Oskar Schindler

ONE OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES OF THE OSKAR SCHINDLER STORY was his relationship with Amon Göth, who was played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. In 1983, Monika Christiane Knauss, Göth’s daughter, wrote a letter to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in response to the publication in Germany of Thomas Keneally’s Schindlers Liste. She was particularly critical of Keneally’s portrayal of her father as “einen Idioten.” She claimed that Schindler and her father were the best of friends, though she admitted that Schindler later denied this. She said that after the war Oskar visited her mother, Ruth, and said nothing negative about her father during the visit. Because Monika was only ten months old when her father was executed for war crimes in 1946, she obviously received this information secondhand. She also told Der Spiegel that without her father it would have been impossible for Schindler to have saved some of Płaszów’s Jews. She ended her 1983 letter by saying that her father’s silence also saved Oskar Schindler’s life.¹

Monika’s tone was very different in a rambling, forty-eight-hour interview with Matthias Kessler in the spring of 2001, published the following year as Ich muß doch meinen Vater lieben, oder? (I Have to Love My Father, or Do I?) And though the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled its review of the book a “Biographische Freakshow,” in reality, the book-length interview was part of an ongoing and painful attempt by a middle-aged woman to come to grips with the monstrous legacy of her father.²

Monika, who used the surname Göth for the book, only slowly discovered the truth surrounding her father’s brutal past. Her mother, Ruth Irene Kalder, an actress from Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland), had begun to work for Oskar Schindler as a secretary at Emalia in 1942. One evening, Oskar took her to one of the lavish parties put on by Amon Göth at his villa at Płaszów, where the Viennese camp commandant fell head over heels for Ruth, who, some thought, resembled Elizabeth Taylor. Ruth soon moved in with Göth, who had a wife, Anni, and two children, Werner and Inge, in Vienna. Göth told Ruth that she could live with him but that he could never divorce his wife because of his children.³

Ruth loved her luxurious life with Amon Göth in Płaszów. Every morning before breakfast, and again in the afternoon, she would go horseback riding. During warm weather, Ruth could be seen sun bathing on the infamous balcony of Göth’s villa overlooking the camp. When she was not sunbathing or horseback riding, she could be found on a nearby tennis court. And then, of course, there were the incredible parties given by Göth in the evenings. Ruth Irene Kalder lived a life of luxury and comfort during her two-year relationship with Amon Göth, though she claims she never visited the concentration camp below the villa.⁴

Ruth remained faithful to Göth after his execution; in 1948, with the backing of his father, Franz Amon Göth, she changed her name to Göth after Franz legally affirmed that his son had been engaged to Ruth at the end of the war. The reason there was no wedding, Franz claimed, was the “chaos at the end of the war.”⁵ Ruth spoke adoringly of Amon Göth, whom she called by his childhood nickname, “Mony.” In fact, she named Monika for him. Ruth told Monika very little about her father when she was a child, but when she did it was always in glowing terms. Ruth told her daughter that Amon Göth was a handsome ladies’ man who had a beautiful singing voice and threw lavish parties. Ruth once told Monika: “He was my king and I was his queen.” She said that Monika should love her father as deeply as her mother. And for a while she did.⁶

But as she grew older, something continued to nag Monika about her father. Even before she became aware of the mysterious dark shadow that surrounded her father’s name, someone attacked her when she was in her pram, possibly because she was Amon Göth’s child. Then, when Monika was eight years old, an aunt criticized her for crying and told her that if her father could see her, he would “jump out of the Weichsel.”⁷ What Monika did not know was that the aunt was alluding to the disposal of Amon Göth’s ashes in the Weichsel River in Poland after his execution in 1946. Three years later, when Monika failed to clean a bathroom, she had a terrible fight with her mother. Ruth, who was fanatical about a clean bathroom, said, “You are like your father and will end up like him.”⁸ The next day, Monika asked her grandmother, who for all practical purposes raised her, what had really happened to her father during the war. Her grandmother told her that her father had been executed because he had killed some Jews in Poland. She added that he had also run a labor camp and killed the Jews for “sanitation” reasons.⁹

When Monika was twelve, she wanted to get to know a Jewish classmate, Ernestine Silber, who was new to her school. One day, Monika followed Ernestine home and was impressed when Ernestine’s father hugged her warmly. She remembered wondering what was so bad about Jews because she liked the way Jews treated their children, and remembered wondering what was so bad about Jewish people. That evening, Monika told her mother about Ernestine and her interest in becoming her friend. Ruth replied, “Oh God, I hope Ernestine does not mention your name at home.” Monika responded, “Do you think every Jew knows about Amon Göth and the work camp at Płaszów?” Ruth said that the Jews knew the name of Amon Göth. Monika quickly lost interest in becoming Ernestine’s friend. “What could I say? I’m the daughter of someone who killed your relatives?”¹⁰

Monika’s struggle with the memory of her father continued into adulthood. After her marriage to a man that abused her, she wondered why she had married “such a brute.” Was she, she later asked herself, trying to replicate her father in her marriage or was she punishing herself?¹¹ She now felt that she had a drawer in her mind called “Amon Göth” and “could keep it closed” if she wanted to.¹²

When she was twenty-five, she met a Jewish survivor from Płaszów, Manfred, in a Munich bar. When Monika noticed the tattoo on his arm, she asked if he was a Jew. She then wanted to know whether he had been in a concentration camp and, if so, where. “In Poland,” Manfred responded. But where in Poland, Monika wanted to know. Manfred, who was becoming uncomfortable with the thrust of the conversation, told her it was probably a camp she had never heard of. But she persisted and he told her he had been a prisoner at Płaszów. Monika said she was glad to hear he was in a labor camp instead of a concentration camp. She then asked whether Manfred knew her father. “Who was he?” Manfred replied. “Göth,” said Monika. Manfred, who was Polish, evidently did not understand Monika’s pronunciation of her father’s name and said he knew no one by that name. Shocked, Monika said that Manfred must have known him because her father had been the commandant at Płaszów. She pronounced her father’s name again, first as “Gätt,” then as “Gööth,” and finally as “Amon Gätt.” At that point, Manfred turned white and screamed, “That murderer! That swine!” Stunned, Monika tried to argue that Płaszów was a labor camp, not a concentration camp. That was the end of the conversation. Several days later, Manfred and Monika met again. Manfred refused to talk about the matter any further, saying that Monika was too young to discuss such things.¹³

It was also during this period that Monika met Oskar Schindler. She was, of course, too young to have remembered Oskar’s first visit with her mother soon after the war. Monika was now a teenager and Oskar had returned from Argentina several years earlier. They met in a rundown neighborhood near the Central Train Station in Frankfurt. Oskar was too embarrassed by his shabby living conditions to invite Monika and Ruth to his apartment. Instead, they met at a restaurant. Monika recalled that he appeared to be unemployed and broke and that her mother had to pay for the drinks at the restaurant. This is striking because it was not the custom then for women to pay the bill in a restaurant. Moreover, Oskar consumed quite a few schnapps and cups of coffee. As Monika later told an Israeli newspaper reporter: “I’ve never seen anyone drink like Oskar, although he had no money.”¹⁴

Oskar, who also borrowed cigarettes from Monika, told her that she looked just like her father. Monika came away from the meeting thinking that he liked her father. She remembered that her mother told her that her father had once gotten Schindler out of prison, so she felt no compunction asking Oskar why he did not go to Kraków to help her father when he learned that Göth had been captured by the Allies. “Monika,” Oskar replied, “it was impossible; they would have hanged me as well even if I had saved 10,000 Jews.”¹⁵ This was the last time that Monika would see Oskar Schindler.

The publication of Thomas Keneally’s Schindlers Liste in Germany in 1983 reopened new wounds for Monika and her mother. In the decade or so since she had met the Płaszów survivor, Manfred, and the appearance of Keneally’s novel, Monika had married and given birth to a daughter, Yvette. After Keneally’s novel came out, Ruth was contacted by the London-based, South African-born film maker Jon Blair, who told Ruth that he was preparing a documentary on the life of Oskar Schindler. In 1982, he visited Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios to see whether he could get permission for the rights to the Schindler story, which Universal owned. According to Blair, Universal was hesitant to give him permission to make the documentary and only did so under pressure from Spielberg, who was not yet ready to make a film about Oskar Schindler. Blair said that Spielberg later told him that “letting [him] make the documentary… would be a cheap way for Universal to have their research done for them, and he [Spielberg] of course would have access to [the] film once he came to make his.” Blair feels that he wound up “doing a lot of the leg work for him [Spielberg].”¹⁶ Though it is difficult to determine the impact of Blair’s eighty-two-minute documentary, Schindler: His Story as Told by the Actual People He Saved (Thames Television) on Spielberg, Blair’s research is first rate. Moreover, he captured on film interviews of some of the most important people involved in the Schindler story.

Ruth agreed to do the interview with Jon Blair because she thought it would be about Oskar. Instead, at least from her perspective, all Blair wanted to talk about was Amon Göth. This troubled her. Ruth, who spoke excellent English, was, according to Blair, dying from emphysema. It is obvious from watching the interview that Ruth was ill. Yet she chose her words carefully, particularly when she was asked about Amon Göth. She told Blair that Amon Göth was not a brute, at least no more than others in the SS. He did not, she asserted, “kill for the fun of it.” Göth’s views towards Jews, Ruth said, were similar to those of others in the SS: “They were there to work.” But she admitted that Göth “did kill some Jews,” though he did not hate them. She also claimed that she told the two Jewish maids who worked for her, whom Göth called “Lena,” (Helen Sternlicht; today Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig) and “Susanna,” (Helen Hirsch), that if she could, she “would have saved them [the Jews] all.” Helen Rosenzweig, or “Lena,” says that Ruth once did make such a statement to both maids.¹⁷

Blair did ask Ruth about Oskar Schindler, though most of her interview time on the documentary was spent discussing Amon Göth. In response to Blair’s question about whether Oskar loved Jews, Ruth said that he was a “lovable opportunist” who needed the Jews and worked with them. Blair then asked Ruth whether she thought Schindler was a good Nazi. “We were all good Nazis,” she told him, “we couldn’t be anything else.” She added that they “had to believe in all of these things.” When asked about the plight of the Jews, she answered with a question: “What could we have done? We couldn’t have done anything against it.”¹⁸

But according to Monika, there was more to Ruth Kalder’s interview with Jon Blair than appeared in the documentary. Ruth had expected to meet just with Jon Blair and was shocked when he showed up with “einem ganzen Fernsehteam (a whole television crew).” And though the interview with Ruth takes up only about five minutes in the documentary, Blair spent many hours with her on the day of the interview. Monika claimed that the interview seemed to “go on and on and on.” While Blair and the BBC crew filmed the interview in Ruth’s living room, Monika listened from the kitchen. Monika vividly remembered her mother’s stunning response when Blair asked how she could live with such a brute: “He was no worse than the rest of them.” Monika, who had never discussed her father with her mother, said she could no longer listen to what was going on in the other room. The next day, Ruth Kalder Göth committed suicide, though in fairness to Jon Blair, it must be mentioned that she had talked about doing this in the weeks before the interview. Ruth left Monika a letter that said she no longer wanted to live. She also hoped that her daughter would have good memories of her. And although Monika felt her ties to her mother were more biological than emotional, Ruth’s death traumatized her because an important connection to her past was now gone.¹⁹

In the two decades since her mother’s death, Monika continued to struggle with the memory of her father. She saw Schindlers Liste in 1994 and was surprised by how much Ralph Fiennes resembled the images of her father she had seen in photographs. The film devastated her; for three days afterwards she was bedridden. For the first time she had caught a true glimpse of the murderous actions of Amon Göth, and she remembered wishing that the killing would stop and that her father, in the end, would become a bit more humane. He never did. As she left the theater, she heard several Germans discussing her father. One called him schizophrenic; another said that without Göth, no Schindler Jews would have survived the war. This comment mirrored her own thoughts in the 1983 letter to Der Spiegel. Perhaps to assuage her own sense of guilt at having such a monstrous father, Monika has visited Israel and has studied classical Hebrew at the university where she works in Munich.²⁰

She is interested in the Holocaust and admires Simon Wiesenthal, who overcame his own pain and losses during the Holocaust to seek justice against former Nazi war criminals. Monika has also visited Kraków and the remains of Płaszów. Kessler also gave her a translated copy of the large transcript of Amon Göth’s war crimes trial in Kraków, which was published in 1947 as Proces Ludobójcy Amona Leopolda Goetha by the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland. Kessler used some of the points in the transcript as the basis for some of the questions he asked Monika. Needless to say, she was shocked by what she read. At the end of the interview, she told Kessler that though she had once hoped to see her father as a victim of Hitler, Himmler, and National Socialism, she now saw her father as a murderer.²¹

Despite all this, one is drawn back to Monika Göth’s letter to Der Spiegel in 1983 and her comment that without her father, Oskar Schindler could not have saved his Jews. Evidently these were views held by others, at least according to the the German theater-goer whose comment Monika Göth overheard. Sadly, there are some seeds of truth in what both claimed in 1983 and 1994. From Amon Göth’s perspective, Oskar was his friend. In reality, it was a relationship, at least from Oskar’s perspective, based purely on necessity. All Oskar’s postwar statements about Göth center around two topics: the bribes he paid him and his brutality. Emilie Schindler described Göth as “the most despicable man” she had ever met. She said that Göth had a “double personality.” At one moment, he could be a refined Viennese gentleman commenting on the nuances of a piece of classical music, which he listened to constantly. Minutes later, he could show the “most barbaric instincts.”²² Oskar’s ability to appeal to the more refined side of Göth’s personality was probably the key to his ties to Göth. Oskar understood that though many people were involved in various aspects of his efforts to save his Jews, in the end Amon Göth was the most important one because he was the commandant of Płaszów, where Schindler’s Jewish workers initially lived. And even after Oskar convinced Göth to let him build a sub-camp at Emalia, he had to keep Göth happy to insure the sub-camp’s future.

But Oskar had to do more to win Göth’s confidence; he had to establish a more personal relationship with him. At a distance, this would seem an impossible task, given Göth’s SS fanaticism and racial ideals. Yet it must be remembered that there was another side to Amon Göth that few people knew about. Göth, who was the same age as Schindler, came from a well-to-do Viennese family that owned a publishing house specializing in military publications. Though never a serious student, Amon Göth might well have become a prosperous publisher and intellectual if he had not become involved with the Nazi movement in Austria in the 1920s as a student. Instead, he became a war criminal.²³

Oddly enough, a blend of sophistication with brutality was not uncommon among the SS officer class. Oskar had probably become accustomed to dealings with SS and General Government officials with similar contradictory traits. Soon after Hitler took power in Germany in early 1933, Heinrich Himmler sought to enhance the reputation of the SS by recruiting new members from the aristocracy and the well-to-do of Germany. By the late 1930s, some of the most prominent noble families in Germany had members in the SS, principally the SD. In fact, Heinz Höhne has estimated that almost 19 percent of the SS-Obergruppenführer (lieutenant generals), 9.8 percent of its SS-Gruppenführer (major generals), 14.3 percent of its SS-Brigadeführer (brigadier generals), 8.8 percent of its SS-Oberführer (senior colonels), and 8.4 percent of its SS-Standartenführer (colonels) were from the nobility. The SS also attracted well-educated, intellectual members of the upper middle class, many of them attorneys or economists. They seemed drawn to the SS less by ideals than by careerism and power. These men gave the SS a veneer of sophistication and “legality.” In many ways, Amon Göth became a bit of an anachronism in the SS because many of the old guard had been driven out by the time war began in 1939. On the other hand, he also brought with him a certain air of sophistication that fit into the new SS that after 1933 tried to transform itself into Germany’s new aristocracy.²⁴

Amon Leopold Göth

But who was this Amon Göth and why did he choose the career that ultimately led to his execution as a mass murderer in 1946? It is important to know something about Göth if we are to understand the challenges that Oskar Schindler had to face and overcome as he dealt with this figure so central to his efforts to save his Jews. Fortunately, we have a fairly good body of documentation dealing with Göth’s life before and during the Holocaust. His SS files in the Bundesarchiv Berlin Documentation Center provide a broad outline of his life, including statements by Göth. A microfilm copy of Göth’s SS file is housed in the Foreign Records Seized (RG 242) collection in the National Archives of the United States depository in College Park, Maryland; though not as complete as Göth’s Bundesarchiv dossier, it does contain a few documents not found in the Berlin SS files.

