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House 88: Rudolf Höss, The Zone of Interest, and the Politics of the Past

by Jesse Bunch, 2025 Journalism Fellow


Across the road from the gaunt stucco villa at 88 Legionow Street is the Sola River, a slip of water that snakes between the green hills and sleepy hamlets of Upper Silesia. From the right angle, it’s possible to look out over the river and ignore the looming presence of Auschwitz I, one of several concentration camps within a 15-square-mile region where, between the years of 1940 and 1945, German SS units carried out the mass killing of around 1 million Jews, 70,000 non-Jewish Poles, and tens of thousands of other political prisoners.

This is the house where Auschwitz’s commandant Rudolf Höss raised five children, spoiled his wife with a tranquil back garden, and simultaneously helped orchestrate the largest mass-extermination campaign in human history. Only a concrete wall just more than six feet high shielded his loved ones from the camp’s daily horrors.

It is also where, after a post-war Warsaw court sentenced Höss to hang at the base of a gas chamber about a football field’s length from his bedroom, a Polish widow, Grazyna Jurczak, settled to raise her own children. By Jurczak’s account, it was a typical family life that wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to Höss—besides the shuttered camp that, by the late twentieth century, had begun to welcome millions of international tourists rather than victims of the Nazis’ genocidal ideology.

Now the house sits empty, at least in a literal sense. Its sparse, yellowing rooms offer few clues that Jurczak, let alone a bloodthirsty SS commandant, had once made a home here. Floorboards creak from room to room, the ominous flash of Auschwitz’s red brick barracks ever-present in passing windows.

For all its eeriness, visitors to 88 Legionow Street will find few traces of Höss, save for a few beer bottle caps and a torn edition of a pro-Hitler newspaper. Then, after wondering if that is all there is to see, comes the images of Mark Wallace, about five of them in all.

Wallace, the 58-year-old businessman and former United States ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, cuts a polished figure in a series of photographs hanging across the home’s first floor.

In the shots, Wallace—now CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that combats extremist groups "by pressuring financial support networks, countering their online recruitment efforts, and advocating for policies and regulations”1—mingles with other well-dressed visitors throughout the infamous house.

If the Counter Extremism Project is on an ideological mission, then it’s clear that Wallace is leading the charge. In 2024, the nonprofit purchased Höss’ home to create a research center dedicated to countering hate and antisemitism.

In repurposing the house and a neighboring plot into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization (or ARCHER), Wallace’s organization is doing what the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum does not: offer a political lens through which to view the past.

For all its evidence of human atrocity—from belongings stolen from Jews just before their gassings, to preserved piles of human hair cut from those same victims and repurposed for Nazi profit—visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum will not find mention of a single historical event related to persecution, extremism, or genocide beyond the spring of 1945.

That policy is, according to the Counter Extremism Project’s senior director, Hans- Jakob Schindler, by design—and in his view, a “fundamental problem”2 with the museum as it stands today. (Museum officials have stated publicly that the institution’s goal is to educate the public about the Holocaust and preserve its memory rather than involve itself in politics).

“The idea for ARCHER was to say, why don’t we, as a next step, establish a center that allows us—not as part of the museum—to talk about the actual here and today,” Schindler told me over the phone in late August, about six weeks after my visit, among the first groups to tour the house after the acquisition.

“It has to be a device that takes a lesson from the Holocaust, but translates it into today,” he said.3

Those words stuck with me. As journalists, we are urged to see the world with an immovable objectivity, to avoid applying an overt lens through which to view the world. Here the Counter Extremism Project wasn’t shying from its intention. Nearly 80 years after Höss’ death, it had taken the commandant’s story and placed it in direct conversation with today’s politics.

William Faulkner wrote that “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”4 With that quote in mind, I found the ARCHER project presented an ethical question: if history can be revisited to assert modern truths, who decides how those stories are told and what messages we should take from them?

Höss’ tale naturally centers on his hatred of Jews, and for Schindler, those looking for evidence of modern antisemitism need look no further than across the road from 88 Legionow.

In recent years, at least two antisemitic incidents—the defacement of barracks at the Birkenau camp with Holocaust denialist messages and the vandalizing of a nearby Jewish cemetery with swastikas—have rattled religious leaders and concerned parties worldwide.

Then there are visits to the site from Holocaust deniers themselves, Schindler said, those who peddle falsehoods about the genocide of more than six million Jews in a digital environment lacking the proper guardrails to counter malicious conspiracy theories.

Those concerns explain the rationale behind the home’s sparse interior. By refusing to recreate the commandant’s living space, the house resists possibly becoming an undeserved memorial to Höss, Schindler said. Instead, the Counter Extremism Project hopes the lack of frills create an “immediacy of the experience of the perpetrator.”5

As I entered a plain upstairs room during my tour, my attention was forced to the window overlooking Auschwitz’s stark prison yard and its barbed-wire partitions, an angle that put Höss' perspective higher than that of the surrounding guard towers. The approach was indeed effective.

