Amon Leopold Göth, the only child of Catholic parents, was born on December 11, 1908, in Vienna, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Amon Franz Göth, owned a prosperous publishing house. Because of his father's frequent business travels and his mother's work in the family business, Amon was raised mostly by his aunt.
He attended public school in Vienna, where he showed little interest in the classroom and his academic performance remained poor. He studied agriculture for a few semesters before abandoning his studies in 1925, when he began an apprenticeship as a bookseller in his parents' company.
At 17, Göth became increasingly enthusiastic about National Socialism and its radical ideology. His main political goal was the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, a goal he shared with the German Nazi Party, which he decided to join in 1930. He was granted full party membership on May 31, 1931, making him an "old fighter" — one who had joined before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
Old Fighters were distinguished from the flood of new members who joined in 1933 and later for opportunistic reasons once the Nazis took power. Many of them achieved high status, received special awards instituted for that purpose, and were given prestigious jobs in the opera houses, government buildings, and universities of the Third Reich.
Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign encouraged and funded by Germany. The goal was to undermine the regime of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent, with staged disruptive protests and brawls with political opponents and police. Austrian Nazis set off explosives and tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish-owned businesses.
In June 1933, in response to a fatal Nazi bombing, the Dollfuss regime banned the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates. When Göth's illegal activities, including obtaining explosives for the Nazi Party, made him a wanted man in Austria, he fled to Germany. From there he smuggled radios and weapons into Austria and acted as a courier for the SS.
In October 1933, Göth was tracked down by Austrian authorities and arrested, but legal proceedings against him ended in December 1933 with his acquittal for lack of evidence. He returned to his parents' business but continued to maintain contact with the underground Nazi movement.
On July 25, 1934, when Austrian Nazis attempted to overthrow the Austrian government, the conspirators shot and killed Chancellor Dollfuss. Göth was again detained but managed to escape custody and flee to Germany, where he tried to help his parents develop their publishing business. His mother died in March 1936, and in the summer of the same year his first marriage failed.
In the spring of 1938, Adolf Hitler annexed the federal state of Austria into the German Reich. The Anschluss, as it became known, took place over three days between March 11 and 13, 1938. On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the border into Austria without firing a single shot. They were not met with armed resistance but with cheers and flowers, while thousands of Austrians turned out to greet Hitler as he traveled to Linz and then on to Vienna.
Terrified Jews, leftists, and other opponents of the Nazi regime raced toward the country's borders hoping to reach them before they were closed, but most became trapped in a rapidly Nazifying Austria. In the weeks that followed, there was pogrom-like violence across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat, attacked, and humiliated Jews, forcing them to scrub the streets, clean public toilets, and perform humiliating exercises. Many decided to try to leave Austria, and lines appeared at consulates across Vienna.
Among the Austrians who greeted the Führer was a man who, as commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp during the Second World War, would be responsible for the brutal torture and killing of thousands of innocent men, women, and children: Amon Göth.
Göth returned to Vienna shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and resumed his party activities. He married Anna Geiger, a woman he met at a motorcycle race, in an SS civil ceremony in October 1938. Before the wedding, the couple had to pass a set of strict physical tests administered by the SS to determine the suitability of their marriage. The marriage produced three children, but their eldest child, Peter, born in 1939, died of diphtheria at seven months old.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The following year, Göth joined the SS, in which he reached the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer.
In the summer of 1942, when the Nazis began deporting Jews from ghettos in the General Government to extermination camps, Göth was sent to SS headquarters in Lublin, where he joined the staff of Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police leader of the Kraków area. Operation Reinhard was the code name for the systematic extermination of the Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. Three killing centers were established: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Göth was responsible for rounding up and transporting victims to these camps to be murdered.
Göth's next assignment, starting on February 11, 1943, was to oversee the construction of a 200-acre camp at Kraków-Płaszów, which he was to command. In his inaugural address as commandant, he told the prisoners: "I am your God."
