The 12th of March, 1938. German troops cross the border with Austria and invade the country without
firing a single shot. They are not met with armed resistance, but with cheers and flowers. While
thousands of Austrians turn out to greet Adolf Hitler as he travels first to Linz and then on
to Vienna, terrified Jews, leftists and other opponents of the Nazi Regime race towards the
country’s borders, hoping to reach them before they are closed but most would become trapped
in a rapidly Nazifying Austria. In the weeks that follow, there is pogrom-like violence
across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat up, attack, and humiliate the Jews. They
force them to scrub the streets, clean public toilets and perform humiliating exercises.
Many decide to try to leave Austria and lines appear at consulates across the city of Vienna.
Among the Austrians who greet the Führer is a man who as a commandant of the Płaszów
concentration camp during the Second World War will be responsible for brutal torture
and killing of thousands of innocent men, women and children. His name is Amon Göth.
Amon Leopold Göth, the only child of Catholic parents,
was born on the 11 December 1908 in Vienna then part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Amon Franz,
owned the prosperous publishing house and due to his frequent business travels and
his mother frequently working in the family business, Amon was raised mostly by his aunt.
After he attended public school in Vienna where he showed little interest in what was happening
in the classroom, which was the reason why his academic performance remained poor,
Amon studied agriculture for a few semesters before abandoning his studies
in 1925 when he began an apprenticeship as a bookseller in his parents' company.
Amon, then 17 years old, became increasingly enthusiastic about National Socialism and its
radical ideology and his main political goal was the annexation of Austria to the German
Reich. He shared this goal with the German Nazi Party which he decided to join in 1930.
He was granted full party membership on 31 May 1931 which meant that he was considered
an Old Fighter - one who had joined the party before Adolf Hitler's rise to the position of
Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The Old Fighters were distinguished from the flood
of new members who joined in 1933 and later for opportunistic reasons. Once the Nazis took power,
many of the Old Fighters not only achieved high status and received a number of special
awards instituted for this purpose but were also given prestigious jobs in the
opera houses, government buildings and universities of the Third Reich.
Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign which
was encouraged and funded by Germany. The Nazi goal was to undermine the regime of the Austrian
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent. They staged disruptive protests
and brawled with political opponents and the police. Austrian Nazis set off explosives and
tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish-owned businesses. In June 1933, in response to a fatal
Nazi bombing, the Dollfuss regime banned the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates.
When Göth ‘s illegal activities, including obtaining explosives for the Nazi Party, made
him a wanted man in Austria, he fled to Germany. From there Göth smuggled radios and weapons
into Austria and acted as a courier for the SS. In October 1933, however, Göth was tracked down
by Austrian authorities and then arrested but legal proceedings brought against him
ended in December 1933 with his acquittal for lack of evidence. Göth then returned to his
parents' business, but continued to maintain contact with the underground Nazi movement.
On the 25th of July 1934, when Austrian Nazis attempted to overthrow the Austrian government,
the conspirators shot and killed Chancellor Dollfuss. Amon Göth
was again detained but managed to escape custody and flee to Germany
where he tried to help his parents develop their publishing business.
His mother died in March 1936 and in the summer of the same year his first marriage failed.
In the spring of 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich.
The Anschluss, as it became known,
took place over three days between the 11th and 13th of March 1938.
Göth returned to Vienna shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and resumed his party
activities. He married Anna Geiger, a woman he met at a motorcycle race, in an SS civil
ceremony in October 1938. Prior to the wedding, the couple had to pass a set of strict physical
tests administered by the SS to determine the suitability of the marriage. The marriage produced
3 children but Peter, their oldest child born in 1939, died of diphtheria aged seven months.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On the following year Göth joined the SS in which he reached the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer. When
in the summer of 1942 the Nazis began deporting Jews from ghettos in the General gouvernement
to extermination camps, Göth was sent to SS headquarters in Lublin where he
joined the staff of Odilo Globočnik, the SS and Police Leader of the Kraków area. As part of
Operation Reinhard, which was a codename for the systematic extermination of
the Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland,
three killing centers were established: Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Göth was
responsible for rounding up and transporting victims to these camps to be murdered.
