Read full article here.

In early 2025, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a US-based NGO, announced the purchase of the house from a Polish family for an undisclosed sum. The property had already drawn international attention through Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest. For his movie, Glazer recreated the house on a set using a nearby abandoned building.

The new owners of the Höss home, whose project is called the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization (Archer) at House 88, stripped back the walls and removed Communist-era ceilings in order to restore the property as closely as possible to its wartime state without fully renovating it. Only a handful of original features remain, including an iron staircase balustrade and a bathroom lock disturbingly marked either “Frei” or “Besetz”: free or occupied. One room displays an SS cup and other kitchenware, alongside the striped pyjamas of a Polish Auschwitz prisoner discovered in the roof structure.

Mark Wallace, head of CEP and a former US ambassador to the UN under President George W Bush, says “the house is in many ways the definition of the heart of darkness, of the ideology that drove the Shoah.” 

House 88 sits beside the Auschwitz museum that drew almost 2mn people in 2025, making it one of Poland’s most visited sites. To ease overcrowding, the museum stopped this year selling on-site tickets, requiring visitors to book online in advance.