But if the physical absence was pronounced, that’s also because the Counter Extremism Project aims to fill the home with something intangible, which is its assessment of global antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.

While planning for the center began before that date, Schindler said, ARCHER’s mission has taken on a heightened significance in the two years since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

To that end, Höss' home and the accompanying center will not only host school tours and international delegations but will foster the work of academics who “think differently” about what Schindler calls the emerging “neo-colonialist theory” on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

That thinking, in Schindler’s view, casts Israel as the region’s perpetual colonizer, taking “total agency from Palestine” and leaving them “prisoners of their victim role”6 without the possibility for change.

Since the war’s outbreak, the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza as a result of Israel’s war has surpassed 64,000, according to the latest figures from local health authorities. Criticisms of Israel have echoed well beyond campus greens, and recent reports of mass starvation within the barricaded strip have only elevated the international community’s scrutiny of the country’s actions.

Some of the world’s leading genocide scholars have, in turn, declared the crisis in Gaza just that.7 Through this assessment comes another interpretation of Höss' story.

When the filmmaker Jonathan Glazer accepted an Oscar for his 2023 film The Zone of Interest, he solidified what was already a growing suspicion: that his depiction of the mundanity of Höss' life at 88 Legionow Street—with reality TV-like camerawork and blunt, sunlit dread—was also a reflection of society’s complicity amid deadly global conflicts, including Israel’s in Gaza.

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer said on the awards stage. “Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.”

If those remarks didn’t clarify his view, Glazer then made the controversial rejection of his Jewish identity and denounced the story of the Holocaust being “hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”8

In a Guardian column that spring,9 columnist Naomi Klein was more explicit when she questioned whether the horrors depicted in Zone should be viewed “exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal, with greater recognition for all the groups targeted for extermination.”

“It’s not that these people don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just beyond their garden wall,” Klein wrote of the Höss family. “They have simply learned to lead contented lives with ambient genocide. It is this that feels most contemporary, most of this terrible moment, about Glazer’s staggering film.”10

Of Glazer’s throughline between the horrors of Auschwitz and the war in Gaza, however, Schindler disagreed. He was adamant there were fundamental differences, both in the scale of the destruction and the intent of those involved.

“Of course, there is incredible, unacceptable suffering in Gaza,” Schindler said. “But the difference is that I fail to detect an absolute organized genocidal motivation of the Israeli government.”11

Given the conflict’s decades of debated history, it felt inevitable that this sort of fracturing would arise, and Schindler, for his part, had no illusions that today’s discourse is teeming with warring views of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

He was clear, then, that ARCHER’s think tank would provide a “safe space” for academics and mid-career professionals to produce work that counters the more critical views of Israel’s role in the region. While the Counter Extremism Project will not tell fellows what to study, Schindler was precise when he said that the ultimate goal is to spur political change on the issue.

The center will also adhere to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, Schindler said.12 While that allows for some criticism of Israel’s government, civil rights organizations have condemned the definition for being misused to silence the country’s critics.

Some of the messages we glean from history are immutable. The crimes Hitler’s regime committed against Jews and other victims of Nazi thought are an eternal reminder that antisemitism—and violence against any marginalized group—is entirely unacceptable. Journalists or not, we must ensure that “never again” is an enduring idea for future generations.

But as journalists, it is also our job to parse through the varied interpretations of the past, to listen to differing perspectives with an open mind, and to keep a watchful eye on views that strongly serve one political end over another.

So, I subscribe to a third reading of Höss' story, which is that we should be cautious of retreating into ideological gardens, wary of building concrete walls around our views. That is not to say we should abandon our moral values in times of conflict. Rather, we should encourage conversations about history that include balanced debate, a depth of opinion, and a focus on shared humanity.

Because the past really is never dead. As I stood in Höss' home, overlooking a site disfigured by unfathomable atrocities, I struggled to comprehend how we had arrived here. Catching my reflection in the window, I remembered that 80 years on, it is our responsibility to continue asking these crucial questions.

Jesse Bunch was a 2025 FASPE Journalism Fellow. He is a criminal justice reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and has previously written for the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette and Philadelphia Weekly.

Notes

  1. https://www.counterextremism.com/about.
  2. Interview with the author.
  3. Interview with the author.
  4. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun, London: Chatto and Windus, 1919: p. 73.
  5. Interview with the author.
  6. This quotation and the above from an interview with the author.
  7. Nader, Emir. “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.” BBC News, September 1, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o.
  8. Haaretz Editorial. “Jonathan Glazer was Right: Jewishness and the Holocaust were Hijacked by the Occupation.” Haaretz, March 13, 2024. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-03-13/ty-article- opinion/jonathan-glazer-was-right-jewishness-and-the-holocaust-were-hijacked-by-the-occupation.
  9. Klein, Naomi. “The Zone of Interest Is about the Danger of Ignoring Atrocities–Including in Gaza.” The Guardian, March 14, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of- interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide.
  10. Klein.
  11. Interview with the author.
  12. Interview with the author