Heart and Soul: Kai Höss

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a cinema in south-west Germany, an audience is gathered to watch an Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest, about the life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. Those present comprise Jewish people from around the world, and the special guest is Rudolf’s grandson, Kai.

The topic was rarely visited during Kai's childhood. It was only after a school history lesson that he began to comprehend Rudolf’s role as head of the largest mass murder site in history.

Reporter Shiroma Silva travels to his home in Germany to interrogate Kai on his personal struggle. She tracks Kai’s outlook today through Christianity, in which he uses his past to look forward and understand the particular place of Jewish people in the Bible. He questions how antisemitism thrived in Christian societies and his grandfather’s early life in a devout Catholic family.

Awaiting execution at Nuremberg in 1947, Rudolf Höss returned to Catholicism, regretting his unquestioning pursuit of Nazi ideology and crimes against humanity. But little was said about the Jewish prisoners who made up the majority of the dead at Auschwitz.

Today his grandson speaks to Jewish communities globally, and Shiroma Silva talks to Pastor Kai Höss as he seeks to disabuse congregations of the thinking that has all too often blamed Jewish people for all the world’s ills, and describes himself as a Gentile who’s been saved by Jewish leaders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Kai Hewes.
0:02.1	My name is Kai Hewes.
0:04.0	I am standing here, before you, with the family legacy that brings with it an immense burden and responsibility.
0:13.0	I am the grandson of Rudolf Heurz, the notorious commandant of Auschwitz, who is responsible for the cold-blooded industrial murder of 1.2 million
0:24.6	Jewish people and countless others.
0:29.2	I'm Sharoma Silva, and this is the documentary on the BBC World Service.
0:35.3	For this episode of Heart and Soul, which looks at personal stories of faith,
0:40.0	I'm speaking to Kai Hus to learn how, against the backdrop of his grandfather's crimes,
0:46.0	he's seeking reconciliation with Jewish communities throughout the world.
0:50.0	My grandfather was the greatest mass murder in human history.
0:55.5	He was the architect of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1:00.7	He built it from scratch, instructed or ordered by Himmler, obviously by the furor,
1:07.9	to build this super extermination factory where you could murder people at an industrial
1:16.5	scale. And he handled all the operational aspect to make this murder machine as effective as
1:22.5	possible. I've heard this expression that he was the greatest mass murderer in history.
1:28.3	Surely there's Stalin, other people like that.
1:30.6	Stalin in Mao, there's a lot of people throughout history.
1:34.3	You could call it political ideologies the way they did things that actually caused the death of people.
1:39.6	I don't think these people sat down and personally planned the extermination of 40 million Chinese people or 20 million Russians.
1:49.0	Rudolfes, he actually oversaw it. He was hands-on involved.
1:52.0	He was the executioner that was there.
1:55.0	As a child at home, growing up, how did you learn about him?
	...

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