The published transcript of Göth’s Polish war crimes trial, Proces Ludobójcy Amona Leopolda Goetha (Genocide Trial of Amon Göth), centers around Göth’s criminal actions but also gives information about his Nazi and SS career. In addition, the interviews of Ruth Kalder Göth and Monika Göth by Jon Blair, Matthias Kessler, and Israeli journalist Tom Segev provided more information about Amon Göth’s life and career. Göth’s name comes up quite frequently in Elinor J. Brecher’s fine collection of Schindlerjuden testimony, Schindler’s Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors (1994). I also interviewed Schindler Jews who have unique perspectives on Amon Göth. Among the most important were Mietek Pemper, who worked in Göth’s office in Płaszów, and Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenszweig, who spent almost two years working as a maid for Göth and Ruth at their villa in Płaszów. Together, these sources provide us with good insight into the character, personality, and life of a man his own daughter considered a murderer and most survivors saw as a brutal monster.

The files of most SS men consisted of a set list of eighteen to twenty documents that covered every aspect of their lives and service to the Fatherland. One of the most important documents was the Vitae (Lebenslauf), the third document in Amon Göth’s SS file after his personnel sheet with photograph (Personalbogen mit Lichtbild) and his Supplemental Sheet and Change in Status Report (Ergänzungsbogen und Veränderungsmeldungen). The first two documents provide a basic secretarial look at the ebbs and flows of Göth’s career in the SS. But the most detailed record of his SS career can be found in another document, the Personal data (Personalangaben) file, a four-page document in Fraktur (Gothic-style print favored by the Nazis) German that details every aspect of Göth’s career, including his awards, SS service, education, civilian occupation, family background, marital status and children, Nazi and other party membership information, and foreign travels.

The Vitae is the most revealing document in Amon Göth’s SS file, which, when combined with the interview that Ruth Kalder Göth gave to Tom Segev in 1975, gives us a pretty good look at the more human side of one of Nazi Germany’s more infamous war criminals. Amon Göth was born on December 11, 1908, in Vienna, Austria, though at least one SS document later in his file lists his birth date as December 14, 1905. His parents were Franz Amon Göth, the owner of Verlagsanstalt Amon Franz Göth (Amon Franz Göth Publishing House) for military books in Vienna, and Berta Schwendt Göth. Roman Ferber, a prominent Schindlerjude who went on to hold important urban and economic planning positions in New York city government, told Elinor Brecher that Göth sent much of the booty he stole from Jews or acquired on the black market to his family in Vienna, who are “prosperous publishers to this day.”²⁵

Franz Amon Göth did quite well as a publisher and his son, Amon, was raised in a proper upper-middle-class Viennese Catholic home. He attended public school in Vienna and went to college in Waidhofen an der Thaya, a beautiful but nondescript medieval town in northwestern Austria near the Czech border. Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth were born eight months apart in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and raised within two hundred miles of each other, facts probably not lost on both men. But Göth felt that his life as a child was less than secure. He told Ruth that his parents neglected him, which was the reason he “turned his back on the bourgeois social values” they tried to instil in him.²⁶ His father spent a lot of time away from home in the United States and Europe; his mother devoted her time to running the publishing house. His parents left the responsibility of raising their son to his father’s sister, Kathy. Göth told Ruth that his parents’ main concern was that he prepare and educate himself to take over the family publishing house.²⁷

Yet knowing that he had a secure future seemed to have the opposite effect on Amon Göth. He was intelligent but uninterested in his schoolwork. The six-foot-four-inch Göth was more interested in athletics than academics. To the great disappointment of his parents, he decided to study agriculture in college but never completed more than a few semesters of work. He returned to Vienna to work in his family’s publishing house. From this time on he considered himself a publisher, the occupation he listed in his Nazi Party and SS membership files.²⁸

While in college he did acquire an interest in fascism and Nazism, at that time competitive political movements in Austria. In 1925, Göth joined the local youth chapter of the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party (NSDAP; Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which at the time was in the midst of a power struggle between older trade unionists and younger members who admired Adolf Hitler’s forceful leadership in Germany. Hitler’s Nazi movement had strong roots in pre- and postwar Austria, where two of its precursors, the DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; German Workers Party) and the DNSAP (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei; German National Socialist Workers Party), were formed. The DNSAP group split into Austrian and Czech factions after World War I and was the center of Czech Nazism until 1933.²⁹

By the time Amon Göth had begun college, there was a strong surge of interest in Austrian Nazism among high school and university students who came from families hurt by postwar Austria’s serious economic problems. Their teachers often encouraged their students to join Nazi-sponsored organizations such as the German Athletes Association (Deutscher Turnerbund). Estimates are that 22 percent of the members of the Austrian Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization during this period, the Fatherland Alliance (Vaterländerischer Schutzbund), which later was integrated into the German Nazi Party’s SA, were students.³⁰

Ruth Göth said that Amon told her his interest in Nazism came from a fellow student who had joined the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) earlier. Nazism “captured his heart. It knew how to appreciate his physical strength and athletic ability, and fostered friendship and youthful rebellion.”³¹ Göth’s interest in fascism and Nazism continued to grow after he returned to Vienna to begin his short-lived career as a publisher. In 1927, he joined the Styrian Home Protection Organization in Vienna (Steirischer Heimatschutzverband Wien), the strongest and most virulently anti-Semitic wing of the Austrian fascist Home Guard (Heimwehr), the principal fascist competitor of the Nazis in Austria. He was probably attracted to the Home Guard’s political strength vis-à-vis the Austrian Nazis’ lack of unity.³²

Göth evidently left the Styrian Home Guard in 1930 after a failed coalition attempt between the Austrian Nazis and the Home Guard on the eve of the Austrian parliamentary elections in the fall of 1930. Both parties did poorly in the election, particularly the Austrian Nazis; afterwards, Alfred Proksch, one of the Austrian Nazis’ top leaders, decreed that the country’s Nazis could no longer belong to the Nazi Party and the Home Guard. They had to choose between one or the other party. Göth, who had already applied for Nazi Party membership by this time, decided to side with the Nazis. He was awarded full Nazi Party membership on May 31, 1931, when he became member no. 510 764. This meant that he now belonged to what would become a prestigious group within the Nazi Party, the Old Fighters, or Combatants (Alte Kämpfer), who either had been Nazi Party members a year before Hitler took power as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, or had a party membership number below 300 000. Those who had joined the SS, the SA, or the Nazi Party before Hitler’s first major Reichstag victory in Germany on September 14, 1930, were particularly revered as “Party comrades.”³³

After he joined Hitler’s party, Göth became involved in its Margareten district local group (Ortsgruppe) in Vienna but soon joined another Ortsgruppe in the Mariahilf district of the city as “pol. Leiter und als SA Mann [political leader and SA man].”³⁴ And it was probably through his SA membership that he became interested in the SS, which until late 1930 was part of the SA. Ruth Göth said that Amon joined the SS (membership no. 43 673) in 1930 because he was attracted to the “comradeship it promised.”³⁵

The SS, which was established in 1925 as a special bodyguard for Hitler, grew tremendously under Heinrich Himmler, who became the SS’s third leader in 1929. It had 280 members in 1929 and 2,717 members by the end of 1930. Within six months, its membership had grown fivefold and by the fall of 1932 the SS had almost 50,000 members. Given these figures, it is obvious that Göth did not acquire full membership in the SS until 1932. The reason for the contradiction between Göth’s SS and Party files, which stated that he joined the SS in 1930, and SS membership statistics that indicate that he could not have joined until 1932, centered around Himmler’s decision to model certain SS membership requirements on the Roman Catholic Jesuit religious order, which required a lengthy candidate period before one enjoyed full membership. In other words, Amon Göth was only a candidate member of the SS from 1930 until 1932, when he was awarded full SS membership. And though technically “Old Fighter” status in the SS was reserved for members with SS membership numbers below 10 000, Amon Göth still enjoyed a certain prestige in the SS because he was able to survive Himmler’s purge of the older membership from 1933 to 1935 that rid the SS of “patent opportunists, alcoholics, homosexuals, and men of uncertain Aryan background.”³⁶

In Vienna, Göth served initially with SS Truppe (a unit of from twenty to sixty men under a Truppenführer, or sergeant) “Deimel” and Sturm “Libardi.” The SS Sturm, the most important of the SS units, was made up of three Truppen and was commanded by an SS-Hauptsturmführer.³⁷ In January 1933, he was transferred to the staff of the Fifty-second SS Standarte, a regimental-sized unit, where he served as adjutant and Zügführer (platoon leader). In the spring of 1933, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Scharführer and ordered “to organize the necessary [illegal] measures within the scope of the Fifty-second SS Standarte,” which forced him ultimately to flee the “Eastern authorities” [the Austrians], who were hunting him on explosive charges. Göth’s 1941 service report said that he “earned great merits for himself” during his service with this unit.³⁸

Ruth Göth told Tom Segev in 1975 that in the first half of 1933 Amon was involved in terrorist activity and was being hunted by Austrian officials. He soon fled to Germany, where he became actively involved in smuggling “arms, money, and information” from the Reich into Austria.³⁹ Amon Göth’s illegal SS activities in Austria were part of the Nazi leadership’s effort to destabilize the political situation in Austria and wage what the Austrian Nazi Party Manual called a “cold war” in that country.⁴⁰ It centered around a growing campaign of violence and terror against opponents that began in 1932 and continued until the summer of 1934.⁴¹

The Nazis’ cold war resulted in the outlawing of the Austrian Nazi Party on June 19, 1933. The Austrian Nazi leadership fled to Munich where they established an exile base of operations to continue their reign of terror in Austria. Amon Göth fled with them and was assigned to work in SS Sector VIII, where he took responsibility for smuggling communications equipment into Austria. This was tied to efforts by the Nazis to use a new medium, the radio, to spread their propaganda into Austria, particularly from the middle of 1933 until early 1934. Göth also served as a courier for the SS until he was arrested and detained by the Austrian police in October 1933. Göth’s arrest and detention coincided with efforts by the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, who was about to declare martial law “to purge [the government] and Austrian society of Nazi party members and sympathizers.”⁴² According to Göth, he was released for lack of evidence during Christmas 1933. He was lucky. From November 1933 until April 1934, Austrian authorities had convicted 50,000 Nazis of various crimes against the state and society.⁴³

Ruth Göth claimed that Amon continued his illegal activities for the SS in Austria by “smuggling weapons, money, and information.” She also told Tom Segev that Göth seemed to have “played a role in the murder of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß in July 1934.”⁴⁴ The assassination of the Austrian leader on July 25 was part of an Austrian SS-led attempt to begin a revolt that would lead to a Nazi seizure of power. More than likely, Hitler knew of the coup, though he thought it was linked to an Austrian military move against the Dollfuß regime. The Nazi rebellion was badly organized and doomed to failure, though it did trigger a minor civil war in certain parts of Austria that resulted in the death of hundreds. The Austrians arrested more than 6,000 Nazis involved in different aspects of the coup. Amon Göth was one of those detained by Austrian authorities, though he somehow managed to escape and return to Munich, where Himmler had opened an SS-Übungslager (SS Training Camp and Garrison) at the Dachau SS complex just to the northwest of Munich. Next to it was the smaller, infamous Dachau Konzentrationslager (KZ; concentration camp). It is not known whether Göth spent any time at the SS facilities at Dachau because he was soon forced out of the SS by his commander, SS Sector VIII’s Oberführer, Alfred Bigler. All Göth said about his dismissal was that he had encountered “difficulties” with Bigler, who, he claimed, was also soon kicked out of the SS. Göth launched counterclaims against Bigler, though he said these went unanswered because of Bigler’s dismissal from the SS.⁴⁵ It is difficult to gauge the seriousness of the factors that led to Amon Göth’s problems with the SS at this time, though given the infighting within the Austrian Nazi Party, quite possibly they centered around nothing more than personal conflicts between Bigler and Göth. There is no record of Göth’s dismissal in his SS file or in the numerous personnel reports written in 1941 on Göth by his superiors in Vienna. The only indication we have that he was not active in SS affairs from 1934 until 1937 is the simple lack of service details in his SS records. Consequently, it is possible that Göth was allowed to rejoin the SS sometime between 1934 and 1937. This was a difficult time for the Austrian SS and the SA, which were supposed to be dissolved after the July coup. Yet both groups were quickly rebuilt, though by 1938 the ranks of the Austrian SS was still 20 percent smaller than it had been in 1934. It maintained a low profile during this period and worked principally at gathering information for the Third Reich as part of the extensive spy network set up by the Germans in the years before the 1938 Anschluß. But it is difficult to say whether Göth was involved in SS affairs in Austria or Germany between 1934 and 1937.⁴⁶

The first document we have that indicates Göth’s return to Nazi Party activity is a letter he wrote on July 16, 1937, to the headquarters of the Austrian Refugee Society (ARS; Flüchtlingshilfswerk) in Berlin. He asked ARS officials for a note permitting the transfer of his party membership to Munich and the confirmation of his Nazi Party number. He gave Pognerstraße 28/III in Munich as his new, permanent address. He explained that his original Party papers had been taken from him after his arrest in Austria in 1933. It is possible that they were destroyed when he was dismissed from the SS, though more than likely they were part of the Nazi Party and SS records seized by Austrian officials after the 1934 coup.⁴⁷

The ARS had been set up before the 1934 coup and afterwards sent money from Nazi party coffers in Germany to help the families of Nazis killed and executed after the failed coup against Dolfuß. German party leaders hoped this would stop the flood of Austrian Nazi refugees into the Reich and create a greater sense of loyalty towards the Reich among Nazi Party members in Austria. The ARS, which was headed by the head of the Austrian SS, Alfred Rodenbücher, also gave money to unemployed Nazis and even loaned funds to Austrian Nazi businessmen who were having problems because of their political beliefs. Göth’s request to ARS headquarters in Berlin for copies of his party documents and permission to transfer his party membership to Munich suggests that he was working for the ARS in Austria. It is also possible that Göth received funds from the ARS during this period, though his father kept a tight rein over the family business. Moreover, it is questionable whether Franz Göth would have accepted funds from the Nazis.⁴⁸

What did Amon Göth do from 1934 until 1937? Ruth Göth said that he lived in Munich and tried to “develop his publishing business.” Göth’s parents, Franz and Berta, urged him “to make a normal life for himself” and get married. Ruth said her grandfather was something of a liberal and was disillusioned with his son’s involvement in Nazi politics. Franz Göth later told Ruth that he considered Amon’s Nazi activities nothing more than “teenage adventurism.” To push their son along the path of normalcy, Franz and Berta even found him a wife, though the marriage ended in divorce after a few months.⁴⁹

Göth returned to Vienna and the SS after the Anschluß in the spring of 1938; he soon found himself under pressure to remarry because Himmler required all SS men between twenty-five and thirty to marry and “found a family.” He became engaged to Anny Geiger, who had been born in Innsbruck in 1913. But before they could be wed, they had to pass a rigid series of SS tests, including photos of the prospective couple in bathing suits, to insure they possessed the proper physical characteristics. The SS forbade church marriages and required that all SS men be married by their local commander. To move up the ranks, an SS man was expected to turn his back on the Christian faith.⁵⁰

On October 23, 1938, Amon Göth and Anny were married in an SS ceremony; the couple remained married throughout the war. Anny bore three children but there is some confusion about this. Göth’s 1941 SS Personalangaben lists only two sons, though his 1943 Recommendation for Promotion (Ernennungsvorschlag) lists three children: two sons and a daughter who was deceased. Göth’s first son was born in the summer of 1939, his second in February 1940. But the respected life of a publisher did not interest Amon Göth as much as Nazism and the SS, and by the time Adolf Hitler conquered Austria in the spring of 1938, he had rejoined his beloved SS. When war broke out, he began full-time service in the SS, though he still considered himself a publisher by trade. Anny and the children lived permanently in Vienna throughout World War II.⁵¹

