Octogenarian Hans Jürgen Höss reminisces, “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz,” in the first of countless startling moments from Daniela Völker’s deeply moving documentary, “The Commandant’s Shadow.”
It’s a better recollection, at any rate, than his father’s: “The life and death of the Jews is truly a riddle I have not been able to solve,” Rudolf Höss wrote in his memoirs. By then, he was awaiting his fate at the Nuremberg trials, after serving as the powerful camp commandant and mastermind of Auschwitz. The man responsible for millions of deaths had, in fact, solved his own empty riddle as determinedly as any other human in history.