The man known to history as Amon Göth was
born as Amon Leopold Göth on the 11th of December 1908 in Vienna, which at that time
was the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was Amon Franz Göth, the owner
of the Viennese publishing house Verlagsanstalt* Amon Franz Göth. The company specialised in military books,
but also sold religious publications and postcards. It did quite well and as a result the younger
Amon was born into an upper-middle class family of the Vienna business community. Amon’s mother was Berta Schwendt* Göth. He was the couple’s only child and as such
he could look forward to a comfortable life given his family’s prosperity. Young Amon was afforded a good education for
the time. He was sent to an upper-middle class Catholic
school in Vienna and would eventually attend the Waidhofen an der Thaya* college close
to what today is the Czech border. This was an agricultural college which Göth
began attending when he was still in his mid-teens. But despite the affluence of the Göth family,
Amon’s childhood was troubled in its own way. Amon Franz Göth often travelled for his work,
sometimes very widely, in an effort to open up new markets for the publishing house’s
books and other printed material. Back in Vienna, the day to day labour of actually
managing the office and its employees consequently fell to Berta Göth, and so with both his
father and mother largely indisposed, Amon was largely raised by his aunt. This, combined with being an only child, left
him somewhat isolated, but also resentful of his parents. Thus the beginnings of the bitter, savage
man that would later emerge were already making themselves felt when Amon was just a teenager. Years later he would reflect on this to his
mistress in Poland, Ruth Irene Kalder,* who noted in an interview in 1975 that Amon felt
as though his parents had neglected him. We are fortunate to know extensive details
about Göth’s earlier life, not because he kept a diary or composed a memoir such
as is the case with some other senior Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer,
but because there is an extensive file on Göth in Bundesarchiv* Berlin Documentation
Centre. This was compiled by the Schutzstaffel, or
SS, the Nazi Party paramilitary organisation which Göth would subsequently join, and includes
statements by Göth himself about his youth and early adult years. Supplementing this are the extensive details
about Göth’s war-time record and war crimes which was produced as part of his trial after
the conflict and which gives further extensive details on his actions in the 1930s and 1940s. This contains first-hand accounts by some
of those who witnessed Göth’s actions during the Second World War. And all of this is supplemented by accounts
by individuals who would eventually escape from the concentration camp in Poland which
Göth ended up commanding. Furthermore the interview which his former
mistress, Ruth Irene Kalder,* gave in 1975 to the Israeli historian, Tom Segev,* is a
very useful personal account of Göth’s views, although probably biased in some respects. As a consequence, we are able to develop a
more detailed picture of Göth’s life and actions during the war than we otherwise would
be able to for a good many of the other commandants of the concentration camps. Göth’s childhood years were spent in a
country which was mired in war. For years the major European powers had been
aligning themselves into two armed camps, driven by a wide range of forces including
colonial rivalry, regional conflicts in areas such as the Balkans, and rivalry particularly
between Britain and Germany. The Empire of Austria-Hungary in which Göth
was born and grew up was mainly concerned in this maelstrom with the Balkans where it
was vying with Tsarist Russia for influence as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. However, the government in Vienna was also
concerned about the increasing nationalist movements amongst peoples such as the Croats
and Serbs. In the summer of 1914 a Serb nationalist assassinated
the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the crisis which ensued
in the weeks that followed eventually spiralled into a European-wide war between Germany and
Austria-Hungary on one side and Britain, France and Russia on the other. Eventually others would involve themselves
until it became a global conflict. The First World War would last until 1918,
with Britain and France finally emerging as the main victors. At its conclusion the German Empire collapsed
and a new republic, named after the town of Weimar* was created, while the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was dismembered with major regions such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia acquiring
their independence from a new smaller state of Austria. Göth began to rebel against his social and
familial background in his late teens. He would later claim that he did so in order
to turn “his back on the bourgeois social values” which his parents had tried to instil
in him. They wished for Amon to be educated in a way
that would prepare him for taking over the publishing business one day, but although
Amon was clearly an intelligent student he showed little commitment to his work and eventually
dropped out of the agricultural college he attended at Waidhofen* after just a few months. Rather Göth was more interested in athletics
and physical activity. And more concerning was an interest he had
developed in politics during his few months in college. In 1925, when he was still just seventeen
years of age he joined the youth chapter of the Austrian branch of the National Socialist
Workers Party, a pan-Germanic party which had been established in Germany in the aftermath
of the First World War. The Nazi Party, as it was commonly known,
was committed to the idea of reversing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles* which had
ended the war, creating a strong Greater Germany and fighting against the perceived influences
of the Jewish people and Communists in Germany and surrounding nations. Headed by a fellow Austrian called Adolf Hitler
they had attempted a military insurgency in Munich in November 1923 and were thereafter
regarded as an extremist party in both Germany and Austria. Göth had been drawn to the Nazi Party for
a number of reasons. Many Austrians were interested in Nazism owing
to its insistence that the peace terms offered to Germany and Austria in the aftermath of
the First World War were overly punitive. And most historians today agree that the treaty
terms were indeed overly harsh and created severe economic problems in these countries. But Göth, with his interest in sport and
athletics, was also attracted by the party’s emphasis on the physicality of the German
people and their martial and sporting prowess. Its associations such as the youth branch
of the party also fostered camaraderie and for an individual who had been raised as an
only child and had distant parents, the Nazi Party perhaps offered the promise of some
companionship. But if these were some of the more benign
things which attracted Göth, there were also less positive aspects to his liking of the
party. He was openly Anti-Semitic and possessed of
racial hatred towards the Jewish people. This was made clear in 1927 when, while having
returned to Vienna to work in his parents’ publishing house, he joined the Styrian* Home
Protection Organisation, a rabidly Anti-Semitic branch of the Austrian Home Guard, another
Fascist group operating in the country at the time. Göth continued to work for some time with
his parents in Vienna, but without undergoing the sort of academic training which would