Amon Göth’s next assignment, starting on 11 February 1943, was to oversee the
construction of the 200 acre Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, which he was to command.
In his inaugural address as commandant he said to the prisoners: “ I am your God”.
The Płaszów camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in Kraków.
It was initially a forced-labor camp for Jews. The original site of the camp included two
Jewish cemeteries. From time to time the SS enlarged the camp and it reached its
maximum size in 1944, the same year that it became a concentration camp. Until that time,
most of the camp guards were Ukrainian police auxiliaries chosen from among the Soviet soldiers
in German prisoner-of-war camps and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Lublin.
Płaszów camp was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wired fence and was divided into several
sections. The camp had barracks for German personnel, factories, warehouses, a men's camp
and a women's camp, and a "labor education camp" for Polish workers who violated labor
discipline. Poles and Jews were segregated within the camp and the largest number of people confined
in Płaszów at any one time was over 20,000. Thousands were killed there, mostly by shooting.
Everyday life in the camp was subject to Göth's strict rules and was characterized by arbitrary
executions, harassment, humiliation and torture by himself or by the guards. After morning roll call,
the prisoners were herded to their assigned jobs. Escape attempts or sabotage were
generally punishable by death, while food smuggling was punishable by 100 lashes.
Successful escape attempts were punished with the execution of every tenth prisoner in the escapee's
group and it was not uncommon for Göth to perform the executions personally. He believed that with
such measures he could demonstrate his ideas for order and discipline in a memorable way.
One of Göth's specialties was to shoot at prisoners in the morning from balcony of
the villa which was specially renovated for him. Sometimes he shot people from
the window of his office if they appeared to be moving too slowly or resting in the yard.
His Tyrolean hat would mark his intentions. It was the signal
for seasoned prisoners to attempt to hide. His two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralf,
an Alsatian mix, were trained to tear inmates to death. Amon Göth was soon given the nickname
“Butcher of Płaszów” by the prisoners and he killed at least 500 people with his own hands.
After murdering a person, he requested their index card so that their relatives could also be killed,
as he did not want to have "discontented people" in the camp. Göth killed indiscriminately almost
daily. A misinterpreted look was enough for this, which is why the prisoners preferred to look at
the floor when Göth was present. Another time he shot a victim just for a forgotten tribute. On
one occasion Göth, after catching a woman eating a potato, had her thrown into a large cauldron
of boiling water in order to cook her alive. A former Płaszów prisoner, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig,
who survived the war later testified: “ 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.”
During his time at Płaszów, Göth lived comfortably in a villa,
owning cars and horses that he rode in the camp. He also had an interpreter responsible
for his correspondence, a personal physician and a large number of personal servants;
these included several domestic workers, maids, a stable boy, a masseur, a chauffeur,
a bodywork specialist, a butler and a car mechanic for his fleet of three passenger
cars. Negligence in the care and maintenance of the vehicles was punished draconically by Göth.
The kitchen staff could also count on Göth beating them to the point of unconsciousness or slapping
them in the face if the food served was too little or had too much salt. On one occasion he shot a
Jewish cook because the soup was too hot. Göth ‘s shoemaker was threatened with the
same procedure if he used the wrong materials or if the shoes he had made by hand were too
big or too small. Up to six pairs of shoes are said to have been produced for Göth each week.
Amon Göth was also a sexual deviant and an alcoholic who had no problem raping Jewish
women in the camp even though under the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,
sexual relations between Jews and Germans were punishable by severe imprisonment or even death.
After the war, Göth’s former maid testified how on one occasion she
entered the living room where Amon Göth, drunk and naked with whip in his hand,
ordered her to undress. When she refused, he whipped her and tried to rape her.
In his villa Göth also organized orgies and parties with a lot of alcohol.
In addition to his duties at Płaszów, Göth was the officer in charge of the liquidation
of the ghettos and labor camps of Szebnie, Bochnia, Tarnów, Kraków, and other places.
