Luis Fernando Romo

Updated Monday, January 29, 2024-02:34

  • Culture Rudolf Höss, the head of Auschwitz who loved horses

  • Biopic Cristóbal Balenciaga: his enigmas and his men. Would you like what they've done with his brand?

He was a pious young man, loved horses and was predestined to religious life

as a missionary in an African country

. But he became one of the most terrible monsters of the 20th century. Rudolf

Höss

was nicknamed

the Butcher of Auschwitz

because as commander of the Polish concentration camp, according to document USSR-008 presented by the Soviet authorities at the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, he ordered the murder of around

four million people in the chambers of gas

. Among them, Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. However, in his memoirs

Of Him, Commander of Auschwitz

, he recorded that there were only one million individuals. At the Nuremberg Trials he was found guilty and hanged on April 16, 1947.

Paradoxes of life, this architect of the Holocaust lived in a mansion with a garden, orchard and swimming pool

attached to the outer wall

of the camp with his wife,

Hedwig Hensel, and their five children.

All of them have returned to the present for the film

The Zone of Interest

-nominated for five Oscars, including best film and best foreign film-, focused on the life of the Höss family, and the miniseries

Cristóbal Balenciaga

. What does the

couturier

have to do with the

butcher of Auschwitz

? One of his daughters,

Inge-Brigitt,

was one of his mannequins in Madrid in the 1950s. Neither Balenciaga nor

anyone else suspected the dark past

of the icy blonde beauty who paraded so well in the salons of the Guetaria couturier. .

Balenciaga in the sewing workshop, with one of his models.Europa Press

Born in August 1933 on the same farm near the Baltic Sea where her parents met,

she lived in different concentration camps

where her father was the boss. She was in Dachau until she was 5, she was in Sachsenhausen from 5 to 7 and from 7 to 11 in Auschwitz.

As the third of the five Höss children, along with her two sisters she was the right eye of a father whom she described as

"the nicest man in the world"

because he gave them love and every whim. Inge-Brigitt lived in a dream world in a villa normally looked after by

prisoners who served as nannies, cooks, chauffeurs

, seamstresses, hairdressers and cleaners. From the window of her room she saw the smoke from the crematoriums and when she picked the strawberries from the garden she realized that they were covered in gray dust. They were the

ashes of her father's victims.

They lived in luxury until the Allies won World War II. Rudolf went her way and the rest of the family went another way. To avoid deportation of her and her children to Siberia, Hedwig

snitched on her husband's whereabouts

to her...the rest is history. From that moment on, the family experienced a series of calamities: they were hungry, they stole coal to keep warm, and they had no shoes.

Brigitt and three of her brothers in the garden of the Auschwitz house.EM

In the 1950s Inge-Birgitte settled in Spain, where she worked as a milliner in a boutique where Balenciaga

was struck by her beauty, her height

, her long blonde hair and her crystalline eyes. For three years she worked for him as a mannequin in exclusive shows where she paraded with such solemnity that Guetaria's designer

called her "my little German soldier

. "

One of the clients who used to attend these screenings was Carmen Polo. At no time did Miss Höss reveal her past and if anyone asked her she usually said that her father had died during the war. Preserving and hiding her past was her mission.

ABOUT HIS FATHER

In 1961 she met an American-Irish engineer in Madrid with whom she married and they had a son and a daughter, who died. They divorced in 1983. During her courtship he was the first person to whom she confessed her past. "At first I was a little surprised. But then, as I talked to her more and more, I realized that she

was as much a victim as anyone else

. She was just a little girl when all this happened," he told her in an interview. exclusively to Thomas Harding for the

Washington Post

in 2013. After several years of searching Harding, who was looking for material for his book

Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

,

managed to locate Höss's daughter

in the northern Virginia. The story touched him deeply since her uncle, a German Jew named Hanns Alexander, was the one who captured Höss.

During the interview, Inge-Birgitte did not reveal her husband's identity for fear of reprisals from the neighborhood and continued to hide her identity and her past even from her descendants. During the talk she tried to justify her father: "

She must have had two personalities

, the one I knew and another..." And, to convince herself, she told Harding that "she was sure about her father." I was sad inside. It's just a feeling. Because of how she was at home, because of how she was with us, she sometimes seemed sad when she came home from work."

Due to her husband's professional commitments, the family lived a wandering life

in Liberia, Greece, Iran and Vietnam

, until settling in Washington in 1972. In the capital she worked in a boutique and later a Jewish business couple who had migrated from Nazi Germany hired her in her luxury fashion salon where she worked for 35 years. There

she attended to numerous wives of congressmen and senators

. When she revealed her secret to her boss, one day when she had drunk too much, her blood did not reach the river. Her owner told Harding that he didn't fire her because she had nothing to do with what her father had done.

In 2015,

the daughter of the butcher of Auschwitz

was sick with cancer and spoke more about her childhood. She assured that she did not know that these atrocities were being committed next to her house. "

I never asked why there were fences

and watchtowers. When you're nine or ten years old your head is full of other thoughts. And really, would anything have changed if I had?

Given how small I was?

(...) "We once threatened to tear down the fence at a game of cowboys and Indians, but Dad got really angry. He scolded us and told us we should never hurt others."

Neither his mother nor his brothers ever spoke about it. They didn't return to Auschwitz either. Only his nephew Rainer,

son of his brother Hans-Jürgen Höss

, has revealed in an interview with the German magazine

Eastern

that if he knew where his grandfather was buried "he would go pee on his grave."