have prepared him to succeed his father as head of the firm one day. It was clear he viewed his position there
at the time as a temporary employment which he would possibly move on from. It was in Vienna in 1930 that he became caught
up in a power struggle within Austrian Fascism. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and
the Great Depression which followed it, the Nazis had moved from being a fringe party
with the support of little more than 5% of the German people to quickly becoming a major
force in German politics. As they did, the Austrian branch of the party
sought to consolidate its hold over Austrian Fascism by forcing the Austrian Home Guard
and other groups to merge with them. This did not succeed and the Nazis now decreed
that Austrian members could not also be members of the Home Guard. Göth was aligned with both, but tied his
flag to the Nazi Party after some deliberation. Accordingly in May 1931 Göth, who until this
time had remained a member only of the youth wing of the Nazis, became a full member, number
510,764. This would later qualify him as an ‘Old
Fighter’, a party member who had joined before January 1932. Once he had become a fully-fledged member
of the party, Göth’s involvement in its various branches and organisations became
more extensive. For instance, he had become a member of the
SA, the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, a paramilitary wing of the party which wore
brown shirts as their military uniform. Members participated in military drills and
parades as part of Nazi militaristic activity. And it was possibly through his initial involvement
with the SA, that Göth developed an interest in the more hard-line branch of the Nazis,
the Schutzstaffel* or SS, meaning ‘Protection Squad’ which was, like the SA, a paramilitary
grouping within the Nazi Party. It was originally established as a small bodyguard
unit for Hitler. However, unlike the SA, the SS placed an overt
emphasis on the racial ideology of the Nazis, particular so after Heinrich Himmler became
the new head of the organisation in 1929. Himmler’s appointment also saw a massive
increase in the size of the SS from just hundreds of men to thousands and eventually tens of
thousands. Göth had seemingly applied to become a member
of the SS in 1930, but his application was only accepted in 1932 when he became the 43,673rd
member of the organisation. It would be a fateful association as the SS
would in time become the body which orchestrated the worst of the Nazis’ war crimes across
Europe. 1933 was a significant year for both Göth
and the Nazi movement overall. As the economic situation had deteriorated
in Germany in 1931 and 1932 the Nazis had risen to become a major force in German politics. Elections to the Reichstag* in 1932 confirmed
them to be the leading party in the country, while still only able to command just over
one-third of the vote. The Communists, regarded as their ideological
opponents, were the second strongest performing party and so Germany was now engaged in a
tussle between the right-wing Nazis and the left-wing Communists. Eventually the Nazis won out as the centre-right
leaning business community in Germany decided to back Hitler early in 1933. He became Chancellor and within weeks a dictatorship
was established through an Enabling Act which allowed the Nazis to rule by decree. For Göth in Austria, the implications of
this centred on the response of the Austrian government. It was concerned by the rise of the Nazis
and the party’s call for a Greater Germany. Consequently in 1933 it began cracking down
on the Nazi movement in the country and eventually prohibited the party entirely on the 19th
of June 1933. Göth, who was already being sought for engaging
in terrorist activities around Vienna on behalf of the party, fled Austria and relocated to
Germany later in the year. Göth now followed the exodus of senior members
of the Austrian Nazi Party who were streaming north over the Austrian border with Germany
towards Bavaria and the city of Munich, where Hitler and the main leaders of the German
Nazi Party had risen to prominence a decade earlier. And he quickly established himself here within
a sort of Austrian Nazi Party in exile, one which sought to continue to disseminate the
Nazi message throughout Austria from southern Germany. Göth’s specific involvement was in trying
to use the new medium of radio to broadcast Nazi programmes and messages over the airwaves
which could be picked up on in Austria. And he was also working during this time as
a courier for the SS moving between Germany clandestinely, over the Austrian border. It was this activity which led to him being
arrested in October 1933 as the Austrian government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss* was trying
to purge Austrian society of its Nazi element, a campaign which saw some 50,000 Austrian
Nazis incarcerated by April 1934. Göth was not among them though, as he was
released in the final days of 1933 owing to a lack of evidence and returned to Germany. Our understanding of Göth’s activities
in the months and years that followed is aided by the interview Göth’s mistress Ruth Irene
Kalder* gave in 1975. She noted how Amon continued his activities
with the Austrian Nazi Party in exile following his return to Germany, but his brief arrest
and imprisonment late in 1933 did not deter him from making further forays over the border
into Austria in 1934 as the politics of his home country was becoming increasingly turbulent. In an effort to suppress the Nazis, Chancellor
Dollfuss* increasingly cemented a brand of Austro-Fascism distinct from that of the Nazis,
and after an attempted uprising by the Nazis in February 1934 he established a new constitution
which gave himself near dictatorial powers. However, he would not live long to exercise
them. On the 25th of July 1934 Dollfuss* was assassinated
by a squad of nearly a dozen Austrian Nazis in the chancellery building in Vienna. And it seems clear that Göth had played a
part in the planning of the assassination. Moreover, he was one of several thousand Austrian
Nazis who were detained in the country in the weeks that followed, but somehow he managed
to escape from custody and yet again fled over the border to safety in southern Germany. It was a near escape, one which might have
otherwise led to a lengthy jail sentence or even his execution. In the aftermath of the failed Nazi coups
in Austria in the spring and summer of 1934 a new government emerged there under Kurt
Schuschnigg* which maintained Dollfuss’s* anti-Nazi stance with greater success in the
mid-1930s. As a result, many of those Austrian Nazis
who had been attempting to seize power in Austria by operating from Germany resigned
themselves to the fact this would not be possible for some time. Accordingly, from late 1934 Göth began to
focus on advancing within the ranks of the SS in Germany by finding a position at Dachau*
concentration camp which had recently been established in Bavaria to detain political
prisoners. However, he temporarily left the organisation
just a few months later when he fell out with his immediate commander, Alfred Bigler.* This
was a time during which the Austrian members of the SS declined quite considerably following
the failure to establish control over their native land. Consequently, in the mid-1930s Göth turned
for some time to working for his family’s publishing business to handle its activities
in Germany. He also married shortly after settling fully
in Germany, to Olga Janauschek,* a woman who was recommended to Göth by his parents who
knew her family, but the marriage was immediately troubled and they divorced within just a few
months.