The Płaszów camp was established in 1942 under the authority of the SS and police leaders in Kraków. It was initially a forced labor camp for Jews. The original site included two Jewish cemeteries. From time to time the SS enlarged the camp, and it reached its maximum size in 1944, the same year it became a concentration camp. Until that time, most of the camp guards were Ukrainian police auxiliaries chosen from among Soviet soldiers in German prisoner-of-war camps and trained at the Trawniki training camp in Lublin.
Płaszów was surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence and divided into several sections. The camp had barracks for German personnel, factories, warehouses, a men's camp, a women's camp, and a labor education camp for Polish workers who violated labor discipline. Poles and Jews were segregated within the camp. The largest number of people confined in Płaszów at any one time was over twenty thousand. Thousands were killed there, mostly by shooting.
Everyday life in the camp was subject to Göth's strict rules and was characterized by arbitrary executions, harassment, humiliation, and torture, by himself or by the guards. After morning roll call, the prisoners were herded to their assigned jobs. Escape attempts or sabotage were generally punishable by death, while food smuggling was punishable by 100 lashes. Successful escape attempts were punished with the execution of every tenth prisoner in the escapee's group, and it was not uncommon for Göth to perform the executions personally. He believed such measures could demonstrate his ideas for order and discipline in a memorable way.
One of Göth's specialties was to shoot at prisoners in the morning from the balcony of the villa specially renovated for him. Sometimes he shot people from the window of his office if they appeared to be moving too slowly or resting in the yard. His Tyrolean hat would mark his intentions; it was the signal for seasoned prisoners to attempt to hide. His two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralph, an Alsatian mix, were trained to tear inmates to death.
Amon Göth was soon given the nickname "Butcher of Płaszów" by the prisoners, and he killed at least 500 people with his own hands. After murdering a person, he requested their index card so that their relatives could also be killed, as he did not want discontented people in the camp. Göth killed indiscriminately almost daily; a misinterpreted look was enough, which is why prisoners preferred to look at the floor when Göth was present. Another time he shot a victim just for a forgotten salute. On one occasion, after catching a woman eating a potato, he had her thrown into a large cauldron of boiling water in order to cook her alive.
A former Płaszów prisoner, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, who survived the war, later testified: "When we saw him from a distance, everybody was hiding in latrines, wherever they could hide. I can't tell you how people feared him."
During his time at Płaszów, Göth lived comfortably in a villa, owning cars and horses that he rode in the camp. He also had an interpreter responsible for his correspondence, a personal physician, and a large number of personal servants. These included several domestic workers, maids, a stable boy, a master, a chauffeur, a bodywork specialist, a butler, and a car mechanic for his fleet of three passenger cars. Negligence in the care and maintenance of the vehicles was punished iconically by Göth. The kitchen staff could also count on Göth beating them to the point of unconsciousness or slapping them in the face if the food served was too little or had too much salt. On one occasion he shot a Jewish cook because the soup was too hot. A shoemaker was threatened with the same procedure if he used the wrong materials or if the shoes he had made by hand were too big or too small. Up to six pairs of shoes are said to have been produced for Göth each week.
Amon Göth was also a sexual deviant and an alcoholic who had no problem raping Jewish women in the camp, even though under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, sexual relations between Jews and Germans were punishable by severe imprisonment or even death. After the war, Göth's former maid testified how on one occasion she entered the living room where Amon Göth, drunk and naked with a whip in his hand, ordered her to undress. When she refused, he whipped her and tried to rape her. In his villa, Göth also organized orgies and parties with a lot of alcohol.
In addition to his duties at Płaszów, Göth was the officer in charge of the liquidation of the ghettos and labor camps of Szebnie, Tarnów, Kraków, and other places.
