Amon Göth

Amon Göth (born December 11, 1908, Vienna, Austria—died September 13, 1946, Kraków, Poland) Austrian Nazi officer who was commandant of Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. Decades after his execution for war crimes, Göth became widely known as the principal adversary of Oskar Schindler, the industrialist who shielded a group of Jews during the Holocaust.

Göth was the son of a prosperous publisher in Vienna. In 1931 he became a member of the Austrian Nazi Party, having earlier served in the party’s youth chapter. About a year later he joined the SS, the elite paramilitary corps of the Nazi movement. After engaging in illegal SS actions in Austria, he fled to Germany. In 1938, when the Anschluss brought Austria into the Third Reich, he returned to Vienna. He then married for the second time, and his family remained in Vienna through World War II.

Göth rose steadily through the SS ranks, earning a promotion to untersturmführer (equivalent to second lieutenant) in 1941 and joining Operation Reinhard, the Nazi campaign to kill the Jews of occupied Poland, in 1942. He was made commandant of Plaszow in February 1943 but remained active elsewhere, supervising the violent closings of the Kraków ghetto (March 1943), the Tarnów ghetto, and the Szebnie concentration camp (both in September 1943). His performance so pleased his superiors that he was promoted two ranks to hauptsturmführer (equivalent to army captain) in summer 1943.

In Plaszow, Göth had many prisoners killed as punishment for infractions, but he also killed randomly and capriciously. From the balcony of his villa, he took target practice with his rifle on prisoners as they moved about the camp. According to some reports, he had his Jewish dog handler executed because the dogs—Great Danes trained to kill prisoners on command—preferred the handler’s company to his own. Göth also mixed corruption with cruelty, selling on the black market many of the rations intended to feed his prisoners.

Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory, staffed with Jewish slave labour, was moved adjacent to the Plaszow camp after the closing of the Kraków ghetto. Schindler adroitly cultivated Göth, carousing with him and his staff at parties and handing over large bribes to secure better treatment for the enamelware workers. Eventually Göth allowed Schindler’s workers to move to a barracks outside the camp, where their chance for survival improved greatly.

In September 1944 Göth was arrested for brutality and corruption (withholding of loot from the SS), and he was held in Breslau (Wrocław) until October. After being diagnosed with diabetes, he was sent to an SS sanitarium in Bad Tölz, Germany, where he was arrested by U.S. troops in early 1945. The Americans turned him over to the restored Polish government, which then tried him for war crimes, most notably the killing of more than 10,000 people in the Plaszow and Szebnie camps and in the Kraków and Tarnów ghettos. Göth’s defense was that he was only following orders. After the brief trial, he was convicted on September 5, 1946, and hanged eight days later.

Göth’s crimes were not well known outside the field of Holocaust studies until the publication of Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark (1982) and the release of Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, Schindler’s List (1993); Ralph Fiennes received an Academy Award nomination for his chilling performance as Göth.