Amon’s years in exile from Austria in Germany in the mid-1930s coincided with a period during
which the Nazi state was becoming increasingly belligerent on the European stage. It had always been the intention of Hitler
and his followers to overturn the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.* Accordingly from
their first seizure of power in 1933 a gradual rearmament began throughout Germany. Then in March 1936 the Rhineland region was
remilitarised. Under the terms of Versailles* this region
was to remain strictly empty of German armed forces in order to prevent any future build-up
of power along the French border, and the border with the Low Countries. The Allied powers, though, were willing to
appease Hitler in this respect as the area had been demilitarised for nearly twenty years. Yet it was also the first sign of a strategy
of appeasement by Britain and France which was to prove catastrophic in the years that
followed. Additionally, a new German air-force called
the Luftwaffe* had been established under the command of Hermann Goering.* This new
found belligerence and rearmament spoke of a willingness by Hitler and the Nazis in Germany
to increasingly confront its neighbours and the main victors of the First World War, Britain
and France. This would soon have consequences for Austria
and for Göth. Göth was relatively inactive between his
moving away from the SS between late 1934 and early 1937 as he largely continued working
for his parents’ company from within Germany. First signs that he had returned to being
an active Nazi and SS member came in the summer of 1937 when he wrote a letter to the headquarters
of the Austrian Refugee Society in which he requested the transfer of his Nazi Party membership
number from Austria to Munich. The timing of this is significant. Throughout 1937 political pressure was again
being employed by the Nazis to try to bring Austria under its control. By the summer of that year Hitler was determined
to annex Austria and was offering renewed support to a resurgent Austrian Nazi movement. In response Kurt Schuschnigg’s* government
in Vienna tried to crackdown again on these initiatives by mass arrests of Austrian Nazis,
but this had a limited effect. Accordingly on the 9th of March 1938 he called
a referendum on the issue of unification with Germany, hoping that a victory in this vote
would shore up support for the government. But what the result might have been in a fair
election is difficult to determine. Before it could ever be held Hitler ordered
the German 8th Army to cross the border into Austria. Under the German occupation, the referendum
was held on the 10th of April and passed by a clearly manipulated vote of 99.7%. The Anschluss,* or Union, had finally come
about. This union of Austria with Germany was a triumphant
moment for Göth. He could now return to his native Austria
and duly did so within days of the Anschluss* occurring. And he was now under pressure to marry quickly. The SS had a rule which the head of it, Heinrich
Himmler, had promulgated that all SS men between the ages of 25 and 30 were required to get
married and start a family. This directive was issued with the intention
that these men, the supposed best of the Aryan race, would have numerous children which would
go on to flood Germany and its dominions with ideal German citizens. Göth was already 28 years of age and needed
to settle down quickly to conform with this rule. Thus it was that he quickly established a
relationship with Anny Geiger,* a 23 year old Austrian woman whom he had met at a motorcycle
race. They were wed on the 23rd of October 1938,
but not before passing a series of stringent physical tests and interviews set by the SS. And they would have three children in quick
succession in the years that followed. Peter was born in 1939, but died in infancy. Werner arrived soon after in 1940 and Ingeborg*
appeared the following year. Göth would have little contact with them
as Anny and the children spent most of the war which was to follow living in Vienna while
Göth was stationed in Poland and elsewhere. Göth’s eagerness to abide by Himmler’s
directive for men of the SS of his age to marry and start a family was indicative of
his newfound commitment to the organisation in the aftermath of the German annexation
of Austria. He now moved away from working with the family
business again and committed himself fully to the SS. Much of this activity focused on the extension
of the Nazi regime’s brutal Anti-Semitic policies into the newly acquired territory. The Nuremburg Laws in Germany had earlier
robbed the country’s Jews of their citizenship and made them into second-class individuals
in business and social terms. Now these were extended into Austria and the
persecution of the country’s Jewish community began. The severity of it was particularly apparent
during the Kristallnacht* ‘Night of the Broken Glass’ pogroms in November 1938 when
Jewish homes and businesses all across Nazi Germany and Austria were destroyed and thousands
of Jews were either killed or seriously wounded. The attacks were particularly severe in Vienna
where most of the city’s synagogues were burnt as the capital’s people and fire departments
looked on and watched. No doubt Göth was involved in some capacity. And by early 1939 he was serving in the SS-Standarte*
89, a group of highly organised shock troops, in Vienna, it appears on a largely full-time
basis, although he maintained some minimal links with the family publishing business. As Göth was establishing his family in Vienna
the new German Third Reich was becoming ever more aggressive in its approach and willingness
to test the patience of Britain and France. Following the union with Austria Hitler almost
immediately began making noises about the Sudetenland,* a region in Czechoslovakia with