In early 1939, Göth was assigned to SS-Standarte 89 in Vienna; when war broke out, he was reassigned to SS Sturmbann 1/11. On March 9, 1940, Göth proudly noted in his 1941 Lebenslauf that he became a member of one of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s Sonderkommando units, where he served as a Verwaltungsführer (administrative leader) on the SS operational staff in East Upper Silesia. Eight months later, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Oberscharführer (technical sergeant). At the time, he lived in Kattowitz (Kattowice), though he gave as his permanent address Zollerg 25/16, 7 Wien (Vienna).⁵²

Upper Silesia, or, as the Germans called it after it was integrated into the Third Reich in 1939, East Upper Silesia (Ostoberschlesien), was highly prized during the war for its coal production output, second only to that of the Ruhr Valley in Germany. Equally important was Upper Silesia’s industrial capacity. By 1943, it produced 5 percent of Germany’s raw iron and 9 pecent of its steel. Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (DAF; Deutsche Arbeitsfront), underscored the importance of East Upper Silesia to the war effort in the Kattowitzer Zeitung in early 1942: “As one of our mightiest arms producers, the Gau of Upper Silesia has the task of contributing to the strengthening of the German armament industry and thus to the achievement of the final victories of our arms.”⁵³

From the summer of 1941 until late May 1942, Göth served as an Einsatzführer (action leader) and a financial administrator with the 1/11th SS-Standarte Planetta, where he worked with an Umsiedlungskommando (resettlement commando) under SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Weilgung in the Kattowitz office of the Ethnic German Central Office (VoMi; Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle), which was part of Himmler’s Reich Office for the Integration of the German Volk-Nation (Reichsamt für den Zusammenschluß des deutschen Volkstums). Göth’s superiors praised his work with the resettlement command and said that he exhibited “superior character and very good SS-comradeship.”⁵⁴ When the Germans occupied Upper Silesia in the fall of 1939, they created a special “police line” that ran through the Kattowitz district and divided the new district into two distinct parts. The western area of East Upper Silesia, which had a large German population and was the heart of industrialized Silesia, would not only be an area ripe for major industrial development and exploitation but also Germanization. The area east of the police line, which included Auschwitz and the surrounding area, had large Polish and Jewish populations, which the Germans wanted to isolate from the western portion of East Upper Silesia as part of their “ethnic reordering” scheme.⁵⁵

The idea was that the western portion of East Upper Silesia, along with other segments of recently conquered Poland, would become something of a racial laboratory centered around the move of ethnic Germans into the region after the expulsion of Poles and Jews. Different SS-controlled offices under Himmler’s newly created Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKFDV; Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutsches Volkstums) would then oversee the transfers and expulsions. The RKFDV’s headquarters office in Berlin under SS-Gruppenführer Ulrich Greifelt would plan for the resettlement of ethnic Germans and oversee the expulsion of Poles and Jews; the VoMi, under SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz, would be responsible for the physical transfer of the German immigrants; this would include the creation of temporary settlement camps and the selection of leaders within these diverse groups. The Reichsstatthalter (governors) of each Gau (district or province) in the newly conquered territories were responsible for the care of the new settlers. Himmler’s new super police organization, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA; Reichssicherheitshauptamt), headed by Reinhard Heydrich, was in charge of “requisitioning” the property of “anti-state” Jews and Poles and deporting them to the General Government. These organizations, in turn, had to work with other Party and government agencies to insure the success of the German settlement program.⁵⁶

What is important about Göth’s role in all of this is that he worked in a part of the Greater Reich where economics took precedent over racial policy when it came to the fate of Jews. Because the SS came to view him not only as a seasoned administrator but also as an expert on Jewish resettlement and transfers, we can surmise that Göth was probably involved in similar policies and programs in East Upper Silesia. Jewish policy in East Upper Silesia was overseen by SS-Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt. By the fall of 1940, Schmelt had developed a highly efficient and extremely profitable Jewish slave labor system that housed Jews in a network of two hundred camps scattered throughout East Upper Silesia. If Albrecht Schmelt was Amon Göth’s SS role model, then he learned from a master of brutal efficiency and corruption. Schmelt’s Jewish slave labor force grew from 17,000 in the fall of 1940 to more than 50,000 by late 1943. The vast sums made by Schmelt and the SS from hiring out his Jewish laborers to factories and other businesses were such that the SS was able to help fund a resettlement program for ethnic Germans in the district and even provide aid to SS men killed in battle. And there was enough wealth left over to help buy an estate, Parzymiechy, where ethnic Germans were trained to become farmers. Schmelt was also able to skim enough money from this program to pay for a private home for himself and put RM 100,000 ($40,000) in his private bank account.⁵⁷

By the time Amon Göth was transferred to Lublin in the summer of 1942, he had become a seasoned administrator. Ten months earlier, he had been promoted to the rank of Untersturmführer. His transfer papers stated that he was to work on the staff of SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globočnik, the SSPF (SS- und Polizeiführer Ost; SS and Police Leader) in the Lublin district. His transfer documents stated that he was to become part of “Sonderdienst [Special Aktion] Reinhard,” specializing in “Judenumsiedlung” (Jewish resettlement) efforts.⁵⁸

If anyone came to symbolize the brutality of German policy towards Polish Jews during this period, it was Globočnik. But Globočnik was more than just a brute. He was also a crook of the highest order, and he, like Albrecht Schmelt, became a role model for Amon Göth. Like Göth, he was an Austrian Old Fighter who had been arrested and imprisoned several times for illegal Nazi activity before the Anschluß. In fact, it is possible that both men knew each other in Austria and Munich. Göth and Globočnik both smuggled explosions into Austria from Germany for the Austrian Nazi Party and spent a lot of time in Munich working for the outlawed party. But here their careers diverged. While Göth’s career in the Nazi Party and the SS languished because of his dismissal in 1934, Globočnik, who joined the Nazi Party (Party no. 442 939) and the SS (SS no. 292 776) later than Göth, quickly caught the eye of Himmler when he became an SS member in 1934 (SS No. 292 776). Like Göth, he spent a great deal of time in Munich from 1934 to 1938, where he helped operate a ring smuggling funds into Austria. Globočnik also served as Gauleiter of the Kaernten district in Austria.⁵⁹

In early 1939, Globočnik, who at the time was Gauleiter of Vienna, was stripped of his rank and honors for corruption. However, Himmler, who thought highly of Globočnik, resurrected his career in the fall of 1939 when he made him the SSPF for Lublin. Globočnik transformed the Lublin district into an economic center for SS firms using Jewish slave labor and also planned to make it the heart of SS and German colonization in Poland. In late 1941, Globočnik was put in charge of what later became known as Aktion Reinhard, so-named to honor the memory of Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated by Czech partisans on June 4, 1942, in Prague. Aktion Reinhard was the SS plan to murder the 2.3 million Jews in the General Government as part of the Final Solution. It centered around the creation of three special “extermination camps”—Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.⁶⁰

There are documents in Göth’s SS files in the Bundesarchiv and in the National Archives as well as a brief reference in his war crimes trial transcript linking Göth to Aktion Reinhard. In addition, Mietek Pemper, Göth’s Jewish stenographer, shed some light on Göth’s activities as an Aktion Reinhard staff officer in his testimony during Göth’s war crimes trial in 1946. Göth’s SS records provide no details about his activities because of the secrecy that surrounded Aktion Reinhard. Each of the 450 SS men, police officers, and “euthanasia” specialists chosen to serve with Globočnik were sworn to secrecy and asked to sign a statement pledging that they would say or write nothing about their activities to anyone except members of the Aktion Reinhard staff. They also agreed not to take photographs of any of the Aktionen of the operation, and to maintain this secrecy even after they completed their service with Aktion Reinhard. Göth, along with many of the other Austrians selected to serve with the Globočnik team, worked in one of the three Aktion Reinhard death camps. According to Göth’s war crimes transcript, he worked directly under SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle, an Austrian who headed the Main Department (Hauptabteilung) and was responsible for planning the roundups from the ghettos and the deportations to the Aktion Reinhard death camps. This is where Göth gained the skills that made him an expert in brutally rounding up Jews in ghettos and preparing them for deportation to death camps. Three of the five charges brought against him during his war crimes trial in 1946 dealt with the closing of the Kraków and Tarnów ghettos and the forced labor camp at Szebnie.⁶¹

Göth spent only six months working for Höfle and Globočnik before he was appointed commandant of the Płaszów forced labor camp in Kraków on February 11, 1943. According to Pemper, he was sent to Płaszów because he had trouble with Höfle.⁶² But the lessons he learned during that six-month period in Lublin honed his brutish, murderous skills. Raimund Titsch, the manager of one of the factories in Płaszów, said that even before his arrival, the factory managers and Jews in the camp already knew Göth as the “Bloody Dog of Lublin.”⁶³ It is difficult to say what job Göth had during this period, though his SS file indicates that on October 1 he was assigned to the “Stab,” meaning possibly the Aussiedlungsstab (Evaluation or Deportation Staff) under Höfle. Göth probably worked on Höfle’s headquarters staff because the actual deportations were overseen by local SS leaders and the movement of rail transports were handled by German railroad officials in Kraków. During the brief period he was in Lublin, this group oversaw the building of new, more efficient gas chambers in the three death camps as well as personnel and labor changes designed to make the camps run more efficiently. Yet Göth must have had some experience with ghetto deportations and camp administration because the SS later had high regard for him as a camp commandant and expert on closing ghettos; in fact, the fall of 1942 was one of the most active periods for such “actions” in the General Government.⁶⁴

Mietek Pemper had occasion to see some of Göth’s private documents. He explained in a 1996 interview that every so often one of Göth’s adjutants, SS-Hauptsturmführer Raimund Gaube, would ask Pemper to help him draft a letter that necessitated looking at Göth’s secret documents. Pemper would explain that because of Göth’s insistence on perfection, he would have to see all documents relating to the proposed letter. If Göth was away, Gaube would allow Pemper access to these files, but only behind locked doors. Sometimes Gaube would carelessly forget to close the safe, which also contained secret documents. Pemper, who had a photographic memory, would use these opportunities to read everything he could get his hands on. This is how Pemper came across letters relating to Göth’s service with Aktion Reinhard. One of the letters that Pemper read but later destroyed during a routine barracks check was from Globočnik to the commandants of Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. According to Pemper, this letter gave Göth the right to move freely about all three of these camps as an inspector involved in construction matters.⁶⁵

For an ambitious SS man, an appointment to Globočnik’s staff was an important career move. And by this time, Amon Leopold Göth was a highly thought-of member of the SS. A July 14, 1941, Certificate of Service (Dienstleistungszeugnis) made out by his commanding officer, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Winter, praised Göth’s loyalty, service, character, proper Weltanschauung (world view), and racial characteristics. Winter added that Göth was also “free from any confessional [religious] ties.” Three months later, Winter and his superior, SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of SS-Oberabschnittes Donau (SS sub-district for Austria), soon to become head of RSHA to replace the murdered Reinhard Heydrich, signed off on a special SS Personal Report (Personal-Bericht) about Göth that went into greater detail about his physical traits as well as his family and financial situation, his personal character, his military and SS background, his training and athletic abilities, his world view, and his knowledge of the SS bureaucracy. At the end of the report, Winter discussed Göth’s advancement prospects.⁶⁶

Not surprisingly, Winter gave Amon Göth high marks in every category. Racially, he was deemed to be of Phalian-Eastern extraction with a very good demeanor. Winter wrote that his appearance and behavior were “flawless.” Göth’s finances were sound and his family situation was considered to be good. Winter considered him bright and well-educated. Göth’s “interpretation of life and power of judgement” were considered “affirmative and clear.” He was deemed to have no “flaws” and his special strength was his “courageous, determined attitude.” He earned affirmative or good marks on all questions about his special police training, his field service, and his knowledge and practice of sports. The only negative was his failure so far to earn his Sports Badge (Sportabzeichen), a reference to the German National Badge for Physical Training (Deutsches Reichsabzeichen für Leibesübungen). Overall, Winter concluded, Amon Göth was an upright National Socialist able to make all the necessary sacrifices required of an SS-man. He added that Göth was well suited to be an SS commander.⁶⁷

Göth, Tarnów, and Szebnie

Anyone familiar with the Oskar Schindler story has read or seen depictions of Amon Göth’s brutal closing of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943. But most people are not aware of his efforts to close the Tarnów ghetto on September 3, 1943, and his shutting down of the Szebnie forced labor camp in southeastern Poland from September 21, 1943, through February 3, 1944. Göth did this extra duty for the SS while serving as commandant at the Płaszów forced labor (later concentration) camp. Two of the Polish government’s five charges against Göth after World War II dealt with his crimes in Tarnów and Szebnie.⁶⁸

Tarnów, about forty-five miles east of Kraków, is a provincial capital with a rich Jewish history. Though originally a Polish city, Tarnów became part of the Austrian empire after the Russian-led Partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Tarnów returned to Polish control at the end of World War I. Under the Austrians, Tarnów became an important regional trading center that attracted a large Jewish population. On the eve of World War II, about 45 percent of Tarnów’s population of 56,000 was Jewish. And although many members of Tarnów’s Jewish community played an important role in the city’s cultural and intellectual leadership, many Tarnów Jews were quite poor. Over the centuries, Tarnów’s Jewish community developed a diverse complex of religious, educational, cultural, and self-help institutions to sustain a rich community life. When World War II broke out, thousands of Jews fled to Tarnów from western Poland to escape the German onslaught. By the summer of 1940, there were 40,000 Jews in Tarnów. They suffered from the same harsh anti-Jewish policies as other Jews throughout occupied Poland.⁶⁹

On June 11, 1942, the SS initiated an action against Tarnów’s Jews as part of Aktion Reinhard in preparation for the creation of a ghetto there. In a brutal Operation where hundreds of Jews were murdered in the streets, the SS rounded up 3,500 Jews and sent them to Bełźec. Four days later, the Germans initiated a second, three-day roundup that saw 10,000 more Jews sent to Bełźec. The SS and their collaborators murdered another 3,000 Jews in the Jewish cemetery and killed 7,000 beside pits dug on Tarnów’s Zbylitowska Gora (hill). On June 19, the Germans sealed off an area for the ghetto and forced Tarnów’s remaining Jews into it. Over time, the Germans had a high wooden fence built around the ghetto. On September 10, the Germans, working with the Judenrat, ordered all Jews to report to Targowica Square near one of the ghetto’s two entrances. The 8,000 Jews without a Blauschein were rounded up and sent to Bełźec. Over the next month, Jews from the surrounding area were sent to the Tarnów ghetto, which now had a population of about 15,000. On November 15, 1942, the Germans rounded up another 2,500 Jews for deportation to Bełźec and then divided the ghetto into two sections just as they had done in Kraków. Jews deemed fit for work were forced to live in Ghetto A; those who were unable to work were forced into Ghetto B.⁷⁰

Julius Madritsch was one of the Germans who opened a factory in the Tarnów ghetto soon after it opened. This would be the third factory that he ran using Jewish slave laborers. Madritsch had opened his second sewing factory in a ghetto in Bochnia, which was midway between Tarnów and Kraków, earlier in 1942. Madritsch claimed in his memoirs that he had opened the factories in Bochnia and Tarnów because of the “constant begging of the Jewish council [in Kraków].”⁷¹ Madritsch estimated after World War II that he was able to save “another 1,000 to 2,000 human beings” because of his efforts in Tarnów and Bochnia. He had about three hundred sewing machines in the Tarnów ghetto, where he employed eight hundred Jewish workers.⁷²

Madrich never said much about the conditions in his sewing factories, although testimony from survivors indicated that he and Raimund Titsch took good care of their workers. Dr. Dawid Schlang, a Schindler Jew who wrote the introduction to Madritsch’s memoirs about the war, wrote Yad Vashem about Mr. Madritsch’s exemplary conduct towards the Jewish workers: “Many survivors testify to his friendly and humane approach and his continuous care of the Jews.”⁷³ He added that there were many times when Madritsch and his manager, Raimund Titsch, risked their lives to help Jews.⁷⁴

There are several photographs of Jewish women at work on Pfaff sewing machines in the Bochnia ghetto in the archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and they are probably Madritsch’s workers. These are obviously propaganda photos because the male workers in the photographs are wearing coats and ties. The women sit at old-fashioned foot-pedaled sewing machines under spare light near shaded windows. One photo has a male tailor fitting a suit coat on another man, stacks of three-quarter-length, light-colored coats in a pile behind them.⁷⁵

After Amon Göth closed the Kraków ghetto in March 1943, Madritsch’s Jewish workers who now worked in his sewing factory in Płaszów begged him to transfer them to his factory in the Tarnów ghetto. Madritsch was somehow able to get permission from the SS to transfer several hundred of his Jewish workers to Tarnów; on the night of March 25–26, 1943, he succeeded in transporting 232 Jewish women, men, and children to the Tarnów ghetto, where they began work in his sewing factory. It probably took considerable bribes to persuade Göth and his SS superiors to agree to this, though Madritsch was probably also able to argue that such a request was reasonable because he would need experienced workers to operate his new factory in the Tarnów ghetto.⁷⁶

Madritsch was proud of his factory in Tarnów, particularly after he was forced to move his operations in the Kraków ghetto to Płaszów, where his new factory was only several hundred yards from Amon Göth’s villa. Life in the Kraków ghetto had been harsh, but it was nothing compared to the terror-ridden atmosphere in Płaszów, where Göth took great pleasure in random, daily acts of murder. According to Madritsch, “At this point [after the closing of the Kraków ghetto] the Jews of Tarnów [about 95 kilometers away] led a life that could be looked upon with envy, since they still had a ghetto where everyone had their own apartment and their own bed.”⁷⁷ Although this is an overstatement by Madritsch, it does show that he was well aware, at least comparatively, of the vast difference between life in the Tarnów ghetto and that in Płaszów under the monstrous Amon Göth.

