shower,
and perhaps to keep
people from panicking
because if all these thousands
of people had panicked...
Yeah.
...it would've been very difficult
to contain that.
I think this is so terrible.
Schrecklich, as they say in German.
It's a horror.
And then the realization hits home,
who did this?
And it is actually no other
than my grandfather.
Yeah.
I had to witness death itself
through the spyhole of the gas chamber.
I had to witness all the processes.
I had to watch, day and night,
the dragging and
the burning of the bodies.
The removal of the teeth.
The cutting off of the hair.
All this ghastliness, for hours on end.
I had to do all this
because I had to show everyone
that I was willing to be
present everywhere myself
as I had to demand
of those I was commanding.
The smell of the burning was
carried many kilometers away
and led to the whole population
talking of the burning of the Jews.
I think there is no one else that did
what he did on such a scale.
It is a fact, an undeniable fact,
that my grandfather is really the...
the greatest mass murderer
in human history.
May the public continue seeing in me
the bloodthirsty beast,
the savage sadist,
the murderer of millions
because the mass of people cannot imagine
the Commandant of Auschwitz
to be anything other.
They would never understand
that he had a heart, too.
Rudolf Hss.
I think he was kinda polishing
his image a little bit.
He had come to the end of the line.
Death was inevitable.
This is the last statement
Rudolf Hss, my grandfather,
made before his execution.
"My conscience compels me to
make the following declaration.
"In the solitude of my prison cell,
I have come to the bitter recognition
that I have sinned gravely
against humanity."
As Commandant of Auschwitz,
I carried out part of the cruel plans
of the Third Reich
for human extermination.
In so doing,
I inflicted grievous damage onto humans
and humanity.
I'm to pay with my life
for what I'm responsible for.
May the Lord God forgive me
one day for what I have done.
Do you think we could see
something like the Holocaust
- happening again?
- It could happen again,
something like the Holocaust
could happen again.
I mean, look at the world now.
It looks different. Yes, it can happen
again because I think
we humans behave atrociously badly.
- Guten tag.
- Come in.
Oops.
Wunderbar. Fantastisch.
Ja.
Ja.
- Ja.
- Ja.
So do you hate your grandfather now?
What is your feeling?
I would hate him, yes. I could say that.
- I hate him, yeah.
- What about you?
- Ja.
- Ja.
Very peculiar situations that we
should be sitting here together
and talking about
these terrible days, yes?
And there are you,
who knew nothing about it
because there was a fence
between the horror
and a normal life, yes.
To somebody like your father, I suppose,
these Jews seemed like vermin,
- not people. Vermin.
- Yeah, yeah.
You need the Jews
to have something to let
your own shortcomings out on, you know?
- Yeah.
- The Jews are original.
They're just people. And it's time
to stop that stupid hatred of Jews.
The Jews are God's chosen people.
Only what for are we chosen?
You know the famous prayer of the Jews...
"Why don't You choose
somebody else for a change
as the chosen people?"
You know, what have we done?
What have we done?
I mean, today, a boy wears
a koppel on the head
is not out of danger.
So, we haven't really made
so much progress yet,
so we have still got lots to do.
We have a responsibility,
the second generation,
to continue to communicate
and speak about humanity
and the absence of...
And make sure it's not forgotten, move on.
You can't forgive what-- what's happened,
but the important thing is that
we talk to each other
and understand each other.
This is going to the next stage,
not what we've done,
but what are we doing now.
That is important.
Yeah, it certainly was a unique moment,
of the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz
walking into my house,
sitting down in a chair opposite me,
and we're having a cup of coffee together.
I mean, in a way, that was beautiful.
My grandfather, Rudolf Hss,
was instrumental in the annihilation
of two-thirds of Europe's Jews.
Thirty years after he had
crossed the Judean Desert
during the First World War,
a Jewish state was proclaimed here
in the hope that it would
protect future generations.
in the Judean Desert,
which his own father crossed in 1917,
during the First World War,
when he was the youngest
non-commissioned officer
in the German army.
30 years later, when he was
nearing his death, he wrote,
"The life and death of the Jews
is truly a riddle
I have not been able to solve."
By then, he had killed more people
than any other man in all of history.
Okay.
I'm not a writer.
Writing has never been my strength.
I've recorded everything as I remember it.
My life has been colorful and varied.
My fate has led me through
all the highs and lows of life.
I have had two guiding stars
since I returned as a man
from the war I entered as a schoolboy,
my fatherland and my family.
I became the Commandant
of a new camp, Auschwitz.