a large population of ethnic German people living in it. Hitler insisted that if the Sudetenland* was
ceded to Germany it would be the last claim he would make on territory in Europe. Taking the bait, the British and French agreed
to this at a conference in Munich in September 1938. But it was nowhere near the end of Hitler’s
territorial ambitions. By the spring of 1939 he pressed forward again,
effectively annexing the rest of Czechoslovakia and bringing Hungary into the German sphere
of influence. By now the situation was clear and the British
and French insisted that any further aggressive action would result in a declaration of war. That duly followed when the German army invaded
Poland on the 1st of September 1939. Two days later Britain and France declared
war on Hitler’s Germany. The Second World War had begun. Göth was soon involved in combat. At the start of hostilities he was transferred
to the SS combat unit Sturmbann* 1/11, and the on the 9th of March 1940 he was promoted
by Himmler to serve as a Verwaltungsfuhrer* or Administrative Leader of a Sonderkommando*
or Special Unit. These units would soon be centrally involved
in the Nazis war crimes. And after serving as the Administrative Leader
in Upper Silesia* for several months Göth was promoted again to become a technical sergeant
and was stationed by now in Katowice or Kattowitz* in Upper Silesia* in Poland. This was an area of western Poland on the
Czech border which was of major industrial significance to the Reich, being a huge producer
of coal and iron. Consequently in the early stages of the war
a strategy was being developed here to deport or otherwise remove much of the population
and effectively colonise it with German settlers. Göth was involved in this initiative during
1941 working as a financial officer and administrator within the office of Reich Commissioner for
the Consolidation of German Nationhood. His ardent commitment to this was work was
recognised when he was given a Certificate of Service by his commanding officer praising
his service and his commitment to Nazi ideology.
Despite the recognition of his usefulness in Kattowitz,* or perhaps because of it, Göth
would soon be employed in a somewhat different fashion. With the outbreak of war the Nazi state’s
attitude towards the Jewish community had become more brutal. In the 1930s the Nazis had begun persecuting
its Jewish population through a series of Anti-Semitic laws which stripped the Jewish
people of their citizenship and through attacks on Jewish businesses. But, much worse was to follow upon the outbreak
of the war. There was now an unfolding policy of forced
exile. The Jews of Central Europe and in particular
the huge Jewish population within Poland would be brutalised until they agreed to leave the
Nazi Reich altogether, while pogroms and killings of Jewish people increased. And things grew more radical still as the
war effort expanded. In the spring of 1940 the Germans conquered
Denmark and Norway, followed very soon after by France and the Low Countries. With its dominance of continental Europe largely
achieved, the Nazis began considering the possibility of mass forced deportations or
even massacres of the Jewish people, tens of thousands of whom were now being rounded
up and forced into Jewish ghettoes and a network of concentration camps which were being constructed
across Central and Eastern Europe. Göth would have been entirely familiar with
the camp system from his time in western Poland. But it took on an even more sinister hue in
late 1941 and early 1942 when the Nazi regime determined that it would begin mass murdering
Europe’s Jews in the concentration camps, generally by gassing hundreds or thousands
of people every day and immediately burning their corpses. The ‘Final Solution’ as it was termed,
was adopted as Reich policy by Hitler and the other leaders in the summer of 1941 and
news of its employment was relayed to a conference of senior Nazi administrators at Wannsee*
outside Berlin in January 1942. And Göth was quickly involved in this sinister
activity. In the summer of that year he was reassigned
to Lublin* in eastern Poland where he worked under Odilo Globocnik,* himself an Austrian
Nazi. Globocnik* was charged with a senior role
in constructing and expanding three concentration camps at Belzec,* Sobibor* and Treblinka,*
and rounding up and sending hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews to these camps which would
become some of the most horrific centres of the Holocaust which was just commencing. In the months that followed Göth observed
Globocnik’s* methods which included a mix of severe brutality towards the Polish Jews
being sent to these camps and also a striking level of corruption. Globocnik* used the inmates of the camps as
mass slave labour and he was siphoning off much of the profits from the work they performed
to benefit himself. Göth would follow these same practices himself
before long. On the 11th of February 1943 Göth was promoted
again. It was a major elevation. He was to become commandant or governor effectively
of a new concentration camp which was to be constructed at Kraków-Płaszów* on the site
of an already existing smaller labour camp. His reputation preceded him. Already before he arrived, the Jewish people
of Kraków* knew Göth as ‘The Bloody Dog of Lublin’.* His behaviour at his new station
would more than justify that designation. Göth’s first task upon arrival was to see
to the camp’s construction on a 200 acre site which, to add insult to injury, was being
built over two Jewish cemeteries. To facilitate this on the 13th of March 1943
the Jewish ghetto in Kraków* was liquidated and the remaining Jewish prisoners from within
it were moved to the new camp as slave labourers, though a significant proportion of the ghetto
residents were simply killed on the spot or were sent to one of the death camps. The facility was quickly constructed at Kraków-Płaszów*
