After the Second World War, many Nazi guards and camp staff members were sentenced to death for the violent crimes committed inside the concentration camps. Commandants like Rudolf Höss were brought to the gallows for the mass murder that happened under their authority. But one camp commandant in particular faced the executioner for crimes so brutal that he became one of the most infamous figures of the entire Holocaust. Amon Göth, the sadistic commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp, would meet his end on a scaffold not far from the camp he once ruled with unchecked cruelty.
Göth’s path to infamy began long before his rise to camp commandant. He joined the Nazi Party in Austria in September 1930 and was involved in youth groups as a young adult. He entered the SS in 1932, serving in Vienna and eventually being promoted to the rank of Scharführer. But his activities soon drew unwanted attention.
He was investigated for illegal activities, including stockpiling explosives for the Nazis, and eventually left Austria for Germany. After the Nazi Party was outlawed in Austria, he remained in Munich, where he worked as a courier for the SS, smuggling radios and weapons back across the border. He was later arrested in connection with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, but he managed to escape custody and made his way to an SS training facility near Dachau. After a brief hiatus, he resumed his SS career, serving as a Wehrmacht officer and as a financial officer for the Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood.
In that role, he became deeply involved in the machinery of persecution, organizing the isolation, deportation, and mass killing of Jews. In the summer of 1942, Göth was transferred to Lublin, where he served within the SS and police forces in the region. There, he participated in rounding up Jews and deporting them to concentration and extermination camps as part of Operation Reinhard. He was then assigned to the SS Death’s Head units, the Totenkopfverbände, which were responsible for the concentration camp system and, ultimately, for the executions, beatings, and deaths that occurred within it.
Göth’s first major assignment was to oversee the construction of the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp, a sprawling 200-acre site. He was told he would command the camp once it was built. It is widely believed he was interviewed for the position by Heinrich Himmler himself, who favored brutal and efficient commandants fully committed to the Nazi program of mass murder. The camp was built in one month, using backbreaking slave labor.
On the 12th of March 1943, the Krakow ghetto was liquidated. Those deemed fit enough to work were sent to the new camp at Plaszow. Thousands of others were sent to extermination camps, where they were gassed within minutes of arrival. Some were simply shot dead in the streets as the SS cleared the ghetto.
As the new arrivals came, Göth made a speech in which he declared to the prisoners that he was their god, and that he alone held complete control and authority over the camp. His cruelty soon defined his command. He was put in charge of liquidating the ghetto at Tarnow, which held 25,000 prisoners. Of those, 10,000 were sent to Plaszow to serve as slave laborers.
The final roundups took place in September 1943. Trains were loaded, and Jews were taken to extermination camps, many to Auschwitz. Less than half were said to have survived the arduous journey, and it was Göth who controlled these deportations. He later admitted to personally shooting between 30 and 90 women and children with his own pistol during the liquidation of the ghetto.
He was also placed in control of other liquidations, including the Shebnik concentration camp, which held around 6,000 slave laborers. During that liquidation, roughly half the prisoners were sent to other camps, and close to 1,000 Jews were taken to a nearby forest under Göth’s command and shot dead. The rest were sent to Auschwitz and murdered there on his orders. For his efficient liquidation, extermination, and killing, Göth gained a horrific reputation in Himmler’s eyes and was promoted to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer.
But within his own camp, he was more than simply efficient. He was known for shooting prisoners randomly from the balcony of his villa, as if hunting game. He would sit with his rifle, waiting for a prisoner to walk past, and take shots at them on a daily basis. If a prisoner walked too slowly or rested in the yard, he would fire at them.
Killing prisoners became a sport to him. He trained his two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralph, an Alsatian, to kill, and he would set them on prisoners. The dogs would tear victims limb from limb. One eyewitness recalled, “I saw Goeth set his dog on a Jewish prisoner.
The dog tore the victim apart. When he did not move anymore, Goeth shot him. ”
A prisoner described Göth as a hideous and terrible monster who stood more than two meters tall and instilled a terror that left people chattering their teeth. He ran the camp with an extremity of cruelty that defied comprehension.
For even the slightest infraction, he would rain blow after blow upon the face of a helpless offender, watching with sadistic satisfaction as cheeks swelled and teeth fell out. Any prisoner being whipped was forced to count each stroke aloud, and if they made a mistake, they had to start over again. During interrogations in his office, he would string the accused by their legs from a hook in the ceiling and set his dog on them. If a prisoner escaped, he would order the entire group from which the escapee came to form a row and count to ten, personally killing every tenth prisoner.
At one morning parade, in front of all the prisoners, he shot a Jew because, as he complained, the man was too tall. Then, as the man lay dying, he urinated on him. When he caught a boy suffering from diarrhea who could not restrain himself, Göth forced him to eat all of the excrement and then shot him. His mistress testified against him at his trial, saying, “As a survivor, I can tell you we are all traumatized people.
Never would I, never, believe that any human being would be capable of such horror, of such atrocities. When we saw him from a distance, everyone was hiding in the latrines, wherever they could hide. I can’t tell you how people feared him. ” He was known for mindless killing, and whenever he was seen, murder and death followed.
He once shot a Jewish cook because the soup he had prepared was too hot. He firmly believed in collective punishment; if one person from a barracks or work team committed an infraction, the entire group was punished. One evening, when a prisoner managed to escape, Göth ordered the shooting of every second worker in the work group from which the prisoner had fled. On another occasion, he shot every fifth member of a crew because one prisoner had not returned to the camp.
If a prisoner stole food out of desperation, Göth shot them. Much of his murderous activity took place at Hujarowa Górka, a large hill used for shootings and mass killings. It is estimated that Göth ordered the executions of around 12,000 people there. Eventually, Göth was removed from his position as commandant of Plaszow.
He was accused of stealing Jewish property that was deemed to belong to the state, giving prisoners adequate food, and violating rules regarding the punishment of prisoners. He was seen as running a poor camp, was deemed mentally ill, and was sent to a mental institution in Bavaria. After the war, he was arrested by the United States and handed over to the Polish authorities, who placed him on trial for his horrific crimes. He was convicted of murder and of personally killing, maiming, and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified, number of people.
For his crimes, he was sentenced to death. Close to the camp he had once commanded at Plaszow, Amon Göth was hanged at Montelupich prison in Krakow. He was a brutal and barbaric camp commandant, a cold-blooded murderer who saw the killing of Jews and prisoners as sport, a man who trained his own dogs to kill.
His involvement in the Holocaust was clear, and although Himmler initially viewed him as a reliable and ruthlessly efficient commandant, his legacy would forever be one of despicable cruelty, many details of which remain untold.