Amon Göth was an Austrian SS officer. He shot people from the window of his villa if they appeared to be moving too slowly. According to witnesses he “would never start his breakfast without shooting at least one person” [1943].

16 comments

  3. [Context ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amon_G%C3%B6th)

    Göth was assigned to the SS-Totenkopfverbände (“Death’s head” unit; concentration camp service). His first assignment, starting on 11 February 1943, was to oversee the construction of the 200 acre Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, which he was to command. Göth was atypical of most SS officers who served in concentration camps, as most hailed from small municipalities. He likely had a personal interview with Heinrich Himmler before being appointed to the post, as was the standard procedure when assigning SS camp commanders. Located on the grounds of two old Jewish cemeteries, the camp took one month to construct using slave 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 deemed not fit for work were sent to extermination camps and murdered. Hundreds more were murdered on the streets by the Nazis as they cleared out the ghetto.In his opening address as the Kommandant of the newly populated camp, Göth told his new prisoners, “I am your god.”Göth had complete authority over the camp, especially in this early stage.

    In addition to his duties at Płaszów, Göth was the officer in charge of the liquidation of the ghetto at Tarnów, which had been home to 25,000 Jews (about 45 per cent of the city’s population) at the start of World War II. About 10,000 were sent to Plaszow to be slave labourers. By the time the ghetto was liquidated, 8,000 Jews remained. The final roundup began on 1 September 1943, when the remaining Jews were assembled in Magdeburg Square, which was surrounded by heavily armed guards. The trains were loaded and departed by midday the next day. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp; less than half survived the journey.Most of the survivors were deemed unsuitable for slave labour and were murdered immediately on their arrival at Auschwitz. According to testimony of several witnesses as recorded in his 1946 indictment for war crimes, Göth personally shot between 30 and 90 women and children during the liquidation of the ghetto.

    On his birthday in 1943, Göth ordered Natalia Karp, who had just arrived in Płaszów, to play the piano. Karp performed Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor so well that Göth allowed her and her sister to live.

    Göth 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 Göth’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 killings. Between 21 September 1943 and 3 February 1944, the camp was gradually liquidated. Almost all of the Polish inmates were transferred to Płaszów or the Bochnia Ghetto, where Göth was also in command. Around a thousand Jews were taken to the nearby forest and shot, and the remainder were sent to Auschwitz, where most were gassed immediately on arrival. After the liquidation, Göth had all the camp’s supplies sorted and transported to Płaszów.

    On 28 July 1943, Göth was assigned to Section F, the SS and Police Fachgruppe (section of experts) that specialised in ghetto liquidation and transport. By April 1944, Göth had been promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain), the highest of the company grade ranks, having received a double promotion, skipping the rank of SS-Obersturmführer (first lieutenant). 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 (WVHA; SS Economics and Administration Office).This distinction made Kraków-Płaszów one of 13 official concentration camps in Poland. Mietek Pemper[a] testified at the trial that it was during the earlier period that Göth committed most of the random and brutal killings for which he became notorious. In early May 1944, Göth was informed that 10,000 Hungarian Jews would soon be sent to be imprisoned in Płaszow. To create space for the new arrivals, on 14 May Göth ordered all children in the camp to be moved to the kindergarten. The next day, Göth had the majority of them, with only a few exceptions, sent to Auschwitz to be killed. 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. Göth, described by survivors as a huge and imposing man, personally murdered prisoners on a daily basis. His two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralf, an Alsatian mix, 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 a Jewish cook to death because the soup was too hot. He brutally mistreated his two maids, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig and Helen Hirsch, who were in constant fear for their lives, as were all the inmates. During his time at Płaszów, Göth lived comfortably in a villa, owning cars and horses that he rode in the camp. He had a Jewish cobbler inmate make him new shoes each week.

    Poldek Pfefferberg, another Schindlerjude (Schindler Jew), said: “When you saw Göth, you saw death.”

    Göth believed if one member of a work team escaped or committed some infraction, the entire team must be punished. On one occasion, he ordered the shooting of every second member of a work group 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.If inmates were caught smuggling food, they were shot. The main murder site at Płaszów was Hujowa Górka (“Prick Hill”), a large hill that was used for mass killings and murders. Pemper testified that 8,000 to 12,000 people were murdered at Płaszów.