using the newcomers and within weeks it was a fully operational concentration camp. Upon its completion Göth delivered a speech
to the camp’s inhabitants in which he ominously stated, “I am your God.” The concentration camp of Kraków-Płaszów*
was not one of the foremost centres of the Holocaust which eventually led to the mass
murder of approximately six million Jews across Europe between 1941 and 1945, as well as the
murder of hundreds of thousands of Roma people, Soviet POWs and other groups which the Nazis
wished to eradicate. That distinction lay with the major death
camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau* in western Poland and Treblinka* where hundreds of thousands
of people were gassed to death, over a million alone in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau.*
Rather Kraków-Płaszów* was strictly a concentration camp in so far as it was a source of slave
labour, and a camp where people were held or concentrated for periods of time until
they were shipped out to Auschwitz* or one of the other death camps. There were no gas chambers or crematoria here
as there were at these more notorious death camps. As such Kraków-Płaszów* was primarily a
way station before Polish Jews were sent off to Auschwitz* while it also functioned to
produce war material and other goods for the German war effort or civilian population back
in Germany. Göth was a particularly sadistic administrator
in all of this. When he organised the deportation of trainloads
of the camps Jewish children to Auschwitz* he would refer to them being sent to ‘kindergarten’. This is not to suggest though that no deaths
occurred at Kraków-Płaszów.* Many thousands died there. A large proportion of these fatalities occurred
owing to the appalling conditions of the camp where diseases such as typhus ran riot. Others simply died of a combination of malnutrition
and being overworked. The average daily ration of food for the Jewish
inmates consisted of just a few hundred calories, typically comprised of watery soup and stale
bread. When this inadequate diet was combined with
a punishing daily work schedule of between ten and fourteen hours of hard labour the
inmates could only last for so long before their physical condition began to deteriorate
sharply. Some agreed to collaborate with the camp authorities
and become guards in order to acquire a double ration of food. However, a greater proportion of the deaths
at Kraków-Płaszów* were owing to pure brutality. Infringements of the camp’s rules or any
effort at insubordination or attempt to escape could result in an immediate execution. These were carried out in a staged fashion
much of the time with the goal of terrorising the camp’s inmates by having them witness
the systematic shooting of those who had dared disobey the rules or would not work hard enough. Central to this brutality, Amon Göth would
often order mass shootings as an example to the entire camp. Others later testified that he would regularly
find reason to shoot somebody before he had even had his breakfast. In the daytime, during which Göth was often
quite drunk, he would parade through the camp with his two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and
Ralf, an Alsatian, who were trained to viciously attack individuals. Occasionally shots were fired out of the window
of Göth’s villa where he lived in the centre of the camp at workers which he had observed
as working too slowly. If one member of a work team committed an
offence Göth saw to it that everyone was punished, the most brutal instance being when
he killed every fifth member of a team from which one individual had seemingly escaped. These murders were often carried out on Hujowa
Gorka,* a large hill in the camp where it is estimated that between 8,000 and 12,000
people were murdered in the eighteen months or so that Kraków-Płaszów* was under the
command of Göth, or roughly twenty people per day. Unsurprisingly, the camp inmates were terrified
of Göth and often tried to hide when he walked about the camp. One survivor later testified that, “When
you saw Göth, you saw death.” During Göth’s time at Lublin* and first
months at Kraków-Płaszów* the war effort more broadly for Germany and its Allies was
turning sour. In the summer of 1941 Hitler had decided to
abandon the campaign which had been initiated against Britain the previous year, of forcing
it to surrender through a naval blockade and a major bombing campaign. Instead the Nazis turned eastwards once again
and invaded the Soviet Union. At first the war on the Eastern Front was
incredibly successful. By the late autumn the Wehrmacht* had advanced
near to Moscow and Leningrad, and had captured vast swathes of territory in Ukraine, Belarus
and western Russia. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, even considered
negotiating a peace in which he would cede much of this captured territory to Germany. Yet he refrained from doing so and as the
bitter Russian winter set in, the German advance was stopped and hundreds of thousands of men
began to freeze. By 1942 the Russians were pushing back and
a major victory in the southern city of Stalingrad in the autumn and winter of 1942 broke the
deadlock. The Russians began pushing the Germans westwards
in 1943. Moreover, the United States had entered the
war in December 1941 and in the course of 1943 the Western Allies defeated the Italians
and Germans in North Africa and then opened a Southern Front in Europe in Italy. Defeat was now assured for the Nazis. Amon Göth’s activities at Kraków-Płaszów*
and the camp more generally are perhaps much more well-known today for having involved
Oskar Schindler.* Schindler* was a German industrialist who hailed from the Sudetenland*
region and had something of a dissolute early adulthood, being arrested for public drunkenness