I, myself, hadn't expected to be promoted
to Commandant so soon,
and it wasn't an easy task.
Out of nothing, and without any resources,
I was to build something enormous
as quickly as possible.
Russian prisoners of war
were meant to build the camp.
They arrived in a totally decrepit state.
We were constantly giving
them additional rations,
but without success.
They were dying like flies.
Cases of cannibalism were not uncommon.
Of more than 10,000
Russian prisoners of war
who were supposed to make up
the main workforce,
by the summer of 1942,
only a few hundred were still alive.
Himmler visited Auschwitz
and had a thorough look at everything.
We drove through the entire
Zone of Interest.
I was constantly drawing
his attention to the shortages.
He, too, saw them.
He shouted at me when
I could not stop talking about
the atrocious conditions.
"I don't want to hear anything
else about difficulties.
"For an SS leader,
there are no difficulties.
His task is to resolve them."
The enormity, I mean,
of what he do-- what he did,
what he conceived.
For years, planning,
making this concentration camp
the most efficient
extermination machine ever--
that ever existed, right?
I mean, that's his plan.
Auschwitz was his
kinda his brainchild.
Auschwitz became a Jew camp,
a gathering camp for Jews
to an extent not known before.
For the Jews of Auschwitz,
there was no more hope.
They knew that, without exception,
they were condemned to death.
Zyklon B was in constant use
for pest control in Auschwitz.
We decided to use this gas
for the mass extermination.
"I, myself, watched a killing,
protected by a gas mask."
"The door was closed,
"and the gas was poured
in through the openings.
"Some shouted, 'Gas,'
and a mighty yelling..."
...and pushing towards both doors ensued.
But they withstood the pressure.
They were only opened after a few hours
when the chamber was aired.
How long this killing took,
I'm not sure of,
but you could still hear a
humming noise for a long time.
That is when I saw gas corpses
for the first time in a heap.
I did not give any thought
to the killing itself.
It had been ordered,
and I had to execute it.
When I first read
my grandfather's memoirs,
what struck me was, he was
like a clinical observer,
just looking at himself,
looking at what he was doing.
It was a very clinical, like a scientist
that looks at a lifeless experiment,
and that had showed me some
kind of a coldness of his soul.
There wasn't much conversation
about Auschwitz in my family.
I think my dad was always
pretty quiet about it.
That's just silent generation, right?
They don't really talk
about stuff that much,
and he's not a big talker today either.
So, yeah, it's hard.
I mean, it freaks me a
little bit when you think about,
like, there's this, you know,
this joyful family life
going on with, you know, actually
quite beautiful presence and
joy, fun, having toys, and enjoying life.
And then, just a couple of hundred yards
behind the walls, you know,
and barbed wired walls,
there would be people being murdered.
That is just mind-blowing
when you think about it.
For me, it's pretty difficult to kind of
imagine that they did not actually smell,
or hear, or see anything.
I think my dad probably, subconsciously,
suppresses some of
the experiences he's had.
Put it in some very deep layers
of his conscience
where he just really doesn't remember,
like protecting himself, his mind.
In Auschwitz, you were killed
in the most sophisticated manner.
People got gassed in a gas chamber.
The place is full of black smoke,
horrible smell.
Hell.
Hell on Earth is Auschwitz.
When I arrived in Auschwitz,
it transpired that there was a band there
that needed a cellist.
They didn't have a cellist.
So, my arrival seems to have been a,
you know, a great event.
So I became the only cellist
in the camp orchestra,
which was a very,
very lucky position to have.
Absolutely saved my life.
My mother survived
the murder of her parents,
witnessed the murder
of millions of others,
being starved,
every imaginable horror.
We had the job of playing marches
for the thousands of people
who were working in the factories
that surrounded Auschwitz.
Because the Germans like
everything nice and neat,
so we had to play marches
so that the working people could,
you know, walk out to the music.
But, this was also conceived as
a sort of entertainment for the guards.
Very boring places, you know, for us
all just to be guards in Auschwitz.
Those were times long before television
or any entertainment.
I found out after the war
that there were orchestras in every camp.
And the camp commander
of Birkenau where I was
suddenly is all,
"They all got music.
I want music as well."
We played. Hopefully,
next day, we are still alive.
That's how it was. Yeah.
I was just looking, Mom,
at your cello case.
It's such
- a monument, isn't it?
- Yeah.
A symbol to your life as a cellist.
I know.
The way in which my mother
found some kind of way
to be in the world after the Holocaust
was by not speaking.
She had settled into a kind of silence.