But life for the Jews in the Tarnów ghetto, which Madritsch described as a comparative “oasis,” would soon change. In early September 1943, Amon Göth arrived to close the Tarnów ghetto and ship its Jews to Auschwitz and Płaszów. On September 1, the Tarnów ghetto’s Jews were ordered to appear the next morning at the Appellplatz at Magdeburg Square. The square was surrounded by heavily armed police, the Gestapo, the SS, Jewish OD men, and others, who began to separate children from their mothers. Over the next two days, different groups were placed in wagons and taken to the train station, where they were shipped to Płaszów and Auschwitz, though no one seemed aware that the transports to Auschwitz meant death. According to the 1946 Polish indictment against Göth, which was based on the testimony of three witnesses, Berek Figa, Leon Leser, and Mendel Balsam, Amon Göth personally shot between thirty and ninety women and children during the ghetto’s closing. Martin Balsam testified that the most shocking aspect of the roundup was the forced separation of the children from their mothers. The children were then placed in wagons and sent to their deaths. Göth played an active role in all this; as the roundup ended at mid-day on September 2, Balsam testified, Göth took out his pistol and helped shoot the two hundred children and women left in the ghetto who were not designated to be part of the clean-up crew.⁷⁸

The indictment added that Göth arranged to have 8,000 of Tarnów’s Jews deported directly to Auschwitz. Another 3,000 Jews from the Bochnia ghetto and forced labor camp, which were in the process of being liquidated, were added to the Tarnów-Auschwitz transport. This group would soon be sent to Auschwitz. The Polish court records stated that only 400 Jews out of 11,000 made it to Auschwitz, meaning that Göth had the rest murdered along the way; furthermore, there is no mention of a transport arriving in Auschwitz from Tarnów in September 1943. On the other hand, the Auschwitz records do show that two transports of 3,000 Jews each arrived in Auschwitz from Bochnia on August 31 and September 2, 1943. Only 3,000 to 3,500 Jews were in Bochnia at the time, so it is probable that the second transport was made up of Jews from Tarnów. The SS selected 1,075 Jews from the first transport for slave labor and murdered the rest. Only 830 Jews on the second transport were chosen as slave laborers and the rest were murdered in the gas chambers. A few more Jews from Tarnów were sent to the Szebnie forced labor camp near Jasło. Three hundred Jews remained in the Tarnów ghetto to go through the belongings of its former Jewish residents and then clean it up. When their work was done, they were then sent to Płaszów. Mendel Balsam testified that it took two weeks to clean up the Tarnów ghetto after the roundup was completed on September 2, 1943.⁷⁹

We know very little about the history and closing of the Tarnów ghetto, particularly the role played by Amon Göth. Because this was part of the secretive Aktion Reinhard operation, no mention was made of Göth’s efforts there in his SS service jacket. On the other hand, his SS file shows that he was praised and promoted in the summer of 1943 for his actions in closing the Kraków ghetto and early administration of the Płaszów forced labor camp. This was an extraordinary promotion; Göth jumped two ranks from SS-Untersturmführer to SS-Hauptsturmführer. According to Mietek Pemper, Göth’s Jewish stenographer, the promotion came after HSSPF Ost SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger inspected Płaszów. Krüger was quite impressed by the large variety of machines in use at Płaszów, though Pemper said that this was a ruse. Gradually, Amon Göth was becoming a master of deception.⁸⁰

In his letter of July 23, 1943, supporting Göth’s promotion to SS-Hauptsturmführer, SS-Sturmbannführer Klein, a member of the HSSPF Ost staff, praised Göth’s outstanding and authoritative work, particularly as commandant of the Płaszów forced labor camp. According to Klein, Göth had created “something out of nothing” at Płaszów. Moreover, Klein noted that Göth’s “exemplary” efforts to open Płaszów were undertaken with little consideration for his own person.”⁸¹ Sacrifices like these, of course, were the things that made a great SS officer. Five days later, the newly promoted Göth was appointed to Section F, the SS and Police Fachgruppe (Section of Experts). His expertise: closing ghettos and shipping its inmates to slave labor or death camps.⁸²

One of the reasons for the haste in closing the Tarnów ghetto was Göth’s growing responsibilities elsewhere. As more and more ghettos were closed during this period throughout the General Government as part of the Final Solution and Aktion Reinhard, Płaszów’s population was growing considerably, which added to his responsibilities there. But Göth’s haste in closing the Tarnów ghetto was driven more by the pace of German mass murder plans in the summer and early fall of 1942. With all six death camps now open and operating to full capacity, the Germans were determined to close the multitude of large and small ghettos throughout occupied Europe. Jews not selected as slave laborers were sent to their deaths. The pace of the German mass murder program of Jews up to this point in the Holocaust was astounding. According to Raul Hilberg, the Germans killed 1.1 million European Jews in 1941 and 2.7 million in 1942. Polish Jews were particularly vulnerable because Himmler had ordered that the General Government be clear of all Jews by the end of 1942 except those designated as slave laborers. The heavy concentration of Jews in close proximity to the six death camps in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union made the Germans’ job much easier. But it should be remembered that only about half the Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in these camps. The others died in mass murder campaigns initiated by the Einsatzgruppen, in ghetto actions or random actions of violence, during transport, from malnutrition, and other horrible ways.⁸³

Once Göth had closed and cleaned up the Tarnów ghetto, he was ordered to close the Szebnie forced labor camp near Jasło, which was fifty miles southeast of Tarnów. If there is a dearth of information on the Tarnów ghetto, this is doubly so for Szebnie; yet, given the large number of concentration camps and sub-camps throughout German-occupied Europe, this is not surprising. During the years of Nazi power in Europe, the Germans set up thousands of large and small detention camps to imprison racial, political, criminal, and military prisoners and “enemies of the state.” In addition to the Konzentrationslager (KL; concentration camp) there were also Arbeitslager (forced labor camps), Zwangslager (forcible detention camps), Zwangsarbeitslager (penal servitude camps), Zivilgefangenenlager (detention camps for civilians), Straflager (punitive camps), Zuchthaus (penitentary), and PW Dulags or Durchgangslager (transit camps). The Wehrmacht ran Soldatenkonzentrationslager (soldiers’ concentration camps) and military prisons as well as a network of Stalags (Stammlager, or main camps) for enlisted men and officers. Some camps existed only briefly and handled only a small number of prisoners. A classified SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) report listed 615 concentration and detention camps in Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944 but admitted that its statistics were not “entirely reliable.” It said that there were 109 camps in Poland in the fall of 1943, including twenty-four concentration camps.⁸⁴

One of the camps mentioned in the SHAEF report was a “Szebunia” (Szebnie) in Jasło County, which it termed a “KL permanent camp.”⁸⁵ Scattered references to Szebnie can be found in all the principal encyclopedic works on the Holocaust, though there is little detailed information about it. In the fall of 1943, Szebnie also served as a brief transit stop for Jews recently shipped out of the Przemyśl and Rzeszów ghettos. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski’s Jews in Poland provides some details about the liquidation of Szebnie in the fall of 1943. He states that on September 22, 1943, the SS took seven hundred young and elderly Jews from Szebnie to the nearby village of Dobrucowa and murdered them. They then burned the bodies. Pogonowski adds that on November 3, SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase, who had been a central figure in the deportations and closing of the Kraków ghetto, arrived in Szebnie with an SS contingent, including a number of Ukrainians, to close the camp. Haase ordered the remaining 2,800 Jewish prisoners to strip naked, then began to load them on trains for transport to Auschwitz. When the Jewish prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, a few were selected for hard labor, but most were sent to the gas chambers. Pogonowski adds that on November 5, 1943, the SS executed another five hundred Jewish prisoners still at Szebnie.⁸⁶

The Holocaust Chronicle states that on September 20, 1943, the SS guards at Szebnie put 1,000 Jewish prisoners on trucks and took them to a nearby field “where they shot all of them.”⁸⁷ They then burned the bodies and dumped the remains in the Jasiolka River. It adds that on November 4, 1943, a rebellion broke out among the Szebnie prisoners, which the SS quickly put down. It then closed the camp and shipped the remaining 3,000 prisoners to Auschwitz. The five-volume official history of the Auschwitz camp, Auschwitz 1940–1945, corrects some of these figures. It states, as does Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, that on November 5, 1932, 4,237 Jews arrived at Birkenau from Szebnie. The SS selected 952 men and 396 women for slave labor and executed the rest.⁸⁸

With the exception of Willi Haase, though, no other SS officer is mentioned in these accounts. Yet one of the five charges brought against Amon Göth in his war crimes trial was that, in the process of closing the Szebnie forced labor camp from September 1943 until early February 1944, he was responsible for “causing the death of several thousand persons.”⁸⁹ The Polish court’s evidence was based on the testimony of various witnesses, including Mietek Pemper, Regina Weiss, and Henryk Faber. Weiss, who was taken to Szebnie from Tarnów, never mentioned Göth in her testimony, though she does support Pogonowski’s claim that 2,800 Szebnie Jews were shipped to Auschwitz and murdered in early November 1943. She also partially confirms official Auschwitz statistics about another 1,200 Szebnie Jews sent to Auschwitz at the same time. But, she says, they were Poles, not Jews. Faber said nothing about Göth in his brief testimony.⁹⁰

One of the reasons for this was that Göth had little to do with the closing of the Szebnie camp. Mietek Pemper said that even though Göth was briefly “nominal commandant” there, he soon lost control of Szebnie to Kellermann, who oversaw the its closing, though Göth continued to play an oversight role there. This fits with the testimony of Dr. Aleksander Biberstein, a Schindler Jew and one of the principal witnesses in Göth’s trial. In mid-February 1943, Biberstein and another physician, Dr. Zygfryd Schwarz, were ordered by Dr. Weichert’s Jewish Aid Society to meet with Göth to talk about “building the [Płaszów] hospital and about the sanitary facilities in the camp.”⁹¹ Göth was unusually friendly to both Jewish physicians and offered them cigarettes; he did almost all the talking and told them that at the time he was building two camps, the one in Płaszów and another in Szebnie.⁹²

Other evidence presented in Göth’s trial gives a more expansive view of the role he played in the clearing and liquidation of the Szebnie forced labor camp. Like many small German forced labor camps, Szebnie had Jewish and Polish workers. There were 4,000 Jewish slave laborers at Szebnie and 1,500 Polish forced laborers. The Göth trial records make no mention of Haase, and given his rank, it is hard to imagine that he was involved directly in the Szebnie roundup, though it is possible he was there briefly as an observer. It was not uncommon for higher-ranking SS officials to show up on the first day of a roundup or the closing of a ghetto or forced labor camp to watch the Aktion. In reality, Göth sent one of his lower-ranking subordinates from Płaszów, SS-Hauptscharführer Josef Grzimek, to work with Szebnie’s commandant, Kellermann, to close the camp, which took place between September 21, 1943 and February 3, 1944. As the camp was being shut down, Göth ordered a detailed inventory of the camp’s goods, which were then shipped to Płaszów. Most of the Poles in Szebnie were sent to Płaszów and Bochnia, though it is not certain how many survived the war.⁹³

Płaszów

But it is not in Szebnie, Tarnów, or even Kraków where Amon Göth committed his greatest war crimes. It was in Płaszów, the forced labor and later concentration camp he commanded from February 11, 1943 until the SS arrested him for corruption on September 13, 1944. According to the Polish indictment against him, Amon Göth was responsible for the deaths of 8,000 inmates during the time that he ran the camp, though it is difficult to determine the exact number. A recent study undertaken by the Polish Foundation for the Protection of Monuments of National Memory-Iwona Ruebenbauer-Skwara (Fundacja Opieka nad Pomnkiem Pamieci Narodowej-Iwona Ruebenbauer-Skwara) estimated that the number of Jews and others murdered at Płaszów was between 8,000 and 12,000. Mietek Pemper testified in Göth’s trial that “natural mortality” in the camp was very low. About five hundred prisoners were executed for trying to escape, and most of these were killed “by Goeth himself or his subordinates.” Pemper estimated that another 5,000 to 6,000 were either executed or were on the May 14, 1944, transport to Auschwitz. Pemper added that the SS murdered about 2,000 Jews during the closing of the Kraków ghetto in the spring of 1943. But these figures must also be put into the context of the actual number of Jews, and, to a much lesser degree, Christian Poles who were sent briefly to Płaszów and then on to concentration or death camps. When Płaszów first opened, it only had about 2,000 prisoners, about half the number it could initially handle. During the next year, its population grew tremendously; at its peak in 1944, it had a permanent population of approximately 30,000. But because it also served as a temporary transit camp, about 150,000 inmates passed through Płaszów. In mid-1943, Płaszów was a sub-camp of Majdanek, but became its own separate concentration camp in early 1944. Until this point, Płaszów housed only Jewish prisoners. A small camp for Polish prisoners guilty of misdemeanors was added in the summer of 1943. When they had served their prison terms, they were released or sent to forced labor camps in Poland. About 3,000 Poles were imprisoned at Płaszów during the war.⁹⁴

Today, it is hard to imagine that this was the site of Amon Göth’s brutal camp. Years ago, the Poles turned it into a nature preserve and it has retained its quiet, bucolic nature. Poles who live in the private homes (some in Göth’s private villa and the “Gray House,” the camp’s former prison) and apartments that run along the northern border of the camp on Jerozoliminka, W. Heltmana and Wielicka Streets, can be seen walking their dogs along the paths that traverse the former camp site. Unfortunately, despite a few monuments at the southeastern end of the camp site, little has been done to preserve the largely hidden but important remnants of the camp. On one occasion when I was looking for the remains of the old Jewish mortuary there, I fell into an open grave that had been desecrated by the Germans. It took me three trips to Płaszów over several years before I truly grasped the significance of these ruins. My most important visits took place in the summer of 2000, when I was accompanied first by Jaroslav Zotciak, a landscape architect who had studied and mapped the Płaszów site, and Stella Müller-Madej, a Schindler Jew who lives in Kraków. Both were able to bring Płaszów back to life for me, but in different ways.

