Amon Goeth

Amon Leopold Goeth, the villain of the movie Schindler's List, was born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 24, he joined the Nazi party. In 1940, he became a member of the SS and was assigned to SS headquarters in Lublin in German-occupied Poland. In 1942, he was involved in the liquidation of several of the small ghettos in Lublin. The Jewish ghettos in Lublin were the first to be liquidated and some of the Jews from Lublin were the first to be sent to the Belzec extermination camp during Operation Reinhard, which marked the beginning of the "Final Solution." Goeth accepted bribes from some of the Lublin ghetto Jews during the selection process, and put them on the list to be sent to a labor camp, rather than to Belzec.

In February 1943, Goeth received a promotion and became the third SS officer to hold the job of Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp. While he was the Commandant of Plaszow, Goeth was assigned to supervise the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto in March 1943, and later the labor camp at Szebnie. On September 3, 1943, Goeth supervised the liquidation of the Tarnow ghetto. During the liquidation of these ghettos, Goeth took advantage of the situation by stealing some of the property that was confiscated from the Jews, including furs and furniture.

According to the novel, Schindler's List, Amon Goeth was "selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants and even restaurants in Cracow." Chilowicz was a Jewish prisoner in the camp; he was allegedly killed by Goeth because he was a potential witness to Goeth's crime of stealing the prisoner's food. The prisoners didn't starve however, because they brought stolen food into the camp with them when they came back from work parties, according to the author of Schindler's List. The movie shows a scene where Goeth is trying to find out which prisoner brought a stolen chicken into the camp.

In the photo above, Commandant Goeth is shown on his white horse. The groom for Goeth's horse was 14-year-old Irwin Gotfried, who managed to survive the Holocaust. After the war, he emigrated to the San Francisco bay area where he lived in a community that included 2,000 other Holocaust survivors. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 16, 2005, staff writer Charles Burress wrote the following:

"That was me in the movie," Gotfried said, referring to a scene from "Schindler's List," where the young groom is shot and killed by the commander. In real life, Gotfried was not shot and lived to become president of AGI Shower Door and Mirror Co. in Redwood City.

In the movie scene, where Gotfried is shot by Amon Goeth, Spielberg deviated from the real life story in order to make a point that is essential to the theme of the movie: Oskar Schindler was an exception. For the most part, the Nazis were depraved degenerates who were incapable of changing their ways. In a key scene in Schindler's List, Oskar Schindler attempts to teach Goeth that he would have "real power" if he would choose to pardon prisoners for minor infractions instead of summarily executing them. Goeth tries this suggestion, and even practices his pardon demeanor in a mirror, but he cannot overcome his intrinsic evilness. He pardons his 14-year-old groom when his work performance does not meet his standards, but then shoots him in the back with his high-powered rifle.

In January 1944, the forced labor camp at Plaszow was converted into a concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the central administration of the SS. The two sub-camps at Prokocim and Biezanow were incorporated into the main camp at Plaszow and living conditions were improved. The Polish prisoners and a few German criminals were now in the same camp as the Jews, as was typical in other Nazi concentration camps. Only a few prisoners were now required to work in the quarry as punishment. There were factories set up for the production of Wehrmacht (regular Germany army) uniforms and for upholstered furniture. There was also a custom tailoring shop, a jewelry shop and a cable factory in the camp.

As the Camp Commandant, Amon Goeth now had to report to the headquarters for all the concentration camps in Oranienburg, near Berlin. This was the official policy in all the Nazi concentration camps.

The following quote is from the novel Schindler's List:

"The chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary execution. The days when slow potato-peelers could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could now be destroyed only by due process. There had to be a hearing, a record sent in triplicate to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not only by General Glueck's office but also by General Pohl's Department W (Economic Enterprises)."

In July 1943, Dr. Georg Konrad Morgan, a 33-year old Waffen-SS officer who was an attorney and a judge, was put in charge of investigating murder, corruption and mistreatment of prisoners in all the concentration camps. As the result of an investigation of the Plaszow camp, Goeth was arrested by the Nazis on September 13, 1944 and was charged with engaging in black market activities and stealing property that had been confiscated from the Jews, but he was not charged with murder. While he was awaiting trial, Goeth was released from prison in January 1945 because he was suffering from diabetes. He was recuperating in an SS sanitarium in Bad Tölz near Munich when he was arrested by General Patton's troops in 1945. His mistress, Ruth-Irene Kalder, was with him at Bad Tölz and their daughter, Monika, was born there in November 1945.