on several occasions in the early 1930s and flitting from job to job. In the mid-1930s he became involved with the
Nazi movement in Czechoslovakia and became an informant to the party as it tried to gain
influence in the Sudetenland* region. His role as a party intelligence officer continued
even after the Sudetenland* was annexed. He was rewarded for his party activity in
1939 when he was given an enamelware factory in Kraków* and it was in this capacity that
he would become involved in the events at the Kraków-Płaszów* concentration camp. Schindler’s* factory was steadily staffed
with Jewish slave labourers from the camp in the early 1940s as the number of Polish
Jews being detained and imprisoned steadily increased. Thus there is an irony in that an individual
who would eventually come to save many of the Jews of Kraków-Płaszów* was paradoxically
a long standing Nazi himself. Schindler* became the mastermind behind the
rescuing of approximately 1,200 of Kraków-Płaszów’s* Jewish inmates and perhaps many more indirectly,
made famous by the 1993 Steven Spielberg film. Although Jewish labour was used in his factory
in Kraków* he did not treat his workers poorly like so many other factory owners throughout
the Reich did. In fact he was especially kind to them, as
he began spending large proportions of his own income and accumulated wealth from the
factory in order to obtain black market goods and supplies to better feed and care for the
workers and their families. Most significantly, he attempted to save hundreds
of individuals. Often this was accomplished by bribing SS
officers in the camp to refrain from killing workers or having them sent to Auschwitz*
or to one of the other death camps. Later, when a decision was taken to begin
scaling back the size of Kraków-Płaszów* as the Russians advanced towards Poland, Schindler*
convinced Göth to allow him to move his factory and its workers to Brněnec * in Czechoslovakia. Göth agreed on the basis of economic necessity,
but for Schindler* what it meant was that he saved the lives of roughly 1,200 Jewish
inmates of the camp whose names he allegedly added to a list which may or may not have
existed. These people would otherwise almost certainly
have been executed or sent to one of the death camps, as Kraków-Płaszów* was wound down. Schindler accomplished his valiant work even
in the face of an increasing level of terror at Kraków-Płaszów.* By mid-1944 the camp’s
population had increased to its largest size. Originally it had housed just roughly 2,000
inmates, but at its peak some 25,000 people were detained there, overseen by approximately
630 guards. And this was also the most intense period
of the Holocaust throughout Central and Eastern Europe and a large proportion of the 150,000
Jewish people who transited through Kraków-Płaszów* on their way to the death camps were sent
through here in the spring, summer and autumn of 1944. Moreover, Göth’s behaviour continued to
cast a pall of fear around the entire camp. Morning parades were now a common feature
of life there. One morning Göth shot a man for being too
tall. He then urinated on him as he lay dying. Sometimes prisoners would escape executions
but be whipped severely for not working hard enough. As one prisoner, Joseph Bau, later reflected,
Göth was “A hideous and terrible monster who…set the fear of death in people…He
ran the camp through extremes of cruelty that are beyond the comprehension of a compassionate
mind.” The intensification of the brutal activities
at Kraków-Płaszów* was occurring as the war was slowly drifting into its final stages. By mid-1944 the Russians were advancing into
Poland. Hitler’s Italian allies had decided to denounce
their own leader, Benito Mussolini, and formed a new government in Rome which sided with
the Allies. However, Mussolini was soon rescued by a mission
sent by Hitler to Central Italy and a pro-German government was established in northern Italy,
initiating a civil war in Italy on the Southern Front. Then in the summer of 1944 the Western Allies
led by the United States and Britain, but with significant support from Canada and other
nations, opened a long planned Western Front in France following the D-Day landings in
Normandy. In the late summer and autumn of 1944 these
landings were followed by the liberation of Paris and several other major cities in the
Low Countries. By the time the winter of 1944 set in the
Western Allies were preparing for the final push into western Germany, while the Russians
were beginning their military build-up in Poland for a strike on Berlin in the spring
of 1945. While the Russians advanced ever westwards
the camps in eastern Poland were beginning to be wound down and dismantled in the summer
and autumn of 1944. For instance, on the 6th of August 1944 alone
Göth shipped 7,500 Jewish women to Auschwitz* and just four days later over 4,500 Jewish
men were sent to Mauthausen* concentration camp. This reduced the population of the camp to
about half its size. However, Göth had departed from Kraków-Płaszów*
before it was ever fully closed. By the summer of 1944 his conduct in running
the camp was being investigated by the SS. Despite his supposed ideological adherence
to the Nazi cause, Göth had actually been profiting enormously from his role as commandant
of Kraków-Płaszów.* There was big money to be made in running one of the slave labour
camps. Factories produced huge amounts of goods which
if siphoned off and sold on the black market could result in a rich reward. Additionally, as inmates arrived to any of
the concentration camps they were generally stripped of their remaining possessions. Sometimes valuable items of jewellery and
gold and silver watches were found and these were often claimed by the senior camp administrators
as their own private loot. Such avenues of profit were exploited at most
camps.