I only had one thought in mind
when I came here to catch up with lost--
my lost life, my lost youth.
When I arrived in England,
nobody asked any questions
about Auschwitz.
So, we decided,
"What's the point here?"
So, we didn't talk about it.
It took nearly-- I think it was 50 years,
and then my children said to me,
"Mom, you never actually
told us anything."
As a child, I was very aware
that there were no-go areas.
Anything German was bad.
So, you kind of settle into
a limbo of not knowing,
not knowing facts,
but a sense of knowing that
there is something really awful
in the hinterland.
I know now, as a psychotherapist,
that those born to Holocaust survivors,
as I am, can inherit a traumatization
that it sort of sits inside the psyche
and has no shape,
has no form, has no words
because words-- it hasn't
been given a context.
And I felt this from being a tiny child.
But nobody in those days
understood the impact of the Holocaust
on the second generation.
And this was my room.
It was the first room of my own,
but it wasn't a happy place.
When I look at the pictures of myself,
probably aged under 2,
I'm overwhelmed with sadness.
See, these are snaps
of a child in deep despair.
A child, which who is not sweetly plump,
but a misshapen child.
My struggle through life
is somehow symbolized
in these early pictures.
My mother wasn't there.
They are pictures of an inability
to take care of me
in the way that I needed.
And that, certainly for me,
was a consequence
of my mother's experiences
in the Holocaust.
I'm the wrong mother for my daughter.
I'm very basic.
Traumatized? Forget it. Get on with life.
If you have lived through
the unbelievable horror
that I've lived through,
it's quite difficult to actually
sympathize or empathize.
Do you know that
I'm somebody who needs nothing?
I could never understand
why you needed everything.
Completely anathema to me.
And it's still anathema to me.
What I needed just wasn't available.
I think what you needed
is to have your mother at home.
- Right.
- That's what I thought. But for me--
- Yeah.
- Your mother wasn't at home because we had
- to put bread on the table, you know?
- Yeah.
- But how can a child understand that?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Of course.
I think you think
that you and I are very different.
Do you think that there
are any similarities?
I would have to look a long way.
I would have to look a long way.
- Really?
- Yeah.
It's really interesting, isn't it?
That my whole life,
which chunks of it have been
about a feeling of not belonging,
in any sense, in British society or
just not belonging,
and everything always
being a huge struggle--
But, I was lucky because I had a very
fulfilled life in England, which...
which you didn't manage.
For you,
- this has been a place of refuge.
- Yeah.
Well, one must realize also, looking back,
what was the situation like in Germany.
A lot of unemployment,
and then this lovely Mr. Hitler appears.
Suddenly, we are somebody again.
So, yeah.
National Socialism became a big success.
I considered the National
Socialist worldview to be
the only appropriate one
for the German people.
Antisemitism is nothing new.
It has always existed all over the world.
It becomes more apparent
when the Jews push themselves forward
too much in their quest for power.
I'd like to stress that, personally,
I've never hated Jews,
but I considered them
the enemy of our people.
Once, two little children
were so absorbed into their game
that they absolutely did not
want to allow their mother
to pull them away from it.
Even the Jews of the Sonderkommando
did not want to take the children.
I will never forget
the mother's expression
in her eyes, begging for mercy,
as she surely knew what was happening.
Those in the gas chamber
were already getting restless.
I had to act.
Everyone was looking at me.
I gave the non-commissioned officer a nod,
and he took the children,
who were putting up
a fierce struggle in his arms,
and put them into the gas
chamber with the mother,
whose screams were heartbreaking.
I also saw a woman
who tried to push her children
out of the gas chamber
as the door was being closed.
Weeping, she cried out,
"At least let my precious children live."
Seeing women walk into
the gas chambers with children,
I often thought of my own family.
I come from a completely assimilated
German-Jewish family.
My father was a soldier
in the First World War
with the Iron Cross and all the--
Yeah, we were Germans.
And Jewish, but we did not
practice the Jewish faith.
My father, unfortunately,
was a complete optimist.
He said, "The Germans
can't be that stupid."
And then, he realized
the Germans are that stupid.
In the 1930s, all Jews in Germany
were stripped of their nationality.
My mother, and father, for that matter,
were never interested in
reclaiming German citizenship
although they would've been entitled to.
Germany was finished for me.
I don't belong there.
I couldn't wait to become
naturalized British.
Life without a passport
is very complicated.
But I decided that it was time
to get my citizenship.
When my German passport
was delivered to my house,
I remember just feeling
a huge sense of elation.
