‘The Zone of Interest’ Ending Explained: What Does the Auschwitz Flash-Forward Mean?

The Zone of Interest is now finally available to buy on digital platforms like Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, and more. That means that you can now finally stream every Best Picture nominee for the 2024 Oscars at home—so no more excuses!

Written and directed by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest is an unsettling Holocaust drama that tells the true story of Nazi Rudolf Höss, who was the commandant of the of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Glazer never shows any of the horrors of the Holocaust on screen, but instead employs a chillingly effective sound design, that captures the screams, drones, and anguish of the violent genocide.

The film is entirely in German, so hopefully, you were paying attention. That said, Glazer presents the horrors of the Holocaust with restraint and subtlety. If you get lost along the way, don’t worry. Decider is here to help. Read on for a full breakdown of The Zone of Interest plot summary and The Zone of Interest ending explained, including that flash-forward sequence at the end.

The Zone of Interest plot summary:

The Zone of Interest follows the domestic life of real-life Nazi Rudolf Höss, who was the commandant of the of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. Played by German actor Christian Friedel, the movie presents a naturalistic view of Höss’s home life with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, who also stars in Anatomy of a Fall), their children, and the Polish servants who tend to their house—which lies right next to Auschwitz.

The Höss family is a portrait of upper-middle-class normality. They throw picnics for their friends. The kids swim in the pool. Hedwig tends to her garden, and Rudolf locks the doors at night. Through it all, just beyond their wall, we see the billowing from the gas chambers burning human bodies alive. We see blood being washed off of Rudolf’s shoes, and ash running in the once-pristine river. More than that, we hear the constant, relentless roar of machinery, the screams of terror of victims, and sounds of gunfire killing Jewish prisoners in cold blood.

The Höss family barely seems to notice the horrors. One brief shot of Rudolf at work shows his blank face, as he listens to the screams of terror up close. More than that, they seem to genuinely love their life in Auschwitz. Hedwig has no problem wearing the coat of a dead Jewish woman—she even borrows the lipstick she finds in the pocket. The only time Hedwig is truly upset is when her husband informs her he has been transferred and will need to move. Hedwig replies that this house in Auschwitz is their dream life, and she refuses to move. She stays behind with the children, while Rudolf moves to Oranienburg. There, he happily designs new, more efficient “crematoriums” to gas more prisoners. It’s implied that he also rapes a Jewish woman prisoner—she comes to his office, takes off her shoes, and in the next scene, we see Rudolf meticulously washing his penis.

Not everyone is immune, however. Hedwig’s mother comes to stay with her, and while she valiantly tries to ignore the ever-present noise of slaughter, eventually, the stench of death gets to her. Unable to take the sight of the flaming gas chamber and the smell of the burning bodies, Hedwig’s mother leaves in the middle of the night, leaving a note behind for her daughter.

There is one character in the movie with a conscious: A Polish girl who lives near the Höss family risks her life to smuggle fruit into the camp. Filmed on a thermal camera, we watch her as she leaves apples and pears in the trenches for prisoners to find. Director Jonathan Glazer included this character after he met a real-life 90-year-old Polish woman, named Alexandria, who brought food to the Auschwitz prisoners when she was 12 years old. Like the girl in the movie, Alexandria told Glazer how she would bike to the camp, and how, one day, she discovered sheet music of a resistance song composed by a prisoner named Thomas Wolf. “She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer said in an interview with The Guardian. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”

The Zone of Interest ending explained:

In recognition of his “good” work, Rudolf is put in charge of an operation that will transport 700,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz to be killed. He will be able to move back to Auschwitz to be with his family. He calls his wife to give her the good news and then attends a lavish gala to celebrate. After the gala, he calls his wife in the middle of the night to tell her they are referring to this future slaughter as the “Höss operation.” He is very proud of this, believing it will be a good legacy. He also tells her that he spent the entire party imagining how to effectively gas everyone in the room. It’s the only time we get a hint in the movie of his sadistic tendencies.

After Rudolf hangs up with his wife, he walks down the stairs of the empty Berlin office. He suddenly begins to retch, not quite throwing up. He pauses and stares into the darkness. The movie suddenly flashes forward to present-day Auschwitz. Workers are meticulously cleaning the exhibits in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, including sweeping up the gas chambers and polishing the glass that displays shoes and personal belongings of thousands of Holocaust survivors. Back in 1943, Rudolf continues to descend down the stairs. With that, the movie ends.

The Zone of Interest ending explained with analysis:

The Zone of Interest is a movie about extreme cognitive dissonance. It’s about the mundanity of evil. It’s about the fact that the Nazis—whom we like to think of as monstrous exceptions to humanity—looked an awful lot like regular people leading regular lives. “To acknowledge the couple as human beings,” Glazer said of his two main characters in that same Guardian interview, “was a big part of the awfulness of this entire journey of the film, but I kept thinking that, if we could do so, we would maybe see ourselves in them. For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”

The fact that the movie is very slow-moving and at times, quite mundane, is the point. Director Jonathan Glazer never shows footage of the horrors that are happening in Auschwitz, because he wants to lull audiences into the same state of mind as the Höss family: Willfully ignoring the genocide happening next to them. However, neither the audience nor the Höss family can block out the sound. “There are, in effect, two films,” Glazer told the Guardian.” “The one you see, and the one you hear, and the second is just as important as the first, arguably more so. We already know the imagery of the camps from actual archive footage. There is no need to attempt to recreate it, but I felt that if we could hear it, we could somehow see it in our heads.”

That final scene can perhaps be interpreted as Rudolf’s body knowing what his mind refusing to acknowledge: That his legacy in this war will not be a good one. The flash-forward to modern-day Auschwitz shows that the Nazi’s work at Auschwitz is remembered not as a glorious war victory, but as a horrific crime against humanity. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Glazer said the flash-forward was inspired by his own visit to Auschwitz and observing the workers at the museum. “It was like they were tending graves,” Glazer said. “You know, Höss is long gone. He is ash. But the museum, and the importance of such museums, they are still there.”

Höss’s legacy is not what he thought it would be, to say the least. Rudolf Höss—who was tried for mass murder and hanged in Auschwitz following a trial in 1947—may not have admitted his sins to himself in this movie. But his retching suggests that guilt is there, somewhere deep within him.