The trip with Stella was the most moving. The day before, I had spent a great deal of time with her talking about Schindler and her experiences during the Holocaust, which she has documented in the first volume of her two-part memoir, Dziewczynka z listy Schindlera (A Girl from Schindler’s List). Stella had lived in Kraków all her life and spent hours telling me and my research assistant, Konstancja Szymura, about her life there before the war. She also shared with us stories about her life in the Kraków ghetto, in Płaszów, and with Oskar Schindler in Brünnlitz. In her fluid, literary way of speaking, she shared with us the range of emotions that she experienced in those long, horrible years during the Holocaust. At the end of the evening, she asked whether we would like her to take us to Płaszów. She also mentioned that she had never been to the site of Schindler’s factory on ul. Lipowa and wondered whether I would mind taking her there on the way to Płaszów. I hesitated at first because over the years I had learned to respect the tender emotions of Holocaust survivors, who are often forced to bring back painful memories when they speak about or visit former Holocaust sites. But Stella insisted and Konstancja and I agreed to spend the following afternoon with her at Płaszów and Emalia.

The trip to Emalia had little meaning to Stella because she had never worked there. But her return to Płaszów was as emotional as I expected it to be. The site is large and Stella, who had been there many times before, decided it would be too much for her to walk the complete site. Instead, she drove off the main road onto one of the dirt roads that runs through the camp. Small mounds of trash left there by inconsiderate visitors were mixed in with the open graves and ruins of the barracks. During other trips to Poland, I have visited Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek with Holocaust survivors. But this visit was different because I had gotten to know Stella very well and was deeply touched by the pain that she experienced as we slowly moved through Płaszów. She would periodically stop the car to point out the location of a barracks or the Appellplatz. But when we stopped before Hujowa Górka, the principal mass murder and burial site of the camp, she got out of the car and walked quietly away from us. Konstancja asked whether we should do something to help. I said that what she was feeling and experiencing was very, very personal and that we should leave her alone. Neither of us could imagine the horrible thoughts and memories that came flooding back to her as she stood in the quiet of Płaszów on that pleasant summer day. When she returned to the car, she had regained her composure and suggested that we go into the hills above Kraków for ice cream.

Today, it is hard to realize that at its peak the Płaszów camp covered between 173 and 197 acres. The only significant remains are Amon Göth’s villa, the “Grey House,” which housed the camp’s small prison, and some broken tombstones and open graves of the two Jewish cemeteries desecrated by the Germans as they constructed the forced labor camp on this site. There are also building foundations and raised mounds as well as portions of one of the camp roads built with broken Jewish cemetery headstones, though they are hard to find, particularly in the summer’s tall grass. There were three mass murder sites in Płaszów: one in the northern part of the old Jewish cemetery; another, Lipowy Dolek, in the southeastern part of the camp, which also contained a mass grave; and Hujowa Górka, which contains two monuments, one Polish and one Jewish, to honor those who were murdered here. The Polish Martyrs’ Monument to all Płaszów victims at Hujowa Górka sits atop the site of a former Austrian fort complete with its old moat. It is one of those striking, stark Soviet-style monuments found throughout Moscow’s former empire. The smaller, more tasteful Jewish memorial is down the hill and just across the moat from the Polish memorial. And hidden away in the hills at the eastern edge of the former camp overlooking Płaszów is a stark cross circled in barbed wire to commemorate the Christian Poles who died in Płaszów.⁹⁵

According to Jaroslav Zotciak, the name for the camp, Płaszów, was a bit of a misnomer because it was located in Kraków’s Podgórze and Wola Duchacka districts, not in the Płaszów district. It probably got the name Płaszów because its first Jewish prisoners came from Julag I, which was in the Płaszów region. In some ways, the site of the future Płaszów forced labor and concentration camp was always a natural island in a sea of Polish development. Today, high rise apartments block the view of the camp from Wielicka street, the large boulevard that runs closest to the former camp site. The buildings now sit where Göth housed his SS troops, and a McDonald’s and other commercial buildings stand on or near the site where he stored the goods taken from the camp’s inmates. The area has not suffered from further development only because Płaszów was built partly in Krzemionki, where Kraków’s prewar Jewish community had two of its most important cemeteries. And just beyond this is the large Christian Podgórski cemetery. So well before World War II, this part of Podgórze had become a sacred place for Jews and Christians.

In 1887, the Jews in Kraków’s Old City built their first cemetery in Krzemionki because space was running out in the small cemeteries in Kazimierz. In 1932, the Jews of Podgórze built a much larger cemetery next to the smaller one. The new cemetery contained a beautiful three-domed mortuary that sat at the entrance of the cemeteries and then ran beside Jerozolinska and Abrahama Streets. At one point, Göth used the mortuary as a stable but later had part of it destroyed to build a rail line into the camp. The SS used what remained of the mortuary for a power station. Göth also built Płaszów’s main entrance near the site of the entrance to the Jewish cemeteries. SS camp tradition dictated a certain style and architecture for entrances to forced labor and concentration camps that reminds one somewhat of the storied entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. But unlike Birkenau, where train tracks ran through the two-storied entranceway, the train tracks into Płaszów ran beside the entranceway. Two black-and-white-striped guard posts stood beside the two-storied entranceway, which had elongated buildings attached to it on both sides. This style of SS architecture with its “central tower and side wings” had been perfected at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other SS-run camps. According to Wolfgang Sofsky, the camp gate was a “sign of final and irreversible inclusion.”⁹⁶

Płaszów’s origins centered around the creation of three Julags, or small Jewish labor camps in the Płaszów, Prokocim, and Biełżanów districts of Kraków. Each of the camps was located within a kilometer or two of the future Płaszów forced labor/concentration camp. Henry Weiner, Jack Mintz, and Richard Krumholz, all three future Schindlerjuden, worked at one of the Julags. Henry Weiner worked for Siemens-Bauwerke at Julag I in Płaszów, where he built roads; Jack Mintz (Jehuda Minc-Anschell Freimann) and his two brothers, David and Benjamin, worked at Julag II in Prokocim, where they built railroad bridges. Julag I, which would become the nucleus of the main Płaszów camp, was commanded first by SS-Unterscharführer Horst Pilarzik and later Franz Müller.⁹⁷

By the time that Amon Göth became commandant of the new Zwangsarbeitslager Plaszow des SS- und Polizeiführers im Distrikt Krakau (Płaszów Forced Labor Camp of the SS and Police Leader in the Kraków District) in February 1943, the SS had gained full control over Jewish labor in the General Government. It had involved a considerable struggle with the Wehrmacht, which now had to go to the SS to get Jewish laborers for its armaments factories in that part of occupied Poland. The considerable administrative changes the SS forced labor and concentration camp system was undergoing made things even more complicated. These had begun in early 1942, when SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen SS und Polizei Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS-Wirtschaftsunternehmen, brought together the various SS offices that dealt with economic and construction matters into one office, the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA; Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt) in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. WVHA was divided into four Amtsgruppen (Office Groups), with Amtsgruppe D (formerly the IKL, or Inspektion der Konzentrationslager; Inspector of Concentration Camps) under SS-Gruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Richard Glücks, who oversaw all aspects of the SS camp network. But in reality, the real head of Amtsgruppe D was not the incompetent Glücks but the head of Amtsgruppe D2, the office of Labor Action of the Prisoners, SS-Obersturmbannführer (later, SS-Standartenführer) Gerhard Maurer. When Oskar Schindler sought permission to move his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944, he first approached a close friend in the Army High Command’s Ordnance Department, Erich Lange, who in turn negotiated with Maurer over the move.⁹⁸

Göth took command of Płaszów ten days after Germany’s stunning military defeat at Stalingrad. As the tide of war began gradually to shift in the Allies’ favor, Germany’s military and industrial manpower needs became more severe and created a conflict between those in the Nazi leadership who wanted to continue their mass murder program of the Jews and those who wanted to balance this with the greater economic interests of the Third Reich. The SS did not give up its goal of ridding Europe of its “racial enemies” and, under Maurer, Amtsgruppe D2 sought to balance these goals with the needs of the burgeoning armaments industry. He tried to give SS physicians more control over life and death in the camps to insure a steady supply of slave laborers. Those deemed unfit for the SS labor needs would be murdered. But Maurer was unable to control ongoing, sadistic reigns of terror unleashed by Göth and other commandants. In fact, the SS would not address the issue of indiscriminate murder in the camps until much later.⁹⁹

Today it is impossible to visit the former site of Płaszów and get any sense of the vast complex that was begun there in late 1942. But photographs in the archives of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., help bring it to life. In addition, Jaroslav Zotciak shared with me a large map of the concentration camp that he had reconstructed based on materials he discovered in the archives of the Glowa Komisja Badana Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Okregowa Komisja w Krakowie (the Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation). The only difference between this map and the one in Joseph Bau’s Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? is that Bau’s map shows the camp’s crematorium. I have been able to form a much clearer picture of the vast complex that Amon Göth and the SS built between 1942 and 1944 from information that Jaroslav shared with me, as well as from our careful trek across the camp’s remains, the accounts I have read or gathered from survivors (particularly Dr. Aleksander Biberstein’s Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie [Extermination of the Jews in Kraków]), and the photographs I have collected.¹⁰⁰

It is important to remember that Płaszów evolved slowly over twenty-six months first as a Julag, then as a forced labor camp, and was finally a permanent concentration camp complete witha crematory and plans for gas chambers. Most of the evidence we have about Płaszów centers around its existence as one of Nazi Germany’s permanent German concentration camps from January 1944 to January 1945. And even here, documents and testimony must be blended with photographs to understand the size and complexity of the concentration camp’s operation. There is little information about the Płaszów Zwangsarbeitslager. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s 1946 trial that it was run without rules or orders and that everything was decided by the camp commandant. This was when Göth committed his most brutal and indiscriminate murders. When Płaszów became a concentration camp in 1944, the paperwork required by the SS for such actions tended to hamper, but not end, Göth’s ability to kill at will.¹⁰¹

At its peak of operations, Płaszów had an SS staff of 636 guards who oversaw 25,000 prisoners. The Totenkopfwachsturmbanne (Death Head Guard Formations) at Konzentrationslager Kraków-Płaszów were commanded by forty-five officers and noncommissioned officers.¹⁰² According to survivor testimony, other than Amon Göth, SS-Unterscharführer Horst Pilarzik and SS-Oberscharführer Albert Hujar, the most hated and feared SS men in the camp, were the black-uniformed Ukrainians. According to Mietek Pemper, Pilarzik, who was initially the Jewish specialist for the HSSPF in Kraków, was a “horrific figure during the liquidation of the [Kraków] ghetto” in 1943. Pemper thought Pilarzik was either an alcoholic or a drug addict because “he rampaged like a hungry wolf or tiger,” murdering many Jews, during the ghetto’s closing. Later, Pilarzik served briefly as Göth’s adjutant but was dismissed because he had bragged at a local restaurant that he was the recipient of the Knight’s Cross. Hujar was the SS officer in Schindler’s List who, without Göth’s prodding, murdered Diana Reiter, the Jewish engineer who questioned SS construction methods.¹⁰³

Schindler Jew Jack Mintz described the black-uniformed Ukrainians as “the best killers.”¹⁰⁴ One “Black Uniform,” he said, would occasionally stand by the garbage pile outside the camp’s inmate kitchen and shoot any desperately hungry Jew who dug through the scraps of food looking for something to eat.¹⁰⁵ The Ukrainian guards at Płaszów wore the black uniforms of the Allgemeine (general) or “Black” SS; others on the camp staff wore the grey uniforms of the Waffen SS (Armed SS), or “White” SS. The camps were under the control of the Waffen SS, the “Imperial Guard” of Nazi Germany. The use of foreign volunteers or recruits in the SS Death’s Head units, which guarded the camp, increased substantially as the war dragged on. The Ukrainian guards at Płaszów and elsewhere were drawn either from the large Ukrainian community in Poland or from Ukrainian prisoners-of-war volunteers who had once served with the Red Army. The Death’s Head units also had other foreign volunteers, such as ethnic Germans or Hungarians, who served as guards at Płaszów. Only about 15 percent of a forced labor or concentration camp’s personnel were career SS men. The handful of Germans who ran these camps relied heavily on foreign volunteers, recruits for guard service, and a cadre of inmate leaders. The members of the Wachbattalions, sentries armed with machine guns and spot lights who guarded the the watch towers and outer perimeters of the camp, were restricted to these zones of authority as well as their contacts with the prisoners. The foreign guards were also an important black market conduit for the inmates who relied on them for illegal foodstuffs, medicines, and other items to make life in these hell holes a little more tolerable.¹⁰⁶

Initially, Zwangsarbeitslager Płaszów was administratively under the auspices of HSSPF Ost Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, though ultimately it was taken over by WVHA and transformed into a permanent concentration camp. The SS gave considerable thought to the structure and boundary networks in its camps. SS guards patrolled the inner boundaries that separated SS personnel facilities and work areas from the prisoners’ living complex. This was touched off by an outer perimeter of double barbed wire fences that created a no-man’s-land lined with gravel. Eleven watchtowers manned by two members of the Feldwache (outpost) SS guard teams were placed along this outer no-man’s-land. In addition, there was also an antiaircraft battery placed on a high tower on one of the promontories overlooking the rest of the camp.¹⁰⁷

Once Płaszów was transformed into a concentration camp, a series of internal boundaries were created by barbed wire fences that essentially divided Płaszów into a series of small camps within a larger camp. This inner network of barbed wire boundaries was designed to create areas of limited access for prisoners and camp staff. Prisoners could enter the SS areas only during working hours, and normally the camp staff and guards did not enter the prisoner compound. To maintain this separation and distance, the SS relied upon a cadre of inmate leaders to serve as liaison between the SS administration and the prisoners. Within this group was what Wolfgang Sofsky has called a gradation of power based on the importance of power. Depending on one’s position in this camp hierarchy, an inmate could wield incredible power over his or her peers. The SS camp administration understood the value of this group and permitted them considerable leeway in how they conducted affairs and relations with other prisoners. Some inmate camp leaders used their positions to help others, though some abused their positions.¹⁰⁸

According to Wolfgang Sofsky, the Nazi concentration camp “was a complete settlement with a network of streets and a railroad siding—a town for personnel and prisoners housing thousands, at times tens of thousands, of people.”¹⁰⁹ It was, for all practical purposes, a self-sustaining SS community with all of the attributes and facilities of a small town.