Oskar Schindler had a lot in common with Amon Goeth, including the fact that both were Catholic and both were arrested by the Nazis for engaging in black market activities. Both were out to get rich from the war-time economy in Poland. Both were born in the same year, 1908; both were hard drinkers and both had a "massive physique." Goeth was Austrian, as were his fellow Nazi criminals Adolph Eichmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Adolph Hitler. Schindler was an ethnic German living in what is now the state of Moravia in the Czech Republic.

Like Commandant Karl Otto Koch of Buchenwald and Majdanek, who was also arrested by the SS for embezzlement, Goeth considered himself to be a cultured man and a man of letters, a poet even.

The pictures below show his prison mug shots; he had lost weight because he was suffering from diabetes.

According to the Pharmacy Museum guidebook, which I purchased in the former Podgorze ghetto in Krakow, there was a total of 35,000 prisoners in the Plaszow camp during the two and a half years of its operation. The novel, Schindler's List, mentions that the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland estimated that 150,000 prisoners passed through Plaszow and 80,000 of them died as a result of mass executions or epidemics. However, it was determined by the Highest National Tribunal of Poland, after hearing witness testimony from survivors, that about 8,000 people had died in the Plaszow camp, most of whom were executed. It was the custom for the Nazis to bring condemned prisoners to the closest concentration camp for execution.

After World War II ended, the American military turned Amon Goeth over to the Polish government for prosecution as a war criminal. He was brought before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Krakow. His trial took place between August 27, 1946 and September 5, 1946. Goeth was charged with being a member of the Nazi party and a member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler's elite army, both of which had been designated as criminal organizations by the Allies after the war. His crime was that he had taken part in the activities of these two criminal organizations, although he was never a Nazi official.

At Goeth's trial, the Nazi party was characterized as "an organization which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, through aggressive wars, violence and other crimes, aimed at world domination and establishment of the National-Socialist regime." Amon Goeth was accused of personally issuing orders to deprive people of freedom, to ill-treat and exterminate individuals and whole groups of people. His crimes, including the newly created crime of genocide, came under the new law of the Allies, called Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Amon Goeth were as follows:

(1) The accused as commandant of the forced labour camp at Plaszow (Cracow) from 11th February, 1943, till 13th September, 1944, caused the death of about 8,000 inmates by ordering a large number of them to be exterminated.
(2) As a SS-Sturmführer the accused carried out on behalf of SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase the final closing down of the Cracow ghetto. This liquidation action which began on 13th March, 1943, deprived of freedom about 10,000 people who had been interned in the camp of Plaszow, and caused the death of about 2,000.
(3) As a SS-Hauptsturmführer the accused carried out on 3rd September, 1943, the closing down of the Tarnow ghetto. As a result of this action an unknown number of people perished, having been killed on the spot in Tarnow; others died through asphyxiation during transport by rail or were exterminated in other camps, in particular at Auschwitz.
(4) Between September, 1943, and 3rd February, 1944, the accused closed down the forced labour camp at Szebnie near Jaslo by ordering the inmates to be murdered on the spot or deported to other camps, thus causing the death of several thousand persons.
(5) Simultaneously with the activities described under (1) to (4) the accused deprived the inmates of valuables, gold and money deposited by them, and appropriated those things. He also stole clothing, furniture and other movable property belonging to displaced or interned people, and sent them to Germany. The value of stolen goods and in particular of valuables reached many million zlotys at the rate of exchange in force at the time.

The last charge, as stated in number (5) above, was the crime for which he was arrested by the Nazis on September 13, 1944 after an investigation by Waffen-SS officer Konrad Morgen.

None of the former Plaszow prisoners testified at the trial that Goeth had shot prisoners from the balcony of his house. Goeth called his former maid, Helen Hirsch, as a defense witness at his trial. In the movie Schindler's List, Goeth is shown mistreating Hirsch because he is sexually attracted to her, but he was frustrated because Nazi laws forbade sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews.

Goeth's defense was that he was a Waffen-SS soldier who had to follow the orders of his superiors. He denied killing anyone except when ordered to carry out an execution.

The photograph below shows Amon Goeth as he was escorted from the courtroom after being sentenced to death. At 6 foot 5 inches tall, Goeth towered over his Polish guards.

Amon Goeth was found guilty on all counts. He was hanged in Krakow on September 13, 1946, exactly two years to the day after he was arrested by the SS for stealing from the Plaszow camp. His body was cremated and his ashes were thrown into the Weichsel river. His name will forever be associated with the total disregard for human life, as exemplified by the scenes in Schindler's List when Goeth shoots Jewish prisoners at random from the balcony of his home.

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