Bedtime stories and a kiss goodnight from father, as he oversaw the Holocaust

Author Thomas Harding visits the Auschwitz commandant’s home and recalls exactly what the daughter of Rudolf Hoess told him about life next door to a horrific killing machine

“Downstairs, there was a kitchen. Then there was a living room; there was a dining room, a guest room, I think. On the second floor, there were all the bedrooms.” This is Brigitte Hoess talking. Her voice, in a raspy German accent, is giving me a tour of her childhood house. This was not just any house. It is the villa where the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess lived with his wife and five children – including Brigitte, who lived there until she was 11 years old.

She remembers her father as someone who tucked her in at night and would let her go downstairs on Christmas Eve to eat real cookies left under the Christmas tree.

As he masterminded the mass murder of more than a million men, women and children in the camp next door, he would pat the family dalmatians, entertain friends and listen to records on the gramophone as he smoked his favourite cigars.

Brigitte Hoess’s childhood home was the home of the Holocaust. The house next door to where 1.1 million Jewish people, along with 20,000 gypsies and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners were murdered.

I had first seen the Hoess villa 16 years ago when I visited the Auschwitz camp. I was with Rudolf Hoess’s grandson Rainer and daughter-in-law Irene, the first family members to return to the camp since the Kommandant’s departure in 1944.

At the time, a Polish woman was living at the Hoess’s former family home (located at 88 Legionow Street). She owned the house, but would not give us entry. I was surprised; it felt that this villa was a site of tremendous historical importance and should be open to the public.

Over the past few years, an American non-profit organisation called the Counter Extremism Project has been negotiating with its Polish owner. In 2024, it was finally able to complete the purchase to open it to the public. The project has the support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Unesco and the Polish Foreign Ministry.