I felt triumphant.
Do you want this?
Will your home move
be within the next 28 days?
Yes.
Will your home move be
within the next 28 days?
Yes!
So now, I'm embarking on a new life.
I've decided to try and live in Germany,
a country that I've never lived in
and don't even speak the language.
But my bones belong there.
I should never have been born here.
I should have been born in Germany.
Hi, Mom.
It's gonna take me a bit of time to load.
Can you just move forward a bit?
No, stop!
Would you like these lights?
- Well, just bring it or whatever.
- Okay.
I'm doing my best, Mom.
Immigrating to Germany was met
with some incredulous responses
'cause, after all, this was the country
that my grandparents had been murdered in,
as so many Jews were,
and it was the country
that my parents had fled from.
Indeed, my mother didn't
set foot back in Germany
for many, many years.
- Mom.
- Well, well, well.
So this is where you're living?
This is it.
Well, well, well. Oh, my goodness.
Oh, this looks beautiful.
Do you wanna sit down
- and have a cigarette?
- Yeah.
Oh, yes, a whole gallery there.
Yeah.
Very, very impressive.
Now, you gotta take
all these schnukies away,
so they can see the books.
Is it an exhibition place or a bookshelf?
No, I like my schnukies.
I guess, in some way,
making this home here
has something to do with an idea of trying
to reclaim stolen lives,
and also my unlived life.
Yeah. It also shows
what could have been
and was destroyed for no reason
other than stupidity.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
But, alas, the stupidity
seems to be perpetuating.
You know, obviously,
people need scapegoats,
and seeing the world is
in such a mess at the moment,
it is typical, it was the fault
of the Jews again.
I kept experiencing being here,
this terrible cultural dissonance,
and I was confronted with
unconscious antisemitism.
- You sure you don't imagine that?
- No, I don't imagine it.
And it's hard sometimes not just want
to turn round and run away.
- But where to?
- Exactly.
- That's the Jewish fate.
- That's the Jewish fate.
- You don't belong anywhere.
- Yeah.
And where you do, where you should belong,
you got the biggest problem.
The process of selection on the ramp
was full of incidents.
When families were ripped apart,
the men separated from
the women and children,
great agitation and turmoil
rippled through the transport.
And the separation of those fit
for work added to this
because the families wanted
to stay together by all means.
The Jews have a strongly
developed sense of family.
They cling to each other like limpets.
This gave every one commanded
to do this monstrous work
a lot to think about.
It left lasting impressions.
Most of those involved often came up to me
during my inspection round.
I heard the same question again and again.
Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands
of women and children
have to be exterminated?
And I would ask myself the same question
countless times deep inside,
had to have fob them off
with the Fuhrer Order,
console them with that.
I had to tell them that
the extermination of the Jews
was necessary to free Germany
and our descendants
of our adversaries once and for all.
My grandfather, obviously
he somehow swallowed,
you know, Nazi ideology,
I mean, socio-Darwinism in a sense,
he swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.
It made sense to him
at the time, the master race.
Auschwitz was given to him
and the way he was wired,
as a human being in his character,
was to do an excellent job.
Father, we just thank You
so much, Lord, for Your word.
Thank You for Your love for us, Lord.
Your patience with us, Lord.
You care for us like
we're Your children, God,
and just thank You
for blessing us this way.
I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Alright, tuck in, guys. Let's get it.
- I would say ladies' first.
- Dig in. Dig in.
I'm a pastor for
Bible Church for Stuttgart
and we serve an international community,
including personnel
from American military bases
and other expats.
We're our having monthly
men's prayer breakfast.
Just the men of the church
having a wholesome,
Godly good time together, that's all.
You guys, you have
enough space there, everybody?
On this study, I was just thinking about,
you know, men here today, men,
Christian men, any man.
Men in general in the,
in the 21st century, right?
What is our mission?
The Bible calls on us men to be leaders.
With leadership
comes great responsibility,
not just in what we teach at home,
but also how we act and walk with God
in each and every day, so...
When I became a Christian
and I read the Old Testament,
it's talking about
the sins of the fathers,
like how we revisit those, you know,
to the third or fourth generation,
and I thought, "Whoa."
My grandfather, he was a go-getter,
an ambitious man, a meticulous man,
but to the point where he, you know,
he turned into this monster,
this ruthless killer and, yeah,
he was not watchful.
And I don't think we can
become mass murderers,
but I think every human being, all of us,
have the propensity to go into a direction
that is totally wrong.
Thank you so much. So let's pray.