WVHA had specific guidelines for the structure of the camp and the placement and borders for each of its sections. The ideal camp structure and substructure was a rectangle with most camp buildings running along an east-west or north-south axis. Theoretically, on a flat plane, one could stand at one end of a smaller camp and easily see the other end of the camp if one’s view was not blocked by buildings or trees. Given the hilly nature of Płaszów, this was a little more difficult, though even here it is possible to observe rudiments of the rectangular design. The center of the camp was the administrative area, which contained the commandant’s office as well as branches of all the different WVHA offices that served as liaisons between the camp administration and WVHA offices in Oranienburg. In Płaszów, the administration building sat just to the right of the main entrance as you entered the camp. Consequently, when Oskar Schindler came to Płaszów he did not have far to go to meet with camp officials or to chat with Mietek Pemper and Itzhak Stern. And if he was invited to a party or gathering at Göth’s villa, he only had to travel about a quarter of a mile or so down SS Straße to the commandant’s very comfortable quarters. This meant that Schindler probably did not ordinarily see some of the more awful aspects of the camp, which were fairly well-hidden in the distance. But he certainly knew a great deal about them. The administrative offices of the camp were surrounded by barbed wire, as was the communications center just across the street.¹¹⁰

SS master planning also dictated comfortable quarters for SS officers and barracks for the guards. In Płaszów, the SS barracks were just across SS Straße from the administrative offices and partially built over the sites of the former Jewish cemeteries. The guards’ barracks centered around a self-contained community area with its own kitchens, infirmary, laundry, and other basics. Farther along SS Straße was the housing of the SS officers, including the Göth villa. There was also a small collection of SS houses just beyond the camp’s industrial quarter. The industrial part of the camp, which lay just to the left of Göth’s villa, housed the workshops of the various factories permitted to operate in the camp. The largest of these was Julius Madritsch’s sewing factory, who housed his workshops in six barracks. Furriers and upholsterers also operated in the industrial complex. Resting between this part of the camp and the SS administrative and housing complex was the camp quarry. The balcony of Amon Göth’s house looked over a portion of the quarry and it is from here that he occasionally shot workers. It is hard to imagine this today because trees on the back edge of the Göth property block this view. One of the camp’s common grave sites, Lipowy Dolek, was wedged between the industrial complex and the quarry.¹¹¹

To the south of the quarry were the camp’s printing press and a smaller number of workshops for shoes, watches, electrical goods, and paper. Just beyond this on the southeastern edge of the camp was Hujowa Gorka, or, as the inmates called it, “Prick Hill,” the camp’s principal execution and burial site. Bergens Straße ran through the middle of the camp and separated the quarry and industrial-manufacturing portion of the camp from the inmates’ enclosure. The center of this part of Płaszów was the hated Appellplatz (roll call, or parade ground or place), where inmates not only had to endure twice-daily roll calls but also humiliating and at times deadly punishments. The Appellplatz was surrounded on two sides by numerous men’s barracks. The camp latrines and barracks were located just to the south of this area; the female inmates were housed in barracks just beyond the male complex. The camp’s kitchen and food storehouses lay just beyond the inmate’s living quarters and were surrounded by barbed wire. Just beyond this small area was the camp’s hospital. The barracks of the jüdischer Ordnungsdienst (Jewish “order service,” or Jewish camp police) sat between the male and female camps. Far in the distance in the south were the barracks of the Feldwache, who manned the guard towers and guarded the outer perimeter of the camp.¹¹²

In the fall of 1943, Amon Göth, prodded by the creatively manipulative efforts of Mietek Pemper, received permission to transform Płaszów into a permanent concentration camp, and this assured the survival of many of the camp’s Jewish and Polish workers. In late October 1943, the WVHA informed Göth that it would be sending SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Schitli to oversee the camp’s transformation from a forced labor camp into a concentration camp. Schitli had served as Schutzhaftlagerführer (head of the protective custody camp) at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg and had begun his SS camp service career at the Sachenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg. He served briefly as the commandant at Arbeitsdorf, a sub-camp of Neuengamme where the SS hoped to build a light-metals foundry. Schitli was removed from this post by Oswald Pohl for incompetency and was forced out of the concentration camp administrative service, only to resurface as part of WVHA’s Office Group C, which oversaw camp construction. Once at Płaszów, Schitli oversaw the division of the camp into separate zones, which were surrounded by barbed wire. A new guard force under the Waffen SS now took over the supervision of the camp, particularly the movement of camp inmates from the living area to the industrial complex.¹¹³

Mietek Pemper, Itzhak Stern, and the Transformation of Płaszów

Mietek Pemper is one of the most remarkable Schindlerjuden in the Schindler story, not only because of his intimate knowledge about the inner workings of Płaszów but also his very close friendship with Oskar Schindler, particularly after the war. Beyond this connection, Mietek Pemper is just a warm, gentle human being with a phenomenal memory. Dr. Moshe Bejski, a retired Israeli Supreme Court justice who later became chairman of the Designation of the Righteous Commission at Yad Vashem, told me when I interviewed him that when it came to facts about Oskar Schindler, the only other person he trusted more than himself was Mietek Pemper. Because of his keen memory, Pemper became the principal witness against not only Amon Göth but also Gerhard Maurer, both of whom were convicted and executed for war crimes. Pemper, who speaks perfect German, also served as a translator in some of the Auschwitz trials in Kraków in late 1947.¹¹⁴

Yet who was this remarkable man? It took a while for me to find out. When I began my initial research for this book, one of the names that kept coming up in interviews with other Schindler Jews was Mietek Pemper’s. Because he served as Amon Göth’s stenographer and worked with him daily for sixteen months, other survivors explained that Pemper was the only one who could really answer questions about Amon Göth and his relationship with Oskar Schindler. I was also told that Mr. Pemper did not grant interviews and was unapproachable. I later learned during my two lengthy interviews with this very gracious, kind man that his distance came more from a certain humility and shyness, as well as a healthy suspicion of interviewers, than disinterest in telling what he knew about Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth. I encountered this suspicion time and again among other Schindlerjuden who were tired of being misquoted. In time, I gained the trust of scores of Schindler Jews because of my sincerity, patience, and scholarly approach to the subject. Over time, I learned to state in my introductory letters to them that I was a scholar, not a journalist. The trust and friendships that I developed with many of the Schinder Jews in the course of my research are some of the richest experiences of my life.

After he attended the Kraków opening of Schindler’s List, a New York Times reporter asked Mr. Pemper why he had “applied” for the job with Amon Göth. Mietek Pemper did not apply for this job; he was chosen by Göth, who asked Jewish congregation leaders in the ghetto to recommend someone who could do clerical work for him. Because Pemper spoke and read perfect German and knew German stenography, he was selected for the job. As a prisoner first in the ghetto and later in Płaszów, there was no way he could have applied for a “position” with Göth. Mietek Pemper was a slave laborer who was forced to work for Amon Göth. For the next sixteen months, his every waking moment was a living hell. He lived in constant fear of being murdered by Göth for the slightest infraction. One does not “apply” for death.¹¹⁵

Mietek Pemper, who was born in Kraków, was nineteen years old when World War II broke out. He came from a family with strong ties to the Habsburg world of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father and uncle had fought proudly in the Austrian army in World War I, and his grandmother, who had great regard for German culture, refused to speak Polish. Soon after the German occupation of Kraków, Pemper got a job as a stenographer with the Temporary Jewish Religious Community (TJRC) in Kraków, which the Germans intended to act as liaison between their administrators and the city’s Jews. He continued to work for the TJRC after the opening of the ghetto, and it was because of his work with this group that he was recommended to Amon Göth.¹¹⁶

The key to Pemper’s survival in the mercurial, deadly world of Amon Göth was his discretion, luck, and thoroughness when it came to his stenographic work. But behind his quiet demeanor was a determined young man with a photographic memory who was intent upon gathering every scrap of information possible about Göth and general SS policies and operations, whether they be in Płaszów or elsewhere. After the war, he was asked by Jan Sehn, one of the principal architects of Poland’s massive war crimes investigations, whether he knew anything about Gerhard Maurer. He explained that he could find no one who knew anything about Maurer, whom Sehn wanted to extradite to Poland for trial. Pemper told Sehn, whom he had met while preparing for his testimony in Göth’s trial, that he had seen two or three letters a week from Maurer in Göth’s office and remembered everything. According to Pemper, Sehn was delighted and “appeared happy like a child” at this news.¹¹⁷ As a result, Pemper became the principal prosecution witness against Maurer, just as he had been in Göth’s trial. Pemper’s testimony in Maurer’s trial shocked the defendant, who could not believe that a mere stenographer knew so much. According to Maurer, he had never heard of a Jewish inmate in such a sensitive position in a Nazi concentration camp.¹¹⁸

The principal reason Pemper had such access was the utter chaos and fear in Göth’s office, not only among the Jewish office workers but also the German and Polish staff. Amon Göth hated office work and was only there a few hours a day. He was also a night person, which meant that Pemper was at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day. He was required to spend each day working full time in Göth’s office in the administrative complex near the front gate, but he also had to go to Göth’s villa to take dictation. He spent a lot of time in Göth’s kitchen waiting for the commandant. That was where he got to know Göth’s two Jewish maids, particularly Helen Hirsch. Göth had a terrible temper and would lose it over the slightest thing, whether it be a misspelled word or a flower arrangement in his house that he thought was out of place. Göth’s office staff was terrified of him. Consequently, his officers and civilian staff members would often ask Pemper to draft letters for them because they were afraid of making mistakes. If the letters were about sensitive issues, Pemper would ask to see the secret files that were kept in a safe.¹¹⁹

Pemper was also helpful to Göth’s part-time German secretary, Frau Kochmann, the wife of a Kraków judge. Initially, Pemper was alone in the office until Göth hired Frau Kochmann, who wanted to work in the mornings. Like everyone on Göth’s office staff, she soon felt the commandant’s wrath. On one occasion, she made the mistake of putting the carbon paper in backwards when she typed a letter for Göth. He flew into a rage and began screaming at her. Frau Kochmann started to cry and later Pemper came up to her and suggested that he prepare the carbon paper in future. Frau Kochmann gladly accepted Pemper’s offer. Pemper made certain to supply fresh carbon paper for each letter to insure that he could read it later in a mirror. Once he had gotten to know and trust Oskar Schindler, Pemper shared everything he could with his future savior and friend.

But Mietek Pemper also did something else with the information he was gathering in Göth’s office. He decided to do what he could to help convince first Göth and then WVHA of the wisdom of transforming Płaszów into a permanent concentration camp, which he thought would save many lives. The seed for this idea came from two unrelated events in 1942: the transports from the Kraków ghetto to Bełżec and detailed armaments orders that he was asked to read from several hundred German and Polish companies to Kraków’s HSSPF offices. David Gutter, the head of the ghetto’s Judenrat, had been given these letters by Horst Pilarzik, who wanted him to organize them into a more efficient, easily accessible system. Gutter did not have time to do this and asked Pemper to help him. Gutter emphasized the secret nature of these documents and told Pemper to lock himself in a room while he read them and reorganized them. As he was reading these secret files, Pemper learned of SS plans to close the ghettos throughout the General Government and to intern those Jews necessary for armaments production in a few enclosed slave labor camps.¹²⁰

Soon after Pemper became Göth’s stenographer at Płaszów, he came face to face with Pilarzik, who remembered that he had helped organize the files he had given Gutter. Pilarzik was now Göth’s adjutant. When they met, Pilarzik said to Pemper, “Wash your chest. Do you know what follows now?” Pemper replied, “Yes, you will be shot.” Pilarzik was surprised and asked Pemper how he knew this. Pemper said, “That’s what ‘wash your chest’ means. So I must have done something wrong or incomplete.” Pilarzik said no, that he did not mean it that way. But he did need the papers Gutter had given Pemper to organize back as quickly as possible.¹²¹

But something else besides the information in these reports also drove Mietek Pemper. Reports had been passed on to him from ghetto Jews who had been involved in prewar Poland’s socialist movement. They had learned from Polish socialist rail workers about the true fate of the transports from the Kraków ghetto to Bełżec. The Polish rail workers had driven the transports close to Bełżec, where the trains had been taken over by Germans and Ukrainians. When the trains were returned to the Polish crews, the cars had blood in them. Pemper also learned that farmers in the fields near Bełżec reported that the train cars smelled like burnt meat. Though it took Pemper and others a long time to accept what was really happening to Poland’s Jews, this realization further motivated him to do everything he could to save as many Jewish lives as possible.¹²²

Consequently, in August or September 1943, Mietek Pemper told the managers of Płaszów’s metalworking shops, including Oskar Schindler, that he needed full production capacity lists for their factories. He had noticed that Göth had become increasingly interested in the daily production reports of the camp’s metalworking shops that Pemper gave him. Göth, who was not a detail person, would occasionally make suggestions about what this factory or that workshop could do with its machines to produce more militarily acceptable goods. Göth had written to his father after Stalingrad that he was worried about the outcome of the war. And Göth also knew that if Płaszów closed he would probably be sent to the Russian front because the Waffen SS was constantly transferring its officers and men from the camps to the front and replacing them with older or wounded veterans.¹²³

Pemper also shared this information with Oskar Schindler, who was also in the process of setting up a separate armaments wing at Emalia. Schindler’s efforts would be strongly supported by Göth since Emalia was a sub camp of Płaszów. As he began planning his statistical game plan, Pemper also told Itzhak and Natan Stern about it one night in their barracks. Both men looked at him and one of them said, “Are you serious or are you aware that it is crazy that we should try to be transformed into a concentration camp?” From their perspective, the concentration camp symbolized the worst that could happen to Poland’s Jews. From that moment on, Pemper decided to be more discreet because it was apparent to him that they thought he was insane.¹²⁴

What is interesting about these developments is that Itzhak Stern took most of the credit for preparing the false reports that helped Göth convince WVHA to transform Płaszów into a concentration camp in his interview with Dr. Ball-Kaduri in 1956. According to Dr. Ball-Kaduri’s report, “Stern was able to take advantage of the common interest [of coming under DAW’s jurisdiction] and constructed inflated reports about the capability of the camp to the central office.” And though he does mention Pemper occasionally, it is clear that he thought of himself as the principal architect of the transformation scheme. It is quite possible that Mietek Pemper never knew about Stern’s claim. In 1969, he wrote Oskar Schindler a long letter in which he described his feelings for Stern, who had just passed away. It is apparent from what Pemper said to Oskar that he had almost the same adoring affection for Stern as he had for Oskar, who also cared greatly for Stern, and that he felt his loss deeply: “I have lost a human being who I admired most of all, who had been together [with me] in war and in the camp, who embodied the ideals of the best, which one saw so seldom amidst the unusual circumstances of the KZ period: a willingness to help, selflessness, unpretentiousness to the point of self-denial—always thinking of others, never of the self, never pushing himself into the foreground—truly there was hardly anyone who can and may be named with him in the same breath.”¹²⁵

So what really happened? As is usual where perspectives differ, the realities lie somewhere in between. I do know that I was able to confirm almost everything Mietek Pemper told me in the two interviews I did with him. He, too, is a man of incredible integrity. My suspicion is that Mietek Pemper and Itzhak Stern both played a role in preparing the reports that helped convince Göth and WVHA to make Płaszów one of only twenty permanent concentration camps. And although Stern claimed he was the principal figure in promoting the transformation scheme, even he admits in his testimony that it was Pemper who suggested to Göth that they wanted to “make an interesting report about [the] production in the workshops.” Moreover, with the exception of the opening statement in which Stern claims sole credit for coming up with the scheme, in the rest of his testimony he constantly uses the term “we.”

