This Is the House That Höss Built The building, a few feet from the main Auschwitz camp, will be turned into a counterextremism center. Oświęcim, Poland 'Why does the Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran have a f— Twitter account?" asks Mark Wallace, a rare lapse in language from a courtly man. "Why should the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism be on f— social media?"
Mr. Wallace, who served as a U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, has succumbed to righteous anger. Blame it on the day when our conversation occurs: Jan. 27, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Blame it also on the ghostly place where we are talking: the house, right next to the original Auschwitz camp, where its commandant, Rudolf Höss, lived with his family from May 1940 through December 1943, and then again in the spring of 1944, when he came back to oversee the murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews at the nearby Birkenau death camp. Höss, his wife and their five children dined and sang and gardened and swam a few feet from the headquarters of the complex where more than a million Jews were gassed or shot or beaten or worked to death. Dad and mom tinted the windows in the kids' bedrooms so they couldn't see a nearby crematorium. No wonder Mr. Wallace finds it intolerable that he can turn on his phone at the ground zero of Jewish genocide and hear directly from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who seeks to wipe Israel off the map. "It's as if Auschwitz hasn't made a difference," he says. "Can we not see that this is wrong?" Höss was hanged by the Poles in 1947 at the site of the crematorium his children couldn't see. If he returned to his house today, he'd be aghast at its transformation. With the help of private American backers, Mr. Wallace and a team of activists bought the house to turn it into a "center for research, education and action on antisemitism, extremism and radicalization." There will be a database of "extremist content, groups, actors and incidents" that will help persuade Western lawmakers to crack down on antisemitic and terrorist support networks and extinguish online propaganda, recruitment and incitement. The subversion is powerful, and cathartic. Inside, the house bears no resemblance to how it was when Höss lived there, so it won't be a museum of evil. It will be gutted and will give way to a "void"—a "quiet, reflective space" cleansed of Höss and his hateful aura. Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-American architect best known for designing the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the reconstructed World Trade Center in New York, will oversee the construction of a brand-new building that will serve as the center's heart. Mr. Wallace's decade-old nonprofit, the Counter Extremism Project, acquired the Höss house and one next door from the Polish family that had owned them for the past 80 years. He declines to say how much he paid but says there were "at least 10 different family members across two houses, and many were estranged from each other." The purchase "took years to accomplish because we didn't believe it appropriate to pay a significant premium because of its Nazi history." As for his broader mission, he speaks of an "algorithm of evil" and wants to "make it untenable for social media to reward hate and antisemitism." Using an analogy with road safety, he says the Internet "isn't just in the pre-seat-belt age, it's in the pre-traffic-light era." He wants to challenge social media's titans to take extremists offline: "Yes, I want them to work with me, but I also want them to worry about me, even be afraid of me." He will invite Elon Musk to visit the house at Auschwitz. "He's a handful, but I want him to see what we're doing, and to understand what's at stake. I know he believes that good will overwhelm evil on Twitter, so why doesn't he sign up with us, get on the team, and help me defeat the negative speech?" In 2017 the Counter Extremism Project was instrumental in getting the video archive of Anwar al-Awlaki taken off YouTube. The incendiary preaching of the American-born jihadist had incited the Fort Hood gunman and the Boston Marathon bombers, among others. Awlaki was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, but his poison had lived on posthumously online. "It's a watershed moment," Mr. Wallace said at the time, "on the question of whether we're going to allow the unchecked proliferation of cyberjihad." Yet Islamic propaganda and Jew-hatred remain disquietingly unchecked. Mr. Wallace cites a recent poll showing that half of all adults across the globe hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the Holocaust. The Höss house, as reconceived, stands as a triumph of Jewish resilience over Nazi Germany and as a challenge to global amnesia. The era that followed Höss's hanging has been a golden age for the Jewish people. It has been marked by Israel's astonishing successes, and the unprecedented acceptance of Jews into Western society—particularly in America, the most powerful country in history. After suffering what Churchill called the single greatest crime in human history, what better rebuke to Nazism than this Jewish flourishing? But civilization is a veneer. If one picks at it, antisemitism quickly resurfaces. Before World War I, Germany arguably represented the most vibrant and elevated culture in Europe. Nazism dehumanized its people, culminating in the Holocaust. The present-day ideology of radical Islam is no less a threat to the Jews than the Nazis were. If anything, the language and deeds of jihadists are more explicit in their genocidal aspirations than the Nazis were in the 1930s. The epicenter for that intent is the regime in Tehran. Its lust, and that of its fellow travelers, for Jewish blood was revealed anew on Oct. 7, 2023. As we stand atop the ruins of the German Reich at Auschwitz, so too must we, one day, stand atop the ruins of a vanquished Islamist Iranian empire. Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute. WSJ Opinion Docs: This 20 minute film sheds light on the worst antisemitic riot in American history, which occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. The current wave of antisemitism makes these events newly relevant and worthy of reconsideration. Photo: John Roca/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images | 
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