Amon Göth was no exception in profiting from his time as commandant at Kraków-Płaszów.*
Since the spring of 1943 he had been accumulating money and goods which he sent westwards, often
back to his wife and children or the offices of his parents’ publishing firm in Vienna. This activity became even more frenzied at
the camp as it became clear that it would be dismantled in 1944, and one of the reasons
why Schindler was able to convince Göth to allow him to move his factory and workers
westwards into Czechoslovakia was that this action would provide Göth with a smokescreen
for also shipping some of his acquired goods westwards. Word of this corrupt activity on Göth’s
part reached the authorities within the SS. It was combined with reports of Göth holding
wild drinking parties at the camp with his mistress Ruth Irene Kalder* and excessive
brutality towards the inmates. The latter action was not criticised on humanitarian
grounds. It was simply believed that Göth should not
have been killing workers who were still fit and healthy to be used as slave labour. And these accusations combined were enough
to have him removed from his position as commandant of Kraków-Płaszów* on the 13th of September
1944. He was sent back to Berlin to be prosecuted
but as the war effort was becoming ever more desperate, the charges were simply dropped
in the winter of 1944 and he was released. Göth had presided over the expansion of the
camp at Kraków-Płaszów, as well as its darkest days in 1943 and 1944, but now it
was nearing its end. Administration of the camp had been placed
in the hands of SS Obersturmfuhrer,* Arnold Buscher, following Göth’s departure.* Under
Buscher* the mass deportations which had begun under Göth in the summer of 1944 continued
until there were just a few thousand inmates and guards operating there by the early winter
of 1944. The final flurry of activity centred on exhuming
the remains of the thousands of bodies of individuals who had been executed in the camp
during Göth’s reign of terror. These were dug up and their remains burnt
on mass pyres. Similar scenes of SS officers attempting to
destroy the evidence of the mass murders which had occurred at the concentration camps were
seen throughout Eastern and Central Europe in the closing months of 1944. Finally, in January 1945 the few remaining
camp authorities learned that the Soviets were closing on Krakow.* Accordingly they
dismantled some of the last parts of the camps and fled. Unlike other camps where buildings, fences,
guard towers and even considerable numbers of prisoners were found, when the Soviets
arrived on the 20th of January 1945 they found little sign of any concentration camp at all
having been at Kraków-Płaszów.* As all of this was occurring Göth was moving
wildly around Central Europe. Following the dropping of the charges against
him and his release, Göth’s primary concern was to ensure that the ill-gotten wealth he
had acquired through his corrupt dealings at Kraków-Płaszów* was preserved. Accordingly, in the early spring of 1945 he
was travelling around Central Europe locating large shipments of goods which had been sent
from eastern Poland. This included a visit to Oskar Schindler’s*
new factory in Czechoslovakia to try to retrieve some of what had been sent there during the
relocation of the factory. However, as he was attempting these actions
Göth was taken ill and ended up in a hospital initially for some chronic stomach problems
he was having, but then he was subsequently moved to an SS medical facility where he was
deemed to be mentally unfit. As a result, as it entered the late spring
of 1945 Göth was being detained in a mental institution in Bavaria, where he had spent
so many years a decade earlier in exile. It was here he would witness the last stages
of the war.
The Second World War in Europe had entered its death throes in the winter of 1944. As the snows set in in December the Western
Allies were preparing to build up their forces in Belgium, Luxembourg and north-east France
for a major assault into western Germany in the late winter. A final major push by Hitler to counter-attack
into the Bastogne* region saw some brief reverses for the Allies, but eventually the Battle
of the Bulge ended in Allied victory in January 1945. Moreover, the concentration of some of Germany’s
last armies in western Germany to attempt the counter-offensive drew resources away
from the Eastern Front and as the Russians moved into northwest Poland and northeast
Germany in the opening months of 1945 they did so with remarkable speed. It was now a race to Berlin for the Allies. The Russians got there first and it was they
who laid siege to the city in the spring of 1945. Finally, surrounded and unwilling to surrender,
Hitler killed himself in the Reich Chancellery bunker on the 30th of April 1945. His successor as head of the Nazi state, Joseph
Goebbels, followed his example the following day. Exactly one week later, the Chief of the Wehrmacht,*
Wilhelm Keitel,* signed the official surrender of Germany bringing the war in Europe to a
conclusion. Göth was a marked man in the aftermath of
the war. The Americans, British and Russians had determined
in the course of 1944 and early 1945 that there should not be excessive retribution
sought against the German people in the aftermath of the war. Many Germans were simply innocent bystanders
of a regime which had seized power with roughly the support of just one-third of the country
in 1933. Moreover, even those who had fought in the
Wehrmacht* between 1939 and 1945 were more often than not young men who had been conscripted
into service or who had shown minimal adherence to the Nazi ideological stance. Fewer still were guilty of actual war crimes
or of having committed the worst atrocities associated with the regime. However, this clemency would only extend so
far. Those who were at the top of the German government
or who had been involved in committing war crimes were to be prosecuted to the full extent,
while the SS, of which Göth was a senior member, were all to be charged with crimes,
as the most ideological branch of the Nazi Party and also the organisation which had
overseen the concentration camps and the mass murder of millions of Jewish people, Roma,
Soviet POWs and other political dissenters. As such Göth would be prosecuted if captured. It did not take long for him to be apprehended
and there was no flight or attempt to evade capture. The former commandant of Kraków-Płaszów*
was still being held in a mental institution in Bavaria and he was arrested there by the
United States military. Göth had donned the uniform of an ordinary
rank and file German soldier in order to cover up his identity as a senior SS officer. As a result he was not immediately detained
as somebody who was to be prosecuted for war crimes and was sent to Dachau* concentration
camp nearby, which had been repurposed by the Allies as a holding centre for German
soldiers while they were being investigated to see if they were to be tried on any charges. Here he was finally identified by one Josef
Yevkovich.* Yevkovich* had met Göth several years earlier in early 1943 when the Kraków-Płaszów*
camp was first being expanded after Göth’s arrival. At that time Göth had once pointed his gun
at the teenage Yevkovich’s* head. He survived only because a Jewish policeman
there assaulted the teenager and then told Göth to save his bullet because Yevkovich*
was dead. Now nearly three years later he identified
the man who had once nearly killed him. And once the Allies knew who he was, Göth
was extradited to Poland for prosecution.