Before World War II, about 25,000 Jews lived in Tarnów, a city in southern Poland 45 miles east of Kraków. Jews whose recorded presence in the town went back to the mid-15th century comprised about half of the town's population. Deportations from Tarnów began in June 1942, when about 13,500 Jews were sent to the Bełżec killing center. During the deportation operations, German SS and police forces massacred hundreds of Jews in the streets, in the marketplace, in a Jewish cemetery, and in the woods outside the town.
After the June deportations, the Germans ordered the surviving Jews in Tarnów, along with thousands of Jews from neighboring towns, into a ghetto. The ghetto was surrounded by a high wooden fence. Living conditions were poor, marked by severe food shortages, a lack of sanitary facilities, and a forced labor regime in factories and workshops producing goods for the German war industry.
In September 1942, the Germans ordered all ghetto residents to report at Targowica Square, where they were subjected to a selection in which those deemed unessential were selected out for deportation to the Bełżec killing center. About 8,000 people were deported. Thereafter, deportations from Tarnów to the killing centers continued sporadically, and the Germans deported a group of 2,500 in November 1942.
When the Germans decided to destroy the Tarnów ghetto in September 1943, the surviving 7,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz and 3,000 to the Płaszów concentration camp in Kraków. In late 1943, Tarnów was declared free of Jews. After the war, several witnesses testified that Göth personally shot between 30 and 90 women and children during the liquidation of the Tarnów ghetto.
Amon Göth was hated not only by the camp inmates but also by his SS subordinates, whom he treated harshly and brought before an SS and police court for the smallest offenses. However, when it was revealed that Göth himself had used the massive Nazi apparatus to gain an enormous amount of wealth, his downfall became inevitable, as all possessions stolen from murdered Jews were regarded as property of the Reich. He stole valuables of any kind: diamonds, money and foreign currency, paintings, carpets, and furniture.
In the course of the investigations, it was revealed that he stole assets worth millions of Reichsmarks. The first wagon with guards and looted goods was secured at the Auschwitz train station at the end of August 1944, with others to follow. On September 13, 1944, Göth was relieved of his position and arrested by Gestapo officials in his Płaszów villa. He was charged by the SS with theft of Jewish property, failure to provide adequate food to the prisoners under his charge, violation of concentration camp regulations regarding the treatment and punishment of prisoners, and allowing unauthorized access to camp personnel records by prisoners and non-commissioned officers.
Administration of the camp at Płaszów was turned over to SS-Obersturmführer Arnold Büscher, and the camp was closed on January 15, 1945. Göth was scheduled for an appearance before SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, but the charges were later dropped due to Germany's looming defeat. SS doctors diagnosed Göth with a mental illness, and he was transferred to a mental hospital, where he was arrested by U.S. soldiers. He was then sent to a temporary prison camp located on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp and extradited to Poland, where he finally faced justice for his crimes.
Between August 27 and September 5, 1946, Göth was tried for his crimes by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Kraków. He was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 8,000 people in the Płaszów camp, the deaths of 2,000 people during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto, ordering the deportation of 8,000 people in the course of the dissolution of the Tarnów ghetto, ordering the murder and deportation of an unspecified number of people as part of the liquidation of the Szebnie camp, and misappropriating significant Jewish assets.
During the proceedings, Amon Göth pursued the simple practice of rigorously denying all allegations against him. When testifying about violent excesses committed during his reign of terror, he questioned the credibility of the witnesses and defended his actions as merely carrying out orders as a soldier. Göth also appeared unimpressed by the course of the court proceedings and expressed his contempt for the court by demonstratively polishing his fingernails.
On September 5, 1946, he was found guilty on all five counts and sentenced to death by hanging. Amon Göth was 37 years old when he was hanged on September 13, 1946, at the Montelupich prison in Kraków, not far from the site of the Płaszów camp. The smooth execution of the sentence was thwarted by the fact that the prepared rope turned out to be too long. It had to be shortened twice because of Göth's height — he was two meters tall. Only the third attempt succeeded. Göth's last words were "Heil Hitler." After the execution, his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Vistula River. There were no tears shed for Amon Göth.