The daughter of Auschwitz’s commandant

For 40 years, Brigitte Höss has kept a secret from her friends and neighbors in Northern Virginia, said Thomas Harding in The Washington Post. Her father was Rudolf Höss, the designer and commandant of the Auschwitz death camp. The 80-year-old, who goes by her married name, hid her identity out of fear of reprisals. “There are a lot of Jewish people, and they still hate the Germans,” she says in a thick German accent. “It never ends.” Brigitte has only positive memories of her father, who was arrested and executed by the Allies for his part in the murder of 1.1 million Jews at Auschwitz. “He was the nicest man in the world,” she says, recalling how he would play with her and read fairy tales to her at the family’s luxurious villa outside the concentration camp. Brigitte, who moved to the U.S. in 1972 after marrying an American engineer, says that she never knew what was going on beyond the garden wall. And despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, she can’t accept that her father was a willing participant in the Final Solution. “I’m sure he was sad inside. It is just a feeling. Sometimes he looked sad when he came back from work,” she says. “There must have been two sides to him. The one that I knew and then another.”

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