"Göth" and "Goeth" redirect here; see Goeth for a discussion of this and related surnames.
Amon Leopold Göth pronounced [ˈɡøːt] was an Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer and the
commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in Płaszów in German-occupied Poland
during World War II. He was tried as a war criminal after the war by the Supreme National
Tribunal of Poland at Kraków and was found guilty of personally ordering the imprisonment,
torture, and extermination of individuals and groups of people. He was also convicted
of homicide, the first such conviction at a war crimes trial, for "personally killing,
maiming and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified number of people". He was executed
by hanging not far from the former site of the Płaszów camp. The film Schindler's List
depicts his practice of shooting camp internees.
Early life and career Göth was born on 11 December 1908 in Vienna,
then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to a family in the book publishing industry.
Goeth joined a Nazi youth group at age 17 and was a member of the antisemitic nationalist
paramilitary group Heimwehr from 1927 to 1930. He dropped his membership to join the Austrian
branch of the Nazi Party, being assigned the party membership number 510,764 in September
1930. Goeth joined the Austrian SS in 1930 and was appointed an SS-Mann with the SS number
43,673. Goeth served with the SS Truppe Deimel and
Sturm Libardi in Vienna until January 1933, when he was promoted to serve as adjutant
and platoon leader of the 52nd SS-Standarte, a regimental-sized unit. He was soon promoted
to SS-Scharführer. He fled to Germany when his illegal activities, including obtaining
explosives for the Nazi Party, made him a wanted man. The Austrian Nazi Party was declared
illegal in Austria on 19 June 1933, so they set up operations in exile in Munich. From
this base, Goeth smuggled radios and weapons into Austria and acted as a courier for the
SS. He was arrested in October 1933 by the Austrian authorities but was released for
lack of evidence in December 1933. He was again detained after the assassination of
Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in a failed Nazi coup attempt in July 1934. He
escaped custody and fled to the SS training facility at Dachau, next to the infamous Dachau
Concentration Camp. He temporarily quit the SS and Nazi party activities until 1937 and
lived in Munich while trying to help his parents to develop their publishing business. He married
on the recommendation of his parents, but was divorced after only a few months.
Goeth returned to Vienna shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and resumed his party activities.
He married Anny Geiger in a civil SS ceremony on 23 October 1938. The couple had three children,
Peter, born in 1939, who died of diphtheria at age 7 months, Werner, born in 1940, and
a daughter, Ingeborg, born in 1941. The couple maintained a permanent home in Vienna throughout
World War II. Initially assigned to 89th SS-Standarte, Goeth was transferred to the 1st SS-Sturmbann
of the 11th SS-Standarte at the start of the war and was promoted to SS-Oberscharführer
in early 1941. He soon gained a reputation as a seasoned administrator in the Nazi efforts
to isolate and relocate the Jewish population of Europe as an Einsatzführer and financial
officer for the Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums. He was commissioned
to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer on 14 July 1941.
He was transferred to Lublin in the summer of 1942, where he joined the staff of SS-Brigadeführer
Odilo Globočnik, the SS and Police Leader of the Kraków area, as part of Operation
Reinhard, the code name given to the establishment of the three extermination camps at Bełżec,
Sobibór, and Treblinka. Nothing is known of his activities in the six months he served
with Operation Reinhard; participants were sworn to secrecy. But according to the transcripts
of his later trial, Goeth was responsible for rounding up and transporting victims to
these camps to be killed. Płaszów
Goeth was assigned to the SS-Totenkopfverbände. His first assignment, starting on 11 February
1943, was to oversee the construction of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, which
he was to command. The camp took one month to construct using forced labour. On 13 March
1943, the Jewish ghetto of Kraków was liquidated and those still fit for work were sent to
the new camp at Płaszów. Several thousand not deemed fit for work were sent to extermination
camps and killed. Hundreds more were killed on the streets by the Nazis as they cleared
out the ghetto.
On 3 September 1943, in addition to his duties at Płaszów, Goeth was the officer in charge
of the liquidation of the ghetto at Tarnów, which had been home to 25,000 Jews at the
start of World War II. By the time the ghetto was liquidated, 8,000 Jews remained. They
were loaded on a train to Auschwitz concentration camp, but less than half survived the journey.