Before World War II, about 25,000 Jews lived in Tarnów, a city in southern Poland,
45 miles east of Kraków. Jews—whose recorded presence in the town went
back to the mid-fifteenth century—comprised about half of the town's total population.
Deportations from Tarnów began in June 1942, when about 13,500 Jews were sent to the Belzec killing
center. During the deportation operations, German SS and police forces massacred hundreds of Jews in
the streets, in the marketplace, in the Jewish cemetery, and in the woods outside the town.
After the June deportations, the Germans ordered the surviving Jews in Tarnów,
along with thousands of Jews from the neighboring towns, into a ghetto.
The ghetto was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Living conditions in the ghetto were poor,
marked by severe food shortages, a lack of sanitary facilities, and a
forced-labor regimen in factories and workshops producing goods for the German war industry.
In September 1942, the Germans ordered all ghetto residents to report at Targowica Square,
where they were subjected to a selection in which those deemed "unessential" were selected out
for deportation to the Belzec killing center. About 8,000 people were deported. Thereafter,
deportations from Tarnów to the killing centers continued sporadically and the Germans
deported a group of 2,500 in November 1942. When the Germans decided to destroy the Tarnów
ghetto in September 1943, the surviving 7,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and 3,000 to the
Plaszow concentration camp in Kraków. In late 1943, Tarnów was declared "free of Jews" .
After the war several witnesses testified that Göth personally shot between 30 and
90 women and children during the liquidation of the Tarnów ghetto.
Amon Göth was hated not only by the camp inmates but also by his SS subordinates whom he treated
harshly and brought them before an SS and police court for the smallest offences. However,
when it was revealed that the Göth himself had used the massive Nazi
apparatus to gain an enormous amount of wealth, his downfall became inevitable
as all possessions stolen from murdered Jews were regarded as the property of the Reich.
He stole valuables of any kind – diamonds, money in foreign currency,
paintings, carpets and furniture. In the course of the investigations, it
was revealed that he stole assets worth millions of Reichsmarks and first wagon with Göth's looted
goods was secured at the Opava train station at the end of August 1944, with others to follow.
On 13 September 1944, Göth was relieved of his position and arrested by Gestapo officials in
his Płaszów villa. He was 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 and
the camp was closed on 15 January 1945. Göth was scheduled for an appearance before
SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen, but the charges were later dropped due to Germany's looming
defeat. SS doctors diagnosed Göth with a mental illness and he was transferred to
a mental hospital where he was arrested by U.S. soldiers wearing a Wehrmacht uniform.
He was then sent to a temporary prison
camp located on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp.
and extradited to Poland where he finally faced justice for his crimes.
Between 27 August and 5 September 1946 Göth was tried for his crimes by the Supreme
National Tribunal of Poland in Kraków. He was accused of being responsible for:
- the deaths of ~8000 people in the Płaszów camp - the deaths of ~ 2000 people during
the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto - order for the deportation of ~ 8000 people
in the course of dissolution of the Tarnów ghetto - orders for the murder and deportation of an
unspecified number of people as part of the liquidation of the Szebnie camp
- and misappropriation of significant Jewish assets
During the proceedings, Amon Göth pursued the simple practice of rigorously denying
all allegations against him and when testifying about violent
excesses committed during his reign of terror, he questioned the credibility of
the witnesses and defended his actions by merely carrying out orders as a soldier.
In addition, Göth appeared unimpressed by the course of the court proceedings
and expressed his contempt for the court by demonstratively polishing his fingernails.
On the September 5, 1946, he was found guilty on all five counts and sentenced to death by hanging.
Amon Göth was 37 years old when he was hanged on 13 September 1946 at
the Montelupich Prison in Kraków, not far from the site of the Płaszów camp.
However, the smooth execution of the sentence was thwarted by the fact that the prepared rope
turned out to be too long. It had to be shortened twice because of Göth's height – he was 2 meters
tall. Only the third attempt succeeded. Göth's last words were "Heil Hitler!"
After the execution, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered into the Vistula river.
There were no teras shed for Amon Göth.
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