The house of Rudolf Hoss

Rudolf Hoss commanded Auschwitz from May 1940. He lived with his wife Hedwig and their five children in a villa set right against the boundary of the camp, a few dozen metres from the bedroom windows. The family had a garden, a greenhouse, a swimming pool and servants drawn from the prisoners. Hedwig Hoss called the place a paradise.

Jonathan Glazer's film showed this house and this garden to the whole world. Not a single shot of the camp appears in it, because the whole thing happens on this side of the wall, where life goes on normally: dinners, birthdays, gardening, with the sound coming over the fence.

After the war Hoss hid under the name Franz Lang. He was recognised, tried in Warsaw and sentenced to death. He was hanged on 16 April 1947 in Oświęcim, beside the crematorium of Auschwitz I, a few hundred metres from his own garden gate. We stand on the pavement directly in front of the house, an arm's length from the fence, and there we tell that story to the end. We do not go inside, because the building is private.