How the Auschwitz Commandant’s Infamous Home Has Been Turned Into a Center Against Antisemitism

Pini Dunner

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British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots

It was the most jarring moment of last year’s Academy Awards: as Jonathan Glazer accepted the Oscar for “The Zone of Interest,” a harrowing film set in the shadow of Auschwitz, instead of using his speech to honor the victims of the Holocaust, he made a political statement that many saw as an astonishing trivialization of the very subject his film had purported to explore.

Rather than acknowledging the unfathomable suffering of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz in particular, and the dangers of pathological antisemitism in general, Glazer chose to equate the Holocaust with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, implicitly drawing a moral equivalence between Nazis and the Jewish state.

The setting made it all the more disturbing — delivered amidst the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, Glazer’s so-called virtue-signaling call for universal resistance to “dehumanization” felt less like a plea for moral clarity and more like a cynical weaponization of the Holocaust to delegitimize Jewish self-defense and undermine the fight against the malignant evil of antisemitism.

“The Zone of Interest” is a film about the chilling banality of evil, loosely based on the novel of the same name, centering on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they go about their daily lives in a picturesque home just beyond the camp’s walls.

The film’s unsettling premise lies in its depiction of the Höss family’s mundane existence — gardening, swimming, and dining — while the machinery of genocide operates just out of sight. It is a study in complicity, yet it deliberately omits the suffering of Jewish victims, leaving their fate largely unseen and unheard.

And yet, somehow, Glazer’s acceptance speech managed to be even more disturbing than this conscious erasure. Instead of honoring those who perished, he co-opted the memory of the Holocaust to push a political agenda against Israel, without once mentioning the horrific evil perpetrated against Jews — fellow Jews! — on Oct. 7, 2023. Not a word about the deliberate murder, torture, and rape of 1,200 Jews, whose only sin was being Jewish in the land of their heritage, Israel.

While Hollywood — even, sadly, some within Jewish Hollywood — may be lost in its own navel-gazing world of self-righteousness, many Jews and Gentiles across the United States and beyond have been utterly shocked by the alarming resurgence of antisemitism in the 16 months since the Oct. 7 massacre.

Enter Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, who founded the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in 2014. Recognizing the urgent need to push back against the normalization of Jew-hatred, he enlisted my good friend Elliott Broidy and fellow philanthropist Dr. Thomas Kaplan. Together they purchased Rudolf Höss’s former home in Oświęcim, just outside the Auschwitz compound, the very setting of “The Zone of Interest” — and created the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, whose goal is not just to remember the victims of the Holocaust but also to find the best ways to combat the spread of antisemitism and advocate for them.

Instead of allowing the Auschwitz commandant’s house to remain a grotesque relic of history, they are turning it into a global center dedicated to combating antisemitism and extremism, ensuring that the lessons of the past are neither distorted nor forgotten — by Hollywood directors or by anyone else.

This week, Elliott was in Poland for the 80th anniversary commemoration of Auschwitz’s liberation. As part of the events, Höss’s house at 88 Legionów Street was opened to visiting dignitaries for the first time since the Holocaust.

Just steps from the site where 1.1 million Jews, along with 20,000 Roma and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were murdered, this house was once home to the man who orchestrated that industrial-scale slaughter: Rudolf Höss. But for nearly eight decades, the Polish family that occupied it since 1945 refused to let anyone inside, despite its profound historical significance.

And the macabre site is just the tip of the spear. A major fundraising campaign has been launched to support ARCHER at House 88’s mission to transform the Höss home into a global center for research, education, and advocacy against extremism and antisemitism. With comprehensive programming designed for college students and educational tools set to be used worldwide, the initiative aims to confront hate where it festers most.

This week, Ambassador Wallace emphasized the center’s crucial role as a global hub for combating hate, while former US Senator Norm Coleman called the project a direct and urgent challenge to antisemitism and extremism.

I spoke to Elliott while he was in Poland. “Rudolf Höss’s house stood untouched for decades, a silent witness to history’s darkest crimes,” he told me. “We refused to let it remain a relic of evil. House 88 will be transformed into a center for fighting antisemitism, extremism, and hate. The lesson of House 88 is so disturbing: a neighbor can be fanatically antisemitic, and the result is the death of millions of Jews — or 1,200 innocent Israelis on the border of Gaza.”

His words carry the weight of history and urgency. This project isn’t only about preserving the past — it’s about ensuring the world understands where unchecked hate leads, and giving future generations the tools to resist it.

One of ARCHER at House 88’s board members is another good friend of mine, George Schaeffer. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” he told me, “and I know how important it is for us to never forget what antisemitism can lead to. The more we know about the past — the horrors of the past — the more we can correct the future, and change the future.”

George’s commitment to this project is deeply personal. “What we are constructing next to Auschwitz is an important way of teaching what the real dangers are,” he added. “The commandant and his family lived next door to Auschwitz as if it was normal — we need to make sure that it’s never normal to allow antisemitism to flourish, especially if it is on our own doorstep.”

In synagogues across the Jewish world, we are currently reading the Torah portions that recall the slavery and persecution of the Jews in ancient Egypt. One of the primary directives of Jewish tradition is incorporating the Hebrew phrase Zecher Li’yetziat Mitzrayim — a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt — into our prayers and blessings. But this is not just an exercise in historical memory — it is a directive for vigilance.

A just society can only thrive and survive if persecution and hatred are identified, combated, and rooted out. We must never be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the danger has passed. Antisemitism may have begun more than three millennia ago in Egypt, but it has reared its ugly head in every era and every location since.

And now, as we face yet another alarming resurgence, ARCHER at House 88 stands as a powerful new initiative to ensure that this latest iteration of Jew-hatred is confronted and defeated — just as Pharaoh was in Egypt, just as Hitler and Höss were in their time, and just as every other vicious antisemite throughout history has ultimately been overcome.

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