Most of the survivors were deemed unsuitable for forced labour and were killed immediately
on their arrival at Auschwitz. According to testimony of several witnesses as recorded
in his 1946 indictment for war crimes, Goeth personally shot between 30 and 90 women and
children during the liquidation of the ghetto. Goeth was also the officer in charge of the
liquidation of Szebnie concentration camp, which interned 4,000 Jewish and 1,500 Polish
slave labourers. Evidence presented at Goeth's trial indicates he delegated this task to
a subordinate, SS-Hauptscharführer Josef Grzimek, who was sent to assist camp commandant
SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Kellermann with mass executions. Between 21 September 1943
and 3 February 1944 the camp was gradually liquidated. Around a thousand of the victims
were taken to the nearby forest and shot, and the remainder were sent to Auschwitz,
where most were gassed immediately on arrival. By April 1944, Goeth had been promoted to
the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, having received a double promotion, skipping the rank of SS-Obersturmführer.
He was also appointed a reserve officer of the Waffen-SS. In early 1944 the status of
the Kraków-Płaszów Labour Camp changed to a permanent concentration camp under the
direct authority of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt. Mietek Pemper testified at the trial that
it was during the earlier period that Goeth committed most of the random and brutal killings
for which he became notorious. Concentration camps were more closely monitored by the SS
than labour camps, so conditions improved slightly when the designation was changed.
The camp housed about 2,000 inmates when it opened. At its peak of operations in 1944,
a staff of 636 guards oversaw 25,000 permanent inmates, and an additional 150,000 people
passed through the camp in its role as a transit camp. Goeth personally murdered prisoners
on a daily basis. His two dogs, Rolf and Ralf, were trained to tear inmates to death. He
shot people from the window of his office if they appeared to be moving too slowly or
resting in the yard. He shot to death a Jewish cook because the soup was too hot. He brutally
mistreated his two maids, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig and Helen Hirsch, who were in constant daily
fear for their lives, as were all the inmates.
As a survivor I can tell you that we are all traumatized people. Never would I, never,
believe that any human being would be capable of such horror, of such atrocities. When we
saw him from a distance, everybody was hiding, in latrines, wherever they could hide. I can't
tell you how people feared him.
Poldek Pfefferberg, another Schindlerjude, said: "When you saw Goeth, you saw death."
Yet Goeth spared the life of Jewish prisoner Natalia Hubler and that of her sister, after
hearing her play a nocturne by Chopin on the piano the day after she arrived at the Płaszów
camp. Goeth believed if one member of a work team
escaped or committed some infraction, the entire team must be punished. On one occasion
he ordered every second member of a work detail should be shot because one of the party had
escaped. On another occasion he personally shot every fifth member of a crew because
one had not returned to the camp. The main execution site at Płaszów was Hujowa Górka,
a large hill that was used for mass killings and executions. Pemper testified that 8,000
to 12,000 people were murdered at Płaszów. Dismissal and capture
On 13 September 1944 Goeth was relieved of his position and charged by the SS with theft
of Jewish property, failure to provide adequate food to the prisoners under his charge, violation
of concentration camp regulations regarding the treatment and punishment of prisoners,
and allowing unauthorised access to camp personnel records by prisoners and non-commissioned
officers. Administration of the camp at Płaszów was turned over to SS-Obersturmführer Arnold
Büscher. Goeth was scheduled for an appearance before SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, but due
to the progress of World War II and Germany's looming defeat, the charges against him were
dropped in early 1945. SS doctors diagnosed Goeth as suffering from mental illness and
he was committed to a mental institution in Bad Tölz, where he was arrested by the United
States military in May 1945. Trial and execution
After the war, Goeth was extradited to Poland, where he was tried by the Supreme National
Tribunal of Poland in Kraków between 27 August and 5 September 1946. Goeth was found guilty
of membership in the Nazi Party and personally ordering the imprisonment, torture, and extermination
of individuals and groups of people. He was also convicted of homicide, the first such
conviction at a war crimes trial, for "personally killing, maiming and torturing a substantial,
albeit unidentified number of people". He was sentenced to death and was hanged on 13
September 1946 at the Montelupich Prison in Kraków, not far from the site of the Płaszów
camp. Goeth's last words were "Heil Hitler". The body was cremated and the ashes thrown
in the Vistula River. Family
In addition to his two marriages, Goeth had a two-year relationship with Ruth Irene Kalder,
a beautician and aspiring actress originally from Breslau. Kalder first met Goeth in 1942
or early 1943, when she worked as a secretary at Oskar Schindler's enamelware factory in
Kraków. She soon moved in with Goeth and the two had an affair. She took Goeth's name
shortly after his death. Goeth's last child was a daughter, Monika Hertwig, whom he had
by Kalder. Monika was born in November 1945 in Bad Tölz.