Thinking about it,
my grandfather's legacy,
there is blood on
the hands of the Hss family.
People are still suffering now.
I mean, even in my family,
you know, almost 80 years later.
Oh, and you have--
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Look at The Frog King.
Oh, God...
Oh, my God. Come on in.
I have to go on-- I'm a little
uneasy without the stick, you know?
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Oh, my God.
I'm happy now you're here.
My family had a lovely time in Auschwitz.
My wife had her flower paradise.
The children could lead
a carefree and pleasant life.
In summer, they splashed
in the paddling pool in the garden
but their greatest joy was
when Daddy bathed with them.
It often happened at home that
my thoughts suddenly turned
to some of the extermination processes.
Often when I saw
our children happily playing,
my wife being overjoyed with
the youngest one, I thought,
"How much longer will our happiness last?"
We had a beautiful mother and father.
- Yeah.
- Beautiful.
Many people don't have that good
- of a life.
- Yeah.
When he talks in his book,
he was outside gas chambers
when women and children were herded in,
how does that feel
when you think about it?
I was very sad, and I have
nightmares sometimes
because he was the only one who said
what was done there.
He was a good person.
You mean he was honest
about his role in mass extermination?
Yes, but he got into it,
and he couldn't get out of it.
And, what about your mother Hedwig?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't want to talk about it anymore.
Do you find it, you know,
- do you find that--
- Depressing.
- It's depressing?
- Yes, yes.
Sometimes, I even thought,
"Why do I have to...
suffer, like, physically, so bad?"
And I even sort of said,
"Is this God will be angry with me
because my dad did things?"
But, I said, "I will never
be angry with my dad."
He must've been a very strong person
to live like this
and do what he had to do.
So...
What he had to do was to basically kill
more than a million people--
I don't think that way.
And look at all the people
that say they died in the camp,
but all the survivors,
why didn't they die?
They're still living,
and they get money now
from Germany or from the Jewish people.
And, you know...
So, just whatever you want
to believe, you do.
Do you think you're in the denial?
No. Why?
I mean, it was the way it was.
It was the Third Reich.
It's a long time ago.
All that's history, I think.
What can I do? What can I say?
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear, Mom
Happy birthday to you
Nothing wrong with
your breath or oxygen supply.
Well done.
I'm nearly 100 years old.
I don't know why
I should get so old, really.
There must be a reason somehow. I mean,
some of us, thank God,
who lived in those days are still alive.
But, when we've gone, finished.
Mom always says she hates birthdays,
she hates fuss, leave her alone,
so on and so forth.
But, today, she celebrated her--
she's celebrating her 98th birthday
and is surrounded by very dear people.
It's quite incredible, Anita,
to think that your parents
were such close friends
of my grandparents.
Yeah, we were tremendous friends.
My story's the typical Jewish story
because Judy's grandfather and my father,
we lived very happily in Germany.
And when the trouble started,
Judy's family had
the intelligence to leave.
And they encouraged my father
to leave as well.
My father went to Palestine,
and he came back and said,
"I don't want to live in the desert."
But Judy's family survived,
and my father did not.
And this is the place
where my family were from.
Now it's called Wroclaw, and it's Poland.
Although it's not Breslau anymore,
it will always be to me.
I want to, I have to, I must
connect the parts of our family history
into one narrative that lives on.
And so, I have to be here
because it's all part of one story.
The recollection of my youth
is a very happy one.
I had two sisters, Marianne and Renate.
My father was a lawyer,
and my mother was a very,
very accomplished violinist.
I mean, culture was written in
very big letters in our house.
We have a large collection
of Wroclaw photographs,
and the home that my mother lived in,
which was a residential,
beautiful outbound apartment house
with a wonderful terrace.
I knew that didn't stand anymore,
but I hadn't imagined what's in its place.
We were, yeah,
just a normal family really.
We became abnormal
with the advent of Hitler.
The front just closed, and
it was all too late for
a whole family to get away.
And then, the war broke out,
and then that was obviously
the end of everything.
And in 1942,
the deportation started.
And my parents were deported to the east.
My grandparents were given
24 hours' warning by the Gestapo
but they had to report the following day
to where the rounding up
of the Jews was happening.
So my mother spent that
last night packing, packing
and my grandmother
was in another room, crying.
And I know that my grandfather's hair
turned gray that night.
My mother wanted to go with her parents,
but my grandfather said,
"No. Where we're going,
you will get there soon enough."
My grandparents were deported
to a place called Izbica.
We need to leave something symbolic
to let you know that your
daughter, my mom's cello,
literally saved her life.