  9. Wasn’t laughing at his execution. They miscalculated the length of rope a few times before he finally went.

  10. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Hertwig](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Hertwig)

    Monika Kalder came from Göth’s non-marital relationship with Ruth Irene Kalder. At the beginning of 1945, the pregnant Kalder fled Katowice before the approaching Red Army. Amon Göth was hanged in Krakow in September 1946. Ruth Irene Kalder successfully applied for a name change to Ruth Irene Göth in 1948. She later moved to the Schwabing district of Munich, where her daughter Monika Göth also grew up. As a toddler, Monika Göth was seriously injured with a knife by an unknown person in a baby carriage.[3] Whether it was an act of revenge for her father’s crimes remained unexplained.
    Her mother never discussed Amon Göth’s deeds as camp commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp. Thus, the daughter learned nothing about his crimes and his execution after the war. Instead, the mother claimed that the father had “stayed in the field.”[4] Monika Göth was raised primarily by her grandmother. It was also from her that Monika Göth first learned, at the age of 11, that her father had been “with the SS,” had served as “commandant of a labor camp in Poland,” and had also killed Jews there.[1] In this context, her grandmother assured her that Plaszow had not been a “real extermination camp,” however.[1]
    Through family members and chance acquaintances, she repeatedly received fragmentary statements about her father.[3] Monika Göth’s relationship with her mother visibly deteriorated. In 1965, after a drastic argument, her mother accused her of being a suicide risk and had her daughter committed to a closed institution for three months.[1] Together with her mother, she later met Oskar Schindler in Frankfurt am Main; however, he told her very little new about her father.[3] She was also able to talk to him about her father.
    A brief relationship with a Nigerian resulted in a daughter, Jennifer Teege, in 1970. Monika Göth had met the father of her child in her mother’s apartment when he visited one of Kalder’s lodgers, who was also from Nigeria. A few weeks after the birth, she gave the child to a home and later agreed that the seven-year-old could be adopted by a foster family.[5] Monika Göth’s first marriage, contracted in the early 1970s, ended in a fiasco. Her husband abused her and forced her into prostitution.[4] The marriage produced Monika Göth’s second daughter.[4] Göth later remarried, taking the name Hertwig in this second marriage.
    After Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List was published in 1982, Monika Göth’s seriously ill mother met with a team from the BBC and gave them an interview believing it was about Schindler.[3] However, documentary filmmaker Jon Blair only wanted to talk to her about Göth for his film Schindler. [3] Monika Göth witnessed the entire interview in an adjoining room and thus learned for the first time about her father’s deeds in full.[3] The following day, January 29, 1983, Ruth Irene Göth took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills. [1] A few weeks later, in a letter to the news magazine Der Spiegel, Monika Göth objected to the portrayal of her father in Keneally’s work.[3] After seeing Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, in which her father was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was unresponsive for several days. [4] Later, she sought contact with survivors of the Plaszow concentration camp and traveled with them to memorials or to Jerusalem.[1] Friendly relations have existed with some of the former prisoners ever since.[1]
    Monika Hertwig first told her life story to journalist Matthias Kessler in the spring of 2001.[3] Based on this material, the book “Ich muß doch meinen Vater lieben, oder?” was written in 2002. In 2003, Kessler made the documentary Amon’s Daughter with Hertwig.[6] In 2006, the documentary Der Mördervater (The Murderer Father) was released, documenting Hertwig’s encounter with her father’s former maid, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, at Amon Göth’s service villa on the grounds of the former concentration camp in what is now Płaszów. She was also involved in the making of the documentary film My Family, the Nazis and Me by Israeli director Chanoch Ze’evi, released in 2011. The trained secretary caught up on her high school graduation at the age of 64 and subsequently studied ancient Hebrew.
    The daughter Jennifer Teege, given up for adoption by Monika Hertwig in the 1970s, lived in Israel for years without knowing her family history and also studied there. She only learned of her origins through the book “I Must Love My Father, Mustn’t I?”[5][7] Together with journalist Nikola Sellmair, Teege researched her family’s history and in 2013 Rowohlt Verlag published the results under the title Amon. My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me. In the course of the processing, Teege also re-established contact with her biological mother.
    Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

  15. I sometimes think that we don’t like autocracies and dictatorships etc. not because they are bad per-se, but because people like this get rewarded for inhumane acts, and the more the better.

Leave a Reply