Regardless of what exactly took place, the testimony of Pemper and Stern gives us some excellent insight into the politics of camp transformation and provides clues into how Oskar Schindler was able to work his miracles within the context of the SS camp administrative system. According to Stern, as the liquidation of camps got under way in the fall of 1943, there was great interest among the SS and many of the business owners in Płaszów to become part of the German Equipment Works (DAW; Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH), the SS-owned economic enterprises in the forced labor and concentration camps. DAW was begun in 1941 to consolidate “the scattered workshops for graft maintained ad hoc by the [camp] commandaten since the earliest days of Eicke’s Dachau.”¹²⁶ Over time, DAW enterprises in the concentration camps became “workshops and supply industries for the new order that the SS planned for an imaginary peace.”¹²⁷ In 1941, DAW sales amounted to RM 5.3 million ($2.1 million). Within two years, its annual sales had quadrupled. In 1942, DAW became part of Office Group W under Oswald Pohl. DAW was now W4/1, a subsidiary of the SS Wood Working Industries.¹²⁸

Stern, like Pemper, also had information about the growing German campaign to murder the Jews throughout the General Government who were not involved in essential war work. He recalls reading one newspaper brought in by foreign workers that contained an essay by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, stating that “anybody who encountered a Jew in the General Government after December 31, 1943, could slap Goebbels in the face.” Stern also testified that in the fall of 1943 the Ukrainian police brought thousands of coats from Lemberg (today, Ukrainian L’viv). One of the Ukrainian guards then told Stern to escape. When Stern asked him why, the guard told him that if he did not, he would suffer the same fate as those in the Janówska camp. Stern then looked at the coats and realized they were covered with blood. The SS, he concluded, had shot the inmates while they were working. There were thousands of coats and other clothing in the Janówska shipment, so they had probably been taken from the bodies of the murdered inmates after a mid-May 1943 action, where the SS had killed 6,000 Janówska inmates. Consequently, by June 1943, Stern had become aware of certain aspects of the Final Solution.¹²⁹

Stern said the incident that triggered the decision to create a report based on phony statistics came after two telegrams were sent to Göth’s office from WVHA headquarters in Oranienburg one Sunday. The first telegram demanded an immediate list of all machines in Płaszów; the second, which arrived on the heels of the first, wanted to know how many inmates were in the camp. Because there were no important officers on duty at the time, the office secretary came to see Stern. Stern made a point of noting that Göth did not come into the office that night, and the secretary also chose not to call Pemper. Stern said that “we” decided to advise Göth not simply to supply a report on the number of inmates but to draft a detailed report that also included the number of machines and departments in the camp, including total figures on the number of people working there. Stern said he thought this might impress officials in Oranienburg and possibly convince them to transform Płaszów into a concentration camp.¹³⁰

Yet, according to Stern, it was Mietek Pemper who told Göth about their idea to create “an interesting report about all [their] productions in the workshops.” Stern said the report was based on many “false numbers” that included past and future production statistics. The result was a nicely bound book with many drawings and graphs. Göth, who read the final report, knew that it was based on phony statistics and, after checking the numbers, angrily called Stern to his desk and asked him to explain the inconsistencies. Stern told him that “Wüst [confusion] promised up this order.” Göth then “realized [their] intention, laughed, and continued to read.”¹³¹

Pemper’s account is much more precise. Moreover, it seems more realistic because you can sense the fear behind Pemper’s every step as he oversaw the creation of the report. He realized after he had gotten the capacity production reports from the factory managers that they were not sufficient to convince WVHA of Płaszów’s potential as a concentration camp. Consequently, he went to Schindler and other factory managers and asked them to give him alternative production capacity statistics based on production potentials if they got orders for metal and iron goods. He then insisted that they provide him with details on every possible type of metal good they could produce with the machines they had as well as exacting detail on every item they might possibly produce if the machines were reconfigured to produce something else. Pemper did not tell them why he wanted this data. He also included Schindler’s statistics from Emalia in this data.¹³²

In the meantime, Pemper learned that Göth had just arranged to trade suits and boots made in the camp for wide Breitwagen typewriters that the commandant had signed over to himself and then leased to the camp. Pemper used one of these wide typewriters to type the capacity lists. In the upper left-hand corner of each page he typed the number of pieces involved in that workshop and added details about the goods, production, and other explanations. He put so much information on each page that he had to use abbreviations to make each section fit on the paper. When he ran out of space, he typed “od.,” the German abbreviation for “oder (or).” On the next line he would report how many of the above described items the camp could produce. And at the end of this line he would type “od.” When he had finished, he showed it to Göth, who was surprised by the numbers and said, “That can’t be true, that’s impossible that we can produce all of that.” And then Göth asked, “How did you do this?” Pemper explained that he had used signed documents from each of the workshop and factory directors. Göth then wanted to know why the figures were not added up. Pemper explained that the figures could not be added up because they were based on alternatives. Göth then asked about the constant use of the “od.” at the end of each line. Pemper said he was becoming more and more nervous about Göth’s questions and that it was “very hard… to keep [his] countenance.”¹³³

Göth then returned to his office where Pemper could hear him in deep conversation with others. Pemper thought that Göth either considered him a complete idiot who did not know what he was doing or someone who was capable of reading his mind. Pemper realized that Göth would never have told him outright to fabricate such figures because this would have been “extortionable.” On the other hand, he knew that Göth had excellent ties to important officials in the General Government. Pemper was convinced that Göth’s two-rank promotion several months earlier was linked to the Płaszów inspection visit of HSSPF Krüger, who seemed fond of Göth. Afterwards, one of Krüger’s adjutants, Graf Korf, began to make frequent trips to Płaszów to get custom-made suits and boots. Krüger’s teenage sons, Eckehart and Jochen, also came occasionally to camp with another of their father’s adjutants, SS-Obersturmführer Petrus, whom the teenagers treated with great disdain.¹³⁴

Stern describes the next series of events leading up to the decision to declare Płaszów a permanent concentration camp. Soon after Pemper and Stern’s report arrived at WVHA headquarters in Oranienburg, Obersturmführer Mohvinkel showed up in Płaszów personally to determine the report’s accuracy. Though Stern had a low opinion of many of the SS officers sent from Oranienburg on camp inspections, he quickly realized that Mohvinkel knew what he was doing. It would not take the WVHA officer long to realize that the Płaszów report was based on phony statistics. Mohvinkel was accompanied by another official from WVHA, Leclerc, who seemed to speak mostly French. Stern thought he was a spy and a provocateur. While Mohvinkel was looking over the books, Leclerc whispered to Pemper: “It all depends on Mohvinkel, he only has half an hour, then he needs to leave. You have to be careful not to be caught.” Consequently, Stern answered Mohvinkel’s questions about the report with partial evidence and partial excuses. Leclerc was there “to do the balances.” At one point, he told Stern and Pemper that “everything would be fine.” Mohvinkel soon left “without noticing our falsifications.”¹³⁵

But by the end of 1943, Göth had still heard nothing about the transformation of the camp. Everything, it seemed, now rested on the visit of one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, the head of WVHA, in late 1943. Pohl’s decision evidently would be based on how many armaments orders that Płaszów would receive from the Wehrmacht. Until this point, the camp’s factories had produced few significant metal goods of interest to WVHA and the Wehrmacht. This was where Oskar Schindler and his contacts with the military’s Armaments Inspectorate became useful. Stern told Göth that they needed Schindler’s arms production orders to document Płaszów’s potential as an arms producer. Stern said that Göth told him to talk with Schindler about this and said the arms production orders were the final key to approval. From what Stern says, though, Göth also talked to Schindler personally about this problem. Oskar immediately called Generalleutnant Maximillian Schindler, the head of the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government, and General Schindler came to Płaszów the following Sunday evening. Schindler’s visit was to determine whether Płaszów was “suitable for such production.” Pohl was also to be on hand to give instant approval if General Schindler thought Płaszów had the potential to produce arms.¹³⁶

Everyone knew, including Oskar Schindler, that Płaszów’s production facilities were “too primitive” for this. So Oskar Schindler suggested to Stern that they have a power failure just before the inspection began. General Schindler and his officers could then make the inspection with flashlights. When the power went off, Göth was furious. But in the dark, “the workshops looked quite magnificent.” General Schindler was evidently impressed by what he saw in the dark and now everyone waited for the production orders from him. Time was of the essence because Pohl had to leave Płaszów by 8:00 P.M. to return to Oranienburg. At 7:00 P.M. Stern called Schindler at Emalia and asked about the production orders. Not long afterwards, a soldier brought three large envelopes with the armaments orders from the Armaments Inspectorate to the camp offices. Stern signed for the envelopes, which he was not supposed to do, and gave them to Pemper, who asked one of the SS men in the office to give them to Göth, who was with Pohl in his office. The SS officer was furious with Pemper because he thought it was improper for him to take the envelopes from someone unauthorized to receive them, particularly a Jew. But the officer was also afraid of disturbing Göth. After hesitating a few moments, the SS man entered the commandant’s office. Göth patted him on the back and smiled when he gave him the envelopes. Soon afterwards, Pohl approved Płaszów’s new status as a concentration camp just before he left. SS-Hauptsturmführer Schitli arrived soon afterwards to oversee the transformation of Płaszów, which was completed in early 1944.¹³⁷

Mietek Pemper was extremely proud of the role he played in this process. During one of our visits together, he even gave me a German stamp commemorating the liberation of the concentration camps. From his perspective, inmates of the camps that were being liquidated were often sent immediately to their deaths; those in the permanent camps were given a chance to live longer. This transformation enabled Oskar Schindler to maintain his sub-camp at Emalia and then transfer it to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Böhren und Mähren) as a sub-camp of another permanent concentration camp, Groß Rosen. Płaszów’s new status, of course, did not alter the murderous environment in Płaszów, whether it be slow death by slave labor, mass execution, or the indiscriminate raging of Göth and other SS men in the camp. Now that the SS was in full control of Płaszów it became a bit more difficult to murder inmates indiscriminately. This change slowed down the death rate in the camp but did not end it.

The Crimes of Amon Göth in Płaszów

In an interview for the Süddeutsche Zeitung in early 1997, the reporter asked Mietek Pemper whether Steven Spielberg depicted Amon Göth accurately in the film’s “truly horrific scenes.” Pemper said that just the opposite was true, meaning there was no way you could capture the evil that was Amon Göth on film. He remembered, for example, a murder that Göth committed while he was dictating a letter to Pemper in his office. Göth kept a mirror there so he could see what was going on outside. While he was talking, he spotted a worker with a wheelbarrow. Pemper was uncertain whether the worker had stopped to rest or maybe did not have a full load of stones in the wheelbarrow. Regardless, Göth walked to the window, shot the man to death, returned to his desk, and asked Pemper, “Where were we in the text?” On another occasion, Pemper saw Göth shoot a female worker for the same reason.¹³⁸

Yet Pemper had seen much worse. He told Spielberg that he watched Göth let his two great Danes, Rolf and Ralf, tear an inmate to death. Pemper also saw the dogs tear “whole pieces of meat” from two inmates who were about to be transferred to another camp. Evidently, the inmates were killed because they had bribed two Ukrainian guards to help transfer them. Spielberg said these stories were too gruesome to put into the film. In his 1946 war crimes trial, Göth told the court that he kept the dogs for breeding purposes. Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig, one of two Jewish maids who worked for Göth in Płaszów, said that he used a padded glove that covered his arm up to his elbow to train Ralf to attack people. Another Schindler Jew, Henry Silver (Hersch Silberschlag), had volunteered to be a dog handler when he arrived at Płaszów, though he knew nothing about dogs. He fed Göth’s “killer canines,” as he called them, until he was transferred to other duty. Roman Ferber, one of the children hidden in Płaszów, said that Göth would occasionally mount “hunting missions” for Jews in the camp and used his dogs to ferret anyone hiding illegally there. Fortunately for Ferber and others, the dogs, who bounded ahead of Göth on these “missions,” acted as a warning signal and allowed them to hide. But Ferber, also a Schindlerjude, remembered that if Göth “didn’t like your looks, he would set the dog on you.” According to Stella Müller-Madej, Göth murdered another of his dog handlers, Adam Sztab, because the commandant thought the dogs liked Sztab more than their owner.¹³⁹

Viennese-born Raimund Titsch, who managed Julius Madritsch’s large sewing factory in Płaszów, remembered being invited to Göth’s villa for lunch. Göth thought the soup was too hot and called the Jewish chef from the kitchen to explain why. The chef evidently did not hear Göth calling for him. Göth jumped out of his chair, yelled for the chef to come out of the kitchen, and took him behind the villa. A few moments later, Titsch heard a single pistol shot. Göth had murdered the Jewish chef because of the hot soup.¹⁴⁰

Mietek Pemper told me that Amon Göth was “an enigma. He could be both brutal, friendly, and playful with officers’ children.” And though his staff seemed terrified of him, there were some high-ranking SS officers who felt comfortable enough to play jokes on him. Schindlerjude Henry Slamovich (Chaim Wolf Szlamowicz) said that one evening in Płaszów a high-ranking camp SS officer came to his barracks and selected twenty Jews who were then marched to Göth’s villa. Slamovich was certain that they were all about to get “wiped out.” The officer then marched them into the villa, where they heard dancing and loud music. The inmates were taken to the second floor and ordered “to dismantle the beds and take everything out to the basement, so when Goeth comes back with his girlfriend, it would be empty. It was a joke.”¹⁴¹ Slamovich was one of those who testified against Göth in 1946.¹⁴²

There were different levels of violence and death at Płaszów: indiscriminate shootings, single and mass executions, beatings by Göth, and formal punishments such as lashing. From the perspective of the SS, the commandant of a camp was the role model for his subordinates. So just as Göth modeled the behavior of his former superiors, Albrecht Schmelt and Odilo Globočnik, he served as a role model for those in the camp who served under him.¹⁴³ Murray Pantirer, a Schindler Jew who came to the United States and committed his life to insuring that the world never forgot Oskar Schindler, said that Göth “couldn’t have breakfast or lunch without seeing Jewish blood. Every day he would shoot somebody else at random.” And if the commandant was wearing his Tyrolean hat, Płaszów’s inmates knew they “were in terrible danger.” Whenever Pantirer saw Göth, he would run to the latrine because he knew that Göth would never go in there. If he came into the barracks, Göth would not leave until he had shot a few workers.¹⁴⁴

Göth deliberately used cruel punishment and the threat of death to maintain the pace and efficiency of work in Płaszów. He also believed in group responsibility, meaning that if one person in a group tried to escape or committed some other infraction, the entire barracks or work team would be punished. And Göth was most dangerous when he was drunk. Mietek Pemper testified that on one particular morning after all night partying, Göth came to the Appellplatz, where the inmates were lined up for roll call. He shot one inmate, Sonnenschein, because his coat was too long and another because he simply did not like his looks. On another occasion, Göth walked into the camp’s brush factory and shot the foreman out of boredom. He ordered all the workers outside and lined them up. He then began to divide them into two groups. Göth and his small entourage walked back and forth among the both groups and finally left. The terrified workers continued to stand at attention for another thirty minutes until they were ordered back into the workshop. Once inside, everyone became hysterical because they “had come close to being killed.”¹⁴⁵

But Göth did more than threaten work groups. Once, he was standing just inside the camp gate as several work teams were returning from cleaning the streets in Kraków. Schindlerjude Julius Eisenstein, who was in one of the work parties, said Göth noticed that “some of the inmates [in one of the labor groups] had bulging pockets. One had bread, one had a salami, and one had canned food.”¹⁴⁶ When Göth discovered the contraband, he told the “blacks [Ukrainian guards]… ‘Alle töten!’ Shoot them all!” The Ukrainian guards then took the entire party of fifty to sixty workers to Hujowa Gorka and shot them.¹⁴⁷

Murray Pantirer remembered another incident in which Göth ordered every other worker in his fifty-man work team shot because one of them had escaped. Göth had the crew lined up and then asked, “Where is the fiftieth?” When nobody responded, he ordered his guards to shoot every other inmate in the group. Henry Slamovich said that something similar happened after a boy escaped from Slamovich’s crew, which was repairing railroad tracks. When they returned to camp, Göth, with whip in hand, touched every fifth boy on the nose with his whip and then shot each one. There was no end to this deadly viciousness. Betty (Bronia) Groß Gunz recalled standing next to Schnadl Müller, a close friend, during morning roll call. As Göth rode by on his horse with Rolf and Ralf, he noticed that Schnadl was smiling. Göth shot her to death for this. As Schnadl fell to the ground, Betty instinctively moved towards her. An SS guard struck her with his whip; another hit her in the back and caused so much damage to her kidney that it had to be removed after the war. The next morning Betty managed to make it to work because she was afraid that if she did not show up they would shoot her.¹⁴⁸

Given the random, indiscriminate nature of death at Płaszów, it should come as no surprise that those working closest to Amon Göth—Mietek Pemper, Itzhak Stern, and Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig—feared him most because they were in constant contact with him. Pemper felt that working for Göth was a death sentence and he did not think he would survive the war. This was one of the reasons he was so bold in gathering information about Göth. Pemper said that when the war was over, his nerves were shattered because of the pressure of working under Göth. Itzhak Stern said that his family was certain that Göth would kill him and lived in constant fear for his life. One day, Göth did beat Stern after he was ordered to prepare one of the commandant’s horses for a ride. Stern, who knew nothing about horses, could not find the stable master and came back to the office to find him. Göth saw him and asked Stern why he had returned. Stern said he had come back to get his hat. According to Stern, Göth then “beat me terribly.”¹⁴⁹