Miraculously,
my grandfather was able to smuggle out
two notes to my mother and her sister.
The last one being the psalm,
"I lift up mine eyes
from whence cometh my help.
A help coming from the Lord."
"Send food. Mutti can't write.
She isn't well."
Which I always understood
that she was dead already.
I've been driven by the need
to create some sort of
in perpetuity for my grandparents.
This happened, these people existed,
and these people happen
to be my grandparents,
and the millions of others
who have no graves.
I think I want to call my mom.
Hello, Mom.
Hi. Where are you?
Can you see?
Can you see?
What is it?
- Your parents.
- What?
Pictures of your parents
and the candles I've lit.
Yeah, I can't really
recognize it. Very nice.
But, I'd like to--
Oh, yeah, yeah. I can see now.
I was smoking in front
of my grandparents,
and I felt guilty.
So, where are you exactly now?
Standing in the middle of Izbica.
What village, is it?
No. I'm in like a big wood.
- What is that?
- Another memorial.
What does it say?
I can't read Hebrew or Polish,
but I did what I wanted to do.
- Good choice.
- Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Ja.
Nein.
I have memories of my grandma, Hedwig.
She would sometimes visit
when we were small.
She was like the lady of the manor,
where my mom always felt, like,
intimidated by her.
She'd wear this white apron,
her hair in a bun.
And she was kind of rigid,
too, in her views.
Now, I never talked to her
about the Holocaust
as a child, you know?
What my mom told me that there was,
you know, a sort of reluctance
to actually own up,
to call it for what it was,
you know, a mass murder.
Holocaust. Shoah. Millions of people
killed by, you know, by her husband.
My grandmother, Hedwig Hss,
she got a one-way ticket
to visit Aunt Pppi,
but the rumor has it that
she took this cyanide pill
that she had actually showed
to members of the family
years earlier, that she still
was in possession of this,
you know, suicide device
from the Second World War
that they were all handed
or all issued to commit suicide
if they were captured
by the enemy or something.
What do you think of the rumors
that she committed suicide
- by biting into a cyanide pill?
- Who?
- Your mother.
- No way!
No way.
Who said that?
It's not true.
I just would love to die the way she died,
just go to sleep and wake--
not wake up.
She had these ideas that
it just all went wrong,
that it could've been so good,
you know, if given the chance.
As she said, "We rose with that star,
and we fell with that star."
The Fuhrer was dead.
My wife and I had the same
thought at the same time.
Now, we, too, must go.
Our world had gone down with the Fuhrer.
Did it make any sense
for us to go on living?
We would be hunted.
They would search for us everywhere.
We wanted to take poison.
We did not do it
for the sake of our children.
Later on, I regretted it again and again.
We were bound and chained to that world.
We should have gone down with it.
I knew that the English Field
Security Police were looking for me,
and also that my family
was strictly monitored,
and that there were constant
searches of their quarters.
On the 11th of March, I was arrested.
My poison ampule had
broken two days before.
I was treated very badly
by the field security police.
I was paraded around
like a particularly interesting animal.
The interrogations were not very pleasant.
I cannot resent the interrogators.
They were all Jews.
I'm gonna see Mom now,
and I'm gonna show her
some absolutely remarkable papers
that I just received 48 hours ago,
and I think she'll be
kind of pretty stunned by.
"I, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hss,
"alias Franz Lang,
having been duly warned,
hereby declare that the
following statements are true."
They are, apparently,
the first interrogation documents
when Rudolf Hss was arrested
when he was found on the run.
God. Who sent that to you?
Somebody who wrote to me saying,
"My uncle, who died recently,
they were found in his attic,
"and I don't know what to do with them.
Can I send them to you?"
What a find. What a find.
He says here,
"I was ordered to report to Berlin
"in June 1941 to Himmler,
"where he told me
approximately the following.
"He wanted me to produce,
within four weeks,
"construction plans in accordance
with these directions.
"He added that the task was so difficult
that he could only trust me with it.
"Prisoners had to be gassed,
then the doors were...
"screwed tight, and two
canisters of Cyclone B
"were thrown in through small holes.
"People would die within three
and ten minutes.
"After half an hour, the doors were opened
and the bodies extracted
"by a special squad of prisoners
who were permanently
employed for this job."
What a find.
Now, you go and deny that.
On the 25th of May,
our wedding anniversary of all days,
I was driven to the airport
and handed over to Polish officers there.
An American plane took us to Warsaw.
You darling little fellow,
may you keep your affectionate nature.
