KRAKOW, Poland — Amon Göth, the SS commandant whose sadistic reign over the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp made him one of the most notorious mass murderers of the Holocaust, was hanged at Montelupich prison in Krakow after being convicted of personally killing, maiming and torturing an unidentified but substantial number of prisoners during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
His execution closed one of the darkest chapters of the Second World War, a chapter in which a single man was permitted to treat human life as sport, shooting prisoners from the balcony of his villa as they walked across the camp yard and training his two dogs to tear inmates apart for his amusement.
Göth was born into a world that would soon be consumed by the Nazi movement he eagerly joined. He became a member of the Nazi Party in Austria in September 1930 and was granted full membership in the SS in 1932, serving in Vienna before being promoted to Scharführer and later fleeing to Germany after an investigation into illegal activities that included stockpiling explosives for the party.
After the Nazi Party was outlawed in Austria, he remained in Munich, where he smuggled radios and weapons across the border as an SS courier. He was later arrested in connection with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss but escaped custody and made his way to an SS training facility near Dachau, resuming his activities within the organization.
He subsequently became a Wehrmacht officer and a financial officer for the Reichskommissar for the consolidation of German nationhood, a post in which he was directly involved in isolating, deporting and organizing the mass killing of Jews. In the summer of 1942 he was transferred to Lublin, where he participated in Operation Reinhard, rounding up Jews and deporting them to concentration and extermination camps.
Göth was then assigned to the SS Death’s Head unit, the Totenkopfverbände, the formation responsible for the concentration camp system and for the executions, beatings and deaths that occurred within it. His first task was to oversee the construction of the 200-acre Krakow-Plaszow camp, built in one month using backbreaking slave labor, and he was told he would command it once it was finished.
Historians believe he may have been interviewed for the position by Heinrich Himmler himself, and that Himmler was impressed by a man who embodied the brutality and obsession with efficiency the SS leadership demanded. On March 12, 1943, the Krakow ghetto was liquidated, and those deemed fit to work were sent to the new camp at Plaszow.
Thousands who were considered unfit were sent to extermination camps and gassed within minutes of arrival, while others were shot dead in the streets as the SS cleared the ghetto. As new arrivals poured into the camp, Göth delivered a deranged speech in which he told the prisoners that he was their god and that he alone held complete control and authority over the camp.
He was then placed in charge of the liquidation of the Tarnow ghetto, which held 25,000 prisoners. Ten thousand were sent to Plaszow as slave laborers, and the final roundups in September 1943 saw trains loaded with Jews bound for extermination camps, many of them destined for Auschwitz. Fewer than half were said to have survived the journey.
Göth later admitted that he had shot between 30 and 90 women and children with his own pistol during the liquidation of the ghetto. He was also placed in command of other liquidations, including that of the Szebnie concentration camp, which held around 6,000 slave laborers. Roughly half were sent to other camps, including his own, while about 1,000 Jews were marched into a nearby forest under his command and shot dead.
The remainder were sent to Auschwitz and gassed on arrival on his orders. His efficiency in liquidation and extermination earned him a horrific reputation in Himmler’s eyes and a promotion to the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer, even as his behavior inside the camp descended into grotesque sadism.
Göth was known for shooting prisoners at random as if they were game, taking up his rifle on the balcony of his villa and waiting for an inmate to pass before firing. If prisoners walked too slowly or rested in the yard, he would shoot them. He regarded the killing of prisoners as a sport, and he trained his two dogs, Rolf, a Great Dane, and Ralph, an Alsatian, to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 on command.
One witness recalled, “I saw Göth set his dog on a Jewish prisoner. The dog tore the victim apart. When he did not move anymore, Göth shot him.”
Another prisoner described him as “a hideous and terrible monster who reached a height of more than two meters,” a man who “set the fear of death in people, terrified masses, and accounted for much chattering of teeth.”
The same account described a regime of cruelty beyond the comprehension of a compassionate mind, in which Göth employed tortures that dispatched his victims to hell. For even the slightest infraction of the rules, he would rain blow after blow upon the face of a helpless offender, observing with sadistic satisfaction as the cheek swelled and turned blue, as teeth fell out and eyes filled with tears.
Anyone being whipped by him was forced to count each stroke aloud, and if the victim made a mistake, the counting had to begin again from the start. During interrogations conducted in his office, he would set his dog on the accused, who was strung by the legs from a specially placed hook in the ceiling.
In the event of an escape from the camp, he would order the entire group from which the escapee had come to form a row, give the order to count to ten, and personally 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 every tenth prisoner. At one morning parade in the presence of all the prisoners, he shot a Jewish man because, as he complained, the man was too tall. As the man lay dying, Göth urinated on him.
On another occasion, he caught a boy who was sick with diarrhea and unable to restrain himself. Göth forced him to eat all of the excrement and then shot him. A survivor who testified against him at trial said, “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.”
The witness added, “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, it was associated with murder and death.
He even shot a Jewish cook once because the soup he had made was deemed too hot.
Göth was a firm believer in collective punishment. If one person from a barrack or work team committed an infringement of the rules, the whole group would be punished. One evening a prisoner managed to escape, so Göth ordered the shooting of every second worker in the work group from which the prisoner had fled.
He also shot every fifth member of a crew when one prisoner failed to return to the camp.
If a prisoner stole food out of desperation, Göth would shoot them. Much of his brutality unfolded at Hujarowa Górka, a large hill used for shootings, mass killings and murders, where it is estimated that Göth ordered the executions of 12,000 people.
He was eventually removed as commandant of Plaszow after being accused of stealing Jewish property that the Nazi state deemed its own. He was also accused of giving prisoners adequate food and of violating rules governing the punishment of inmates. He was considered to have run a poor camp, was deemed mentally ill, and was sent to a mental institution in Bavaria.
After the war, he was arrested by U. S. forces and handed over to the Polish authorities, who placed him on trial for his crimes.
He was convicted of murder and of personally killing, maiming and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified, number of people. He was sentenced to death and hanged near his former camp at Plaszow, in Krakow.
Amon Göth was a cold-blooded murderer who treated the killing of Jews and prisoners as a sport and who trained his own dogs to become killers. His involvement in the Holocaust was clear, and Himmler initially saw him as a reliable camp commandant capable of performing murderous tasks with ruthless efficiency. His crimes were despicable, and many of them remain untold to this day.