Göth was sent to Poland in 1946 with Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz* during
much of the period of the Holocaust. While the major surviving leaders of the Nazi
regime itself such as Hermann Goering,* Albert Speer and Joachim von Ribentropp* were being
tried at the main war crimes trial in Nuremburg in Germany, individuals such as Hoss and Göth
who had run the concentration camps on Polish soil and murdered hundreds of thousands of
Polish citizens were to be tried in Poland. Accordingly, Göth’s trial commenced in
Warsaw on the 27th of August 1946. It lasted just ten days. The Göth that entered court was different
to the one who been arrested in Germany a year earlier. During the war he had gained a lot of weight
and drank heavily while he oversaw the camp at Kraków-Płaszów.* The very fact that
he had been admitted to a mental institution in the dying stages of the war is evidence
enough of his shattered state of mind in early 1945. But as he entered the court room in Warsaw,
he was more composed and had determined to provide his own defence and cross examine
witnesses himself. Nevertheless, there was no doubt from the
very beginning that Göth was going to be found guilty. The indictment, after all, directly accused
him of being responsible for murdering at least 8,000 people at Kraków-Płaszów* and
other locations such as the Kraków* Ghetto. The prosecution called seventy witnesses over
the ten days, many of which provided damning evidence of Göth’s actions at Kraków-Płaszów*
and elsewhere. Unlike Höss, who freely admitted during his
trial that he had done what he did at Auschwitz,* but who based his defence on the argument
that he was simply following orders, Göth consistently tried to deny the truth of the
claims made against him. One of his arguments was that individuals
were only shot at the camp if they were found to be in possession of explosives. It was all a paltry display and even the few
people that Göth called as witnesses in his defence instead corroborated the prosecution
witnesses’ statements about Göth’s brutality. It was no surprise when, on the 5th of September,
the court found Göth guilty of all charges and sentenced him to be hanged. The execution was carried out just eight days
later. He was hanged on the grounds of the Kraków-Płaszów*
labour camp on the 13th of September 1946 after which his body was cremated and the
ashes thrown in the Vistula River. He was survived by his wife and two surviving
children. Anny Göth had earlier applied for a divorce. He also had an illegitimate child, Monika
Hertwig* through his affair with Ruth Kalder.* Ruth continued to defend Göth and his actions
for decades to come before committing suicide in 1983. But what of Göth’s binary opposite at Kraków-Płaszów?*
Oskar Schindler* was briefly a fugitive after the war. Some of the Jewish people whose lives he had
saved prepared letters for him to carry with him attesting to his actions, but his fear
was of falling into Russian hands. As such he set off westwards with little more
than the clothes on his back, having spent all the profits from his factory on bribes
and black market goods earlier. Eventually he and his wife made it to the
American lines and arrangements were made for a pardon. They settled down in Bavaria in the autumn
of 1945, but much of the remainder of Schindler’s* life was turbulent. He suffered several business reverses, emmigrated
to Argentina with his wife in 1949, but then returned to Germany later without her after
going bankrupt in 1958. A further bankruptcy followed back in Germany
in 1963 as well as a heart attack and continued poor health thereafter, however Schindler*
was able to survive through these years based largely on donations from several of the Jewish
people whose lives he had saved and with whom he had maintained contacts over the years. When he died in October 1974 his body was
taken to Jerusalem where he was buried on Mount Zion.* It would be hard to find another
figure who stood in such absolute contrast to Amon Göth. Amon Göth was amongst the most brutal of
the senior and mid-ranking members of the Nazi regime and the SS. What is perhaps striking about this is that
there was not an abundance of evidence of how brutal his tenure as commandant of Kraków-Płaszów*
would be during his earlier life. The only child of a well-to-do couple who
ran a prosperous Viennese publishing house, he certainly exhibited a rebellious streak
from a young age, but there were few signs of overt brutality. Although his political actions became more
and more extreme as the years went by we do not find him engaging in acts of overt violence
throughout the late 1920s, while his terrorist activities in the 1930s were acts of direct
political violence, rather than exhibitions of pure sadism. Indeed there were even significant periods
of time during which he worked within the family business and for nearly three years
between 1934 and 1937 he effectively left the SS and was not an active member of the
organisation. Thereafter when the war broke out he performed
several largely administrative roles before being transferred east to work in the growing
network of officials charged with incarcerating Poland’s Jews and either setting them to
work as slave labour or deporting them to the death camps. It was during these years in the early 1940s
that the already ideologically radical Amon developed the brutal streak which would characterise
his reign at Kraków-Płaszów.* In Poland during the early 1940s he observed his immediate
superiors, figures such as Odilo Globocnik,* terrorise the Jewish people over whose lives
they exercised so much authority. Consequently Göth’s time in Kattowitz*
and Lublin* acted as a macabre training school for him to acquire the brutality which he
deployed at Kraków-Płaszów.* Here he dehumanised the thousands of Jewish inmates and murdered
people savagely on a whim, while others were beaten and tortured. All were psychologically traumatised by Göth
and his impulsive violence. Yet his reign at Kraków-Płaszów* also attests
to the hypocrisy of the upper ranks of the SS. Before Kraków-Płaszów* was fully dismantled
its commandant was arrested for having profited extensively himself from the running of the
camp, rather than filtering the camps profits to the Nazi regime back in Berlin. Moreover, his reign there is leant a darker
hue when it stands beside the noble actions of Oskar Schindler* and his efforts to save
as many of the Jews of Kraków-Płaszów* as he could. What do you think of Amon Göth? Was he psychologically unbalanced all along,
and does this explain some of his behaviour or was he more of an ideological Nazi committed
to the xenophobic policies of the Third Reich? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