Life, my dear boy, will wrench you
too soon from the world of childhood.
Now, you poor boy only have
your dear good mommy left.
You know, throughout my years of ministry,
I've spoken to a number of people.
People whose lives were marred
by trials and tribulations,
hardship,
calamity.
And some of them were wondering
whether their plight,
their suffering, was due
to a generational curse,
brought upon them by an ancestor.
This hits particularly
close to home in my own life.
I mean, being the grandson,
right, of Rudolf Hss.
The infamous, ruthless SS Commandant
of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Just imagine having
such a person as your grandfather.
I mean, you hear people say,
"Like father, like son."
And so, when I considered
my own ways, and I thought,
you know, "Am I like my grandfather?
Am I like him to some extent?"
When I first read
Exodus chapter 20, verse 5,
I was horrified by the thought
at having been born
into the second generation
after Rudolf Hss,
that God's wrath was upon me.
Because of the wicked, cold-blooded evil
that my grandfather
had inflicted upon the Jews.
God's people.
The people of Israel.
And, of course, many others.
Let me just read it again
what God says here in verse 5.
"I will visit the iniquity
the sins of the fathers
"upon the children
and the children's children,
to the third and fourth generation."
But God says that any generational curse
and the guilt and suffering
and the pain that comes with it
can be canceled by earnest repentance.
In other words,
what breaks the curse of sin
is the blood of God's spotless lamb,
and he is Jesus Christ.
Believe and you shall be saved.
When I am in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds
Thy hands have made
I see the stars
I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout
The universe displayed
Then sings my soul
My savior God, to thee
How great Thou art
How great Thou art
Then sings my soul
My savior God to Thee
The Holocaust throws a long shadow.
The trauma is not only
on the survivor side.
How many German families are traumatized,
who know or don't know
what their grandfathers have done?
With a very small "a,"
I think of myself as an activist.
And one of the key parts is to work with
and understand the experience
of the children of perpetrators.
This trip to London is very much
about seeing my mother,
and I come this time
with a very big request
which provokes some anxiety for me.
Hi, Mom!
I'm here.
I made it.
Good. Had a good trip?
Yeah, not too bad
compared to some times.
How are you?
- I'm okay.
- What's news?
News is that I can no longer drive,
and I feel a bit like a trapped animal,
but I'll get used to it.
Anyway, that's how it is. Can't be helped.
So, Mom.
I'm going to be meeting
the son of the Commandant
and grandson of
the Commandant in Auschwitz.
Yes?
Partly motivated--
Well, I actually would say
largely motivated by
what I've learned from you
and the things that you've said.
And what do you think about that?
Well, I think it's fantastic.
Since the hatred goes on
and antisemitism
is absolutely flourishing,
it's very important
to talk about these things.
I wanted to ask you whether
you would consider
coming to Auschwitz with me.
Not really, no. You know,
my Auschwitz is very
different from your Auschwitz.
You haven't actually been in it,
I mean, that's what I mean.
You haven't actually been
in this situation
where you didn't know whether
you're going to live another hour or not.
You don't know what my Auschwitz is.
And I want it left alone.
I want it left alone.
I have nothing against meeting
the son of Hss,
but I'm not going to Auschwitz.
He should come to my house.
You know, I'm pretty disabled.
If anybody wants anything,
has to come here.
- That's quite a thought.
- What?
Kaffee und kuchen in your house.
Yes, why not? If he brings the kuchen.
So this is Oswiecim,
infamously known
and will always be remembered
as "Auschwitz."
It's a very strange thing
that there is a town
so close to the actual concentration camp.
When this possibility came up
that I could accompany
the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz,
who had never been to the camp...
and his son, my contemporary,
that I could witness them witnessing
what they had never seen before
was somehow, in some perverse way, a gift.
The Hsses and I met for
the first time in the cafe
of the last remaining
synagogue of Oswiecim,
which used to have
a thriving Jewish community.
It was as if time stood still.
I felt we were all breathless.
- Ja.
- Hello.
It's difficult to find words.
- Yeah. I know.
- Yeah.
It's been a heavy on-- in my heart,
- you know, just--
- Yes.
Yeah. I understand that.
By the will of the
Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler,
Auschwitz became the greatest
human extermination facility
of all time.
When he personally gave me
the order to prepare a place
for mass extermination in Auschwitz
and to personally carry out
this extermination,
I did not have the slightest idea
of the scale and consequences.
This order was unusual.
Indeed, monstrous.
But the justification made the process
of extermination seem right to me.