Göth also mistreated both of his Jewish housemaids, Helen Hirsch Horowitz and Helen (Helena) Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig. To differentiate between the two Helens, Göth renamed them Lena (Helen Hirsch) and Susanna (Helen Sternlicht). Like most people who saw Schindler’s List, I thought there was only one Jewish maid working for Göth, Helen Hirsch, though both appeared briefly together in one scene in the film. Both worked for Göth for almost two years and suffered equally from his brutality. Helen Hirsch is the best known of the two maids because she was featured in Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film. She settled in Israel after the war, remarried and, at this writing, still lives there. She is better known than Helen Rosenzweig, who settled in the United States after the war, because she was part of the close-knit circle of Schindler Jews in Israel who provided the testimony that became the basis of the Schindler story later told by Keneally and Spielberg. Helen Hirsch was the older of the two Jewish maids who worked for Göth. She had originally worked in the camp’s Jewish kitchen and was chosen by her superior, Leon Myer, to work for Göth. Myer took several weeks to acquaint her with the commandant’s personal likes and dislikes. Initially, Helen lived in a special barracks for Jewish workers, but eventually moved into quarters in the cold, damp cellar of Göth’s villa. Living with Göth, she said after the war, “was almost like living under the gallows twenty-four hours a day.”¹⁵⁰

Göth set the tone for his treatment of Helen Hirsch the first night she moved into his villa. He seemed to like the dinner she cooked for him as well as the way she served it. During the meal, Göth asked her name and how she had become such a good cook. She told him that she came from a good family and knew how to do such things. Though she was not a “professional” cook, she promised the commandant that she “would do everything she could to please him.” Later that evening, Göth came downstairs and asked Helen for the bones from dinner for his dogs. Helen said that she had thrown them out. Göth flew into a rage and began to beat her. In the midst of the beating, Helen got up the courage to ask him why she was hitting her. He responded, “The reason I am beating you now is because you had the temerity to ask me why I was beating you in the first place.”¹⁵¹

After this, Helen said, “I was convinced that my life was going to be short-lived.” She told herself that she would do whatever necessary to live as long as possible. Helen Hirsch and Helen Sternlicht were supposed to do general house chores and cook for the commandant. Helen Hirsch said after the war that Göth would call the maids by either pressing a buzzer that could be heard throughout the villa or by screaming for them. They were at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day and knew that if they took more than a few seconds to respond, he would hit both of them.¹⁵² Göth broke Helen Hirsch’s left eardrum during one of these beatings, which left her deaf in that ear. He was angry with her because he did not like the way she had set the dinner table. On another occasion he threw a knife at her and damaged a nerve in her left leg, an injury that left it partially paralyzed. In a rare display of courage, Helen painfully cried out, “Why are you beating me this way? Why don’t you shoot me, finish my life? Why do you continue to torture me this way?” Göth looked at her and said, “You still have plenty of time—I need you.” On other occasions, Göth would punish Helen Hirsch by making her run up three flights of stairs until she collapsed from exhaustion.¹⁵³

In 1964, Helen Hirsch Horowitz told Martin Gosch and Howard Koch that “insofar as she was concerned, he [Göth] had made some attempts physically and sexually upon her.” Gosch and Koch decided not to put this in the film script because “she might be accused even today of having acceded to his physical demands in order to preserve her life, and this does not happen to be true.” She told the Hollywood film makers that she remembered an incident when Göth called her into his room. When Helen entered, she saw that he was drunk and had a whip in his hand. Göth then began to beat her, “tearing off her clothes, attempting to rape her.” She began screaming and Göth’s mistress, Ruth, came into the room and saved her. Later, during a party, one of Göth’s officers, who liked Helen, told her that she would be the last Jew to die in Płaszów because Göth “derived a kind of sadistic satisfaction out of brutalizing her that gave him greater satisfaction than anything else in the world.”¹⁵⁴

It was during one of these parties that Helen Hirsch met Oskar Schindler. Emalia’s owner “took her aside, put his arm around her so that Göth would not see them, and gave her a piece of candy as he kissed her. Oskar told Helen, ‘I’m not kissing you as a woman, but I am kissing you because I know about you, and I feel so terrible about your circumstances, and I will try in every way that I can to help you.’” From this moment on, Helen told Gosch and Koch, whenever Schindler visited Göth in the villa, he would make a point of taking Helen aside and telling her things to boost her morale. When Płaszów was being closed in the fall of 1944, Oskar told Bankier to put Helen and her sister, Anna, on the female “Schindler’s List.”¹⁵⁵

Itzhak Stern later said that he considered Helen Hirsch the “most unfortunate of all the inmates of the Plaszhow camp.” Everyone in the camp, he said, including the Germans, felt sorry for her. Göth always required her to be dressed elegantly in a fresh, starched uniform because he “did not want to be reminded constantly of the Jewishness around him.” Helen Hirsch was also not permitted to wear the Star of David. From Stern’s perspective, “he [Göth] tried to manufacture into his own mind that perhaps she was a human being, that she was not just a nothing, a piece of dirt, a Jew, and that he was being served by dirt.” Stern felt that what Helen Hirsch suffered under Amon Göth “was “more than ten lifetimes” worth of pain. This was why Stern thought that “no one is more entitled to greater, stronger, more ardent admiration than Helen Horowitz.”¹⁵⁶ But the same could be said for Göth’s other Jewish maid, Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig, who served Göth almost as long as Helen Hirsch and suffered the same horrible mistreatment.

Few people know about Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig, and she is barely mentioned in Spielberg’s film. Sol Urbach knew her and arranged to have me meet her one morning at her home in South Florida. He indicated to me that she was uncomfortable talking about her experiences and that I should not expect much. I had learned from interviewing many Schindler Jews that one could never determine how much they would be willing to talk about or how long an interview would last. People who seemed to know a lot often said nothing; others shared a great deal of information. Usually a hesitation to reveal much had more to do with reviving painful memories than disinterest in talking about their wartime experiences.

When I sat down with Helen Rosenzweig, it was obvious that talking about Göth was going to be very, very difficult for her. She said that she dreamed about him every night and that the two years she worked for him were the most fearful time of her life. I told her that if she did not care to talk about him, I understood. But gradually, she began to open up and tell me stories about him. This beautiful, sensitive woman touched me deeply. After we finished, I walked to my car and shuddered. It took me a long time to recover from what she told me that morning.¹⁵⁷

Helen’s family history under German occupation in Kraków was similar to that of other Jews. When the Germans began the construction of Płaszów in late 1942, her mother, Lola, and one of her older sisters, Sydel (Sydonia), were sent to work there. As the ghetto was being liquidated, Helen decided to try to sneak into Płaszów because she did not have the blue Kennkarte. She had already learned about the death trains to Bełżec and was desperate to join her sister and mother there. She hid in a milk wagon going to the new camp but was discovered by the driver just before he got there. She managed to escape his grasp and made it into the camp, where she was given a job cleaning barracks. One day while she was cleaning windows, Amon Göth walked in and said, “I want this girl in my house. If she is smart enough to clean windows in the sunshine, I want her.”¹⁵⁸

Helen Rosenzweig worked for Amon Göth for almost two years and lived in the basement of his villa, the last of the three homes that Göth and Ruth lived in during their time at Płaszów. Helen Hirsch, who had begun to work for Göth a little earlier, lived with Helen. They stayed in a small room behind the basement that had two beds and a small bathroom. Helen never mentioned sexual advances from Göth. Mietek Pemper told me that Göth, who had liver and kidney problems, was not attracted to women. In fact, he found the idea that Göth was somehow sexually attracted to Helen Hirsch Horowitz pure “baloney.” She was not, he added, “Miss Kraków or Miss Poland.”¹⁵⁹ Helen Rozenzweig added that Göth was also a diabetic who drank heavily. He believed firmly in Nazi racial laws and would not have had relations with a Jew. This does not contradict Helen Hirsch’s claim that Göth tried to sexually abuse her when he was drunk. However, the idea, as depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film, that Göth was somehow infatuated with Helen Hirsch and even toyed with the idea of kissing her is totally fictitious.¹⁶⁰

Göth, of course, had no qualms about regularly beating and abusing his maids. He first mistreated Helen Rosenzweig one day while she was ironing his shirts. At the time, she styled her hair in braids. Göth was evidently displeased with her work and grabbed her by the braids. He told her: “You stupid Jew, don’t you know how to iron a shirt? In Austria, a girl your age knows how to cook and iron.” Göth, a big man with large hands, slapped her hard and told “Susanna” that he did not want any sadness in his house, a warning that she was not supposed to cry when he abused her. At the time, Göth had a young valet named Lisiek working for him. One evening after a party, one of the guests said he needed a ride back to town. Lisiek went to the stable to get the carriage. When he returned, Göth asked him why he done this without his permission. Lisiek, frightened, did not answer. Göth then took out his pistol and shot him to death. From this moment on, Helen Rosenzweig lived in constant fear for her life.¹⁶¹

One of Helen’s greatest conflicts was her desire to be with her mother and two sisters. She told Elinor Brecher that being alone was even worse for her than Göth’s abuse. She would look out the window of her room “watching people marching to work. I envied them. I knew they were going to daily hell, with hanging and killing and mutilations in camp, but they were together for whatever happened, and I was alone.”¹⁶² Helen Hirsch was very good to Helen Rosenzweig and tried to take care of her, but this simply was not enough. Helen’s loneliness was particularly bad when she was on night duty in the villa. Her yearning to be with her family occasionally overwhelmed her and when Göth was away from the villa, she would sneak out and to try to see her mother, who later died during deportation. And when she could, Helen would sneak sandwiches to her sister, Betty (Bronia) Sternlicht Schagrin, as she was marched by the villa on her way to work at Madrisch’s nearby factory.¹⁶³

A few months before Helen Rosenzweig was shipped to Auschwitz and then to Schindler’s new factory at Brünnlitz, she saw her sisters in a group of women in white kerchiefs headed for a deportation train. Helen ran outside to her sisters and looked back at Göth, who was standing nearby. She said, pleading, “Herr commandant, Herr commandant.” Göth, who had a truncheon in his hand, told Helen, “If you don’t move away, I’ll kill you.” An SS guard then told Helen to move away from her sisters and not to look at him. The guard then said that “there weren’t enough cattle cars,” meaning they had run out of space for this particular transport. The SS man then told Betty and Sydel (Sydonia), who were by now calling out to Helen, to step back from the transport line. In the meantime, Helen Hirsch, who had seen everything, woke Ruth up and told her that “Susanna had run outside.” She pleaded with Ruth to help “Susanna.” Ruth, who had once told the two maids that she would help them if she could, said there was nothing she could do without Göth’s approval. But then she made a phone call. Later, Ruth told Helen Hirsch that she would have to tell Amon what she had done “because of her conscience.” Later that day, Göth came downstairs with a pistol in his hand looking for “Susanna.” When he could not find her, he beat Helen Hirsch instead. In fact, it was common for Göth to beat one or both maids for something the other did. Later, “Lena” told “Susanna” to keep quiet and say only “Jawohl, Jawohl” when she next met the commandant. The next day, Göth saw “Susanna” and said, “You were very lucky.” He never mentioned the incident with her sisters again.¹⁶⁴

One of the favored methods of punishment at Płaszów was lashing, particularly of women. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s trial that he remembered one SS circular in the camp that dealt with the lashing of women. It ordered that Czech women were to be lashed by Slovak women and Polish females were to be lashed by Russian women. Pemper said he interpreted this to mean that this was “to cause hatred between people of the same race [Slavs].”¹⁶⁵ And though Amon Göth claimed in his trial that lashing prisoners happened only “once in a while,” Pemper testified that it was a common form of punishment. And Göth always insisted that the prisoner receive the maximum number of “hits”—fifty—though Pemper remembered that prisoners were often struck more than a hundred times by the lash. This was particularly true when Płaszów was a forced labor camp and not a more strictly regulated concentration camp.¹⁶⁶

According to Leon Leyson (Leib Lejzon), the guards used whips with small ball bearings at the end. The first lash was “equal to having somebody cut you with a knife.”¹⁶⁷ Betty Sternlicht Schragin believes that her sister Sydel was the first woman at Płaszów to receive twenty-five lashes “on the bare buttocks.”¹⁶⁸ The SS punished Sydel for letting five girls in her road crew go into the bathroom to warm up because it was so cold outside. And this was not the last time that Sydel was lashed. A year after the first punishment, the SS entered her barracks and said that everyone would be punished for not attending roll call. The women in Sydel’s barracks had been told that because it was a holiday they would not have to work. It was also a Sunday and everyone was asleep when the SS entered the barracks. Sydel volunteered to be the first to be lashed. Before she went outside, Betty told her not to yell out in pain. Sydel was taken out and forced to bend over a chair, where a Jewish policeman named Zimmerman, who was later executed by the Poles, did the lashings. Ultimately, all the women in the barracks, including Betty, were beaten. Afterwards, they “couldn’t sit for weeks.”¹⁶⁹

If anything came to symbolize the absolute horror of Płaszów, it was the camp’s principal execution, burial, and desecration site, Hujowa Gorka. The inmates’ nicknamed it “Prick Hill” because it could be seen from almost any part of the camp. There were also two other camp execution and burial sites at Lipowy Dolek and the northern section of the old Jewish cemetery. We also know that Göth had plans to build a crematorium and gas chambers at Płaszów. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s trial that the crematorium was to serve the camp as well as “Gestapo around the Kraków [area] and others.”¹⁷⁰ The site of the crematorium was shown on the camp plans used during Göth’s trial though it is difficult to determine from trial testimony whether it was ever built. The gas chambers were never built because the representative of the Erfurt company (probably Topf and Sons, which built the crematoria at Auschwitz) sent to build them, Koller, “was a decent man” who tried to stall construction, saying “it was too cold” to build them.¹⁷¹

Most of those who were murdered by Göth or his SS subordinates were buried in Hujowa Gorka. In addition, the 2,000 Jews murdered in the closing of the ghetto in 1943 were also buried in one of the camp’s three common grave sites. The Gestapo and the SS in Kraków also sent some of its prisoners to Płaszów for execution. In one instance, an entire Polish wedding party, including the priest and guests, were sent to the camp for execution. Beginning in the fall of 1943, prisoners were brought three or four times a week from Montelupich prison in Kraków to Płaszów for execution, usually in the morning. The prisoners were ordered from the trucks and told to undress. They were then marched to a ditch surrounding Hujowa Gorka and told to lie down. An SS man, a Genickschußspezialist (specialist in shooting in the neck), would then administer a Nackenschuß, a shot in the nape of the neck. A dental technician, usually a Jew, would then pull the gold teeth out of each victim’s mouth. The dead bodies were then covered with a layer of dirt, though once Płaszow became a concentration camp the bodies were burned. The victims’ clothes were sent to the camp’s storehouses and most of the valuables were taken by the executioners.¹⁷²

The most chilling accounts about the horrible scenes at Hujowa Gorka came from Schindlerjuden forced to work on the burial details or for the special Sonderkommando 1005 unit sent to the camp in the fall of 1944 to exhume and burn the bodies buried in mass graves there. Henry Wiener was assigned to one of the camp’s burial details in the fall of 1943. He remembered they would bring the bodies of young Jewish girls who had been executed for having false papers for burial and the bodies of those executed for the escape of someone else. Before burial, gold teeth were removed from the bodies. Occasionally, those on the burial detail would pocket some of the gold teeth. “You felt like vomiting,” Weiner said. “It was just awful. But the SS guy was right behind you with a gun. I never saw anybody having a nervous breakdown in all those years. In my case, I said ‘I don’t give a damn what they gonna do. We have to keep going and see their defeat, in spite of what they do to us.’”¹⁷³

The Sonderkommando 1005 units were created in the summer of 1942 “to prevent the possible reconstruction of the number of victims.”¹⁷⁴ They were commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, an architect and engineer who had gained a reputation as commander of Sonderkommando 4a in Ukraine for “crudity and bloodthirstiness.”¹⁷⁵ These units were made up of about twenty men drawn from the SD, Sipo, and the Order Police. They, in turn, used prisoners, particularly Jews, to dig up the bodies and carry them to the pyres specially constructed for this purpose. Blobel and his men began their work in the late summer of 1942 where they experimented with various burning methods at Auschwitz and Chełmno. The one that Blobel and his men devised centered around large pyres that intermixed layers of timber with several thousand bodies. Gasoline or another flammable liquid was poured on the four corners of the pyre and then lit. Body fat from the victims helped stