Amon Leopold Göth (or Goeth if one does not use the umlaut) (November 12,1908 - September 13, 1946), was a Hauptsturmführer of the S.S. and was the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszow.

Göth was born in Vienna, Austria, to a family in the printing industry. Göth first joined the Nazi Party at the age of 22, becoming a member of the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party in 1930 and assigned the Party Number 510764. Göth also joined the Austrian SS at the same time he entered the Nazi party and was appointed an SS-Mann with the SS Number 43673.

Göth's early SS activities are little known, due large in part that the Austrian SS was an illegal and underground organization until the Anschluss of Austria, by Nazi Germany, in 1938. Between 1932 and 1936, Göth was a member of an Allgemeine-SS company in Vienna and, by 1937, had risen to the rank of SS-Oberscharführer. Between 1938 and 1941, he was a member of SS-Standarten (Regiment) 11 operating from Vienna and was commissioned an SS-Untersturmführer on July 14, 1941.

In August of 1942, Amon Göth left Vienna to join the staff of the SS and Police Leader of Krakow. He was appointed as a regular SS officer of the Concentration Camp service, and on February 11, 1943 was assigned to construct and command a forced labor camp at Plaszow. The camp took one month to construct via slave labor and, on March 13, 1943, the Jewish Ghetto of Krakow was closed down with the surviving inhabitants imprisoned in the new Labor Camp. The action caused the death of approximately 2,000 people, many of whom Göth personally executed.

On September 3, 1943, Göth was further tasked to close down the ghetto at Tarnow, where an unknown number of people were killed on the spot. His activities continued on February 3, 1944, when Göth was responsible for shutting down the concentration camp at Szebnie by ordering the inmates to be murdered on the spot or deported to other camps, again causing the death of several thousand persons.

On April 20, 1944, Amon Göth was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, having received a double promotion and thus skipping the rank of SS-Obersturmführer. He was also appointed a regular officer of the Waffen-SS. His assignment as Commandant of the Plaszow Labor Camp continued, now under the direct authority of the SS Economics and Administration Office.

In Plaszow, Göth routinely tortured and murdered prisoners on a daily basis. He became internationally known through his depiction by Ralph Fiennes in the movie Schindler's List, although this grim portrayal (where, for shooting practice, he sniped Jews from the balcony of his house) showed only a subset of his crimes.

During his time at Plaszow, Amon Göth allegedly shot over 500 Jews himself; Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Schindler Jews, famously said, "When you saw Göth, you saw death."

The exact nature of the relationship between Göth and Oskar Schindler is not known, but it is suggested (in the movie, too) that in order to save the lives of the Jews working for him (and keep his own profits), Oskar Schindler made friends with Göth. These Jews initially lived in a sub-camp in his factory.

On September 4, 1944, with the Soviet army approaching Krakow, this sub-camp was closed by the Nazi authorities and the Jews were forced to move to the Plaszow camp. To save his workers, Schindler continuously bribed Göth with money and black-market goods.

When Plaszow itself was shut down on October 15, 1944, Schindler managed to establish his famous list of Jews that were not murdered, but instead sent to a new kriegswichtige (war-essential) factory at Brunnlitz in Czechoslovakia.

On September 13, 1944 Amon Göth was relieved of his position as Commandant of Plaszow and was assigned to the SS Office of Economics and Administration. Shortly thereafter, in November of 1944, Göth was charged with theft of Jewish property (which, according to Nazi legislation, belonged to the Reich), and was arrested by the Gestapo. He was scheduled for an appearance before an SS and Police Court, however due to the progress of the Second World War, and Germany's looming defeat, a tribunal was never assembled and the charges against him were summarily dismissed. He was next assigned to Bad Tolz, Germany were he was quickly diagnosed by SS doctors as suffering from mental illness. He was committed to a sanitarium where he was arrested by American troops in May of 1945.

After the war, the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland at Krakow found Göth guilty of murdering tens of thousands of people. He was hanged on September 13, 1946, not far from the former site of the Plaszow camp, saluting the Führer in a final act of defiance.

In 2002, an interview book with his daughter, Monika Göth, was published in Germany under the name Ich muss doch meinen Vater lieben, oder? ("But I must love my father, must I not?"). For the first time, Göth's daughter spoke of her mother, who unconditionally glorified her father, and the shock her mother faced when realizing Göth's role in the Holocaust. Monika Göth's mother had committed suicide after giving an interview in the 1980s, leaving Monika to bear her father's legacy alone. (ISBN 3-8218-3914-7)

External links

• Schindler's List Teaching Guide (http://www.tulane.edu/~so-inst/slguid4.html)
• The Trial of Amon Göth (http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/WCC/goeth.htm)ca:Amon Göth

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