In media and culture Schindler's List
Goeth's actions at Płaszów Labour Camp became internationally known through his depiction
by British actor Ralph Fiennes in the 1993 film Schindler's List. In a subsequent interview,
Fiennes recalled:
People believe that they’ve got to do a job, they’ve got to take
on an ideology, that they’ve got a life to lead; they’ve got to survive, a job to
do, it’s every day inch by inch, little compromises, little ways of telling yourself
this is how you should lead your life and suddenly then these things can happen. I mean,
I could make a judgement myself privately, this is a terrible, evil, horrific man. But
the job was to portray the man, the human being. There’s a sort of banality, that
everydayness, that I think was important. And it was in the screenplay. In fact, one
of the first scenes with Oskar Schindler, with Liam Neeson, was a scene where I’m
saying, 'You don’t understand how hard it is, I have to order so many—so many metres
of barbed wire and so many fencing posts and I have to get so many people from A to B.'
And, you know, he’s sort of letting off steam about the difficulties of the job.
Fiennes won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role and was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His portrayal ranked 15th on American Film Institute's
list of the top 50 film villains of all time. He ranks as the highest non-fiction villain.
When Płaszów survivor Mila Pfefferberg was introduced to Fiennes on the set of the film,
she began to shake uncontrollably, as Fiennes, costumed in full SS dress uniform, reminded
her of the real Amon Goeth. Monika Hertwig
In 2002, Goeth's daughter Monika Hertwig published her memoirs under the title Ich muß doch
meinen Vater lieben, oder?. Hertwig described the subsequent life of her mother, Ruth Kalder
Goeth, who unconditionally glorified her fiancé until confronted with his role in the Holocaust.
Ruth committed suicide in 1983, shortly after giving an interview in Jon Blair's documentary
Schindler. Hertwig's experiences in dealing with her father's crimes are detailed in Inheritance,
a 2006 documentary directed by James Moll. Appearing in the documentary is Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig,
one of Goeth's former housemaids. The documentary details the meeting of the two women at the
Płaszów memorial site in Poland. Hertwig had requested the meeting, but Jonas-Rosenzweig
was hesitant because her memories of Goeth and the concentration camp were so traumatic.
She eventually agreed after Hertwig wrote to her, "We have to do it for the murdered
people." Jonas felt touched by this sentiment and agreed to meet her.
In a subsequent interview, Jonas-Rosenzweig recalled:
It's hard for me to be with her because she reminds me a lot of, you know ... she's tall,
she has certain features. And I hated him so. But she is a victim. And I think it's
important because she is willing to tell the story in Germany. She told me people don't
want to know, they want to go on with their lives. And I think it's very important because
there's a lot of children of perpetrators, and I think she's a brave person to go on
talking about it, because it's difficult. And I feel for Monika. I am a mother, I have
children. And she is affected by the fact that her father was a perpetrator. But my
children are also affected by it. And that's why we both came here. The world has to know,
to prevent something like this from happening again.
Hertwig also appeared in a documentary called Hitler's Children, directed and produced by
Chanoch Zeevi, an Israeli documentary filmmaker. In the documentary, Hertwig and other close
relatives of infamous Nazi leaders describe their feelings, relationships, and memories
of their relatives. Jennifer Teege
Jennifer Teege, the daughter of Monika Hertwig and a Nigerian man, discovered that Goeth
was her grandfather through Hertwig's 2002 memoirs. She addressed her coming to terms
with her origins in a 2013 book, Amon. Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen.
Summary of SS career SS number: 43673
Nazi Party number: 510764 Primary positions: Lagerkommandant, Kraków-Płaszów
concentration camp Waffen-SS service: SS-Hauptsturmführer der
Reserve Dates of rank
Awards Anschluss Medal
German Sports Badge SS Julleuchter
Honour Chevron for the Old Guard At the time of his capture by American forces,
Goeth claimed to have been recently promoted to the rank of Sturmbannführer, a claim not
supported in his SS service record. Nonetheless, several American interrogation transcripts
list him as "SS-Major Goeth". SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration
camp, supported the claim at his own trial when he testified that Goeth was a major in
the concentration camp service. Due to poor record keeping at the end of the war, it is
possible that Goeth was promoted; most historical accounts simply list his rank as that of Hauptsturmführer.
Notes
Citations
References
Further reading Sachslehner, Johannes. Der Tod ist ein Meister
aus Wien. Wien: Styria Verlag. ISBN 978-3-222-13233-9. External links
The Trial of Amon Goeth An Interview with Monika Goeth Hertwig on
YouTube