So, this is the crematoria.
- The gas chamber.
- Right.
Which,
believe it or not, was maybe
100 steps from where my mother
and the women's orchestra played.
Transport after transport
would walk this way
and hear music, and people
who were coming to their deaths,
would come to this building,
be asked to undress,
thinking that they were
going to have a shower,
and told to put their shoes
and their clothes neatly,
so that they could find them again easily.
And within the next 30 minutes,
they were gassed.
It's just shocking how there
was this evil deception
that was kept up
for these people to believe
that there was something.
There was a silver lining,
some offer them safety, perhaps.
Even having, when you said sh--
you know, having to fold their clothes,
that they were gonna have a shower,
and perhaps to keep
people from panicking
because if all these thousands
of people had panicked...
Yeah.
...it would've been very difficult
to contain that.
I think this is so terrible.
Schrecklich, as they say in German.
It's a horror.
And then the realization hits home,
who did this?
And it is actually no other
than my grandfather.
Yeah.
I had to witness death itself
through the spyhole of the gas chamber.
I had to witness all the processes.
I had to watch, day and night,
the dragging and
the burning of the bodies.
The removal of the teeth.
The cutting off of the hair.
All this ghastliness, for hours on end.
I had to do all this
because I had to show everyone
that I was willing to be
present everywhere myself
as I had to demand
of those I was commanding.
The smell of the burning was
carried many kilometers away
and led to the whole population
talking of the burning of the Jews.
I think there is no one else that did
what he did on such a scale.
It is a fact, an undeniable fact,
that my grandfather is really the...
the greatest mass murderer
in human history.
May the public continue seeing in me
the bloodthirsty beast,
the savage sadist,
the murderer of millions
because the mass of people cannot imagine
the Commandant of Auschwitz
to be anything other.
They would never understand
that he had a heart, too.
Rudolf Hss.
I think he was kinda polishing
his image a little bit.
He had come to the end of the line.
Death was inevitable.
This is the last statement
Rudolf Hss, my grandfather,
made before his execution.
"My conscience compels me to
make the following declaration.
"In the solitude of my prison cell,
I have come to the bitter recognition
that I have sinned gravely
against humanity."
As Commandant of Auschwitz,
I carried out part of the cruel plans
of the Third Reich
for human extermination.
In so doing,
I inflicted grievous damage onto humans
and humanity.
I'm to pay with my life
for what I'm responsible for.
May the Lord God forgive me
one day for what I have done.
Do you think we could see
something like the Holocaust
- happening again?
- It could happen again,
something like the Holocaust
could happen again.
I mean, look at the world now.
It looks different. Yes, it can happen
again because I think
we humans behave atrociously badly.
- Guten tag.
- Come in.
Oops.
Wunderbar. Fantastisch.
Ja.
Ja.
- Ja.
- Ja.
So do you hate your grandfather now?
What is your feeling?
I would hate him, yes. I could say that.
- I hate him, yeah.
- What about you?
- Ja.
- Ja.
Very peculiar situations that we
should be sitting here together
and talking about
these terrible days, yes?
And there are you,
who knew nothing about it
because there was a fence
between the horror
and a normal life, yes.
To somebody like your father, I suppose,
these Jews seemed like vermin,
- not people. Vermin.
- Yeah, yeah.
You need the Jews
to have something to let
your own shortcomings out on, you know?
- Yeah.
- The Jews are original.
They're just people. And it's time
to stop that stupid hatred of Jews.
The Jews are God's chosen people.
Only what for are we chosen?
You know the famous prayer of the Jews...
"Why don't You choose
somebody else for a change
as the chosen people?"
You know, what have we done?
What have we done?
I mean, today, a boy wears
a koppel on the head
is not out of danger.
So, we haven't really made
so much progress yet,
so we have still got lots to do.
We have a responsibility,
the second generation,
to continue to communicate
and speak about humanity
and the absence of...
And make sure it's not forgotten, move on.
You can't forgive what-- what's happened,
but the important thing is that
we talk to each other
and understand each other.
This is going to the next stage,
not what we've done,
but what are we doing now.
That is important.
Yeah, it certainly was a unique moment,
of the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz
walking into my house,
sitting down in a chair opposite me,
and we're having a cup of coffee together.
I mean, in a way, that was beautiful.
My grandfather, Rudolf Hss,
was instrumental in the annihilation
of two-thirds of Europe's Jews.
Thirty years after he had
crossed the Judean Desert
during the First World War,
a Jewish state was proclaimed here
in the hope that it would
protect future generations.