Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Nominated for several awards at this weekend's Oscars ceremony, the zone of interest is one of the most acclaimed and talked about

films of 2024. Directed by Jonathan Glazer and loosely based on a novel of the same name by

Martin Amos, the film focuses on the life of Rudolf Hearst and his family during the Second

World War.

Hearst at the time was commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So in today's episode, we're exploring Hurst's story with Professor Richard J. Evans,

one of the world's leading experts on Nazi Germany, who was also a consultant on the original novel. Richard spoke to

Rob Atter. So Richard, we're talking today about Rudolph Hearst because his story is at the

centre of the new film, The Zone of Interest. And I gather that you actually advised Martin Amos

on the book, which the film was loosely based. Or could you tell us

about the work you did on the book? I'd met Martin Amos because the Vina Holocaust Library a few

years ago had a series of public discussions between historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

and novelists who've written using that as a subject.

And so he wrote an earlier book called Times Arrow, which was a fictional reminiscences of a Nazi war criminal told backwards in time.

So he kind of wakes up from death and it proceeds backwards until he goes to sleep at the moment just before he's born.

And it's a wonderfully virtuoso piece of writing quite, quite extraordinary because he

peels back time and begins to reveal, of course, the crimes he's involved in and then why

he's involved in them. So when Martin Amos returned to that subject for his

novel, The Zone of Interest, he got in touch with me and asked if I would read through it just to

check for historical accuracy. So of course I did. I'm a great admirer of his work. And I found

about 50 small historical errors of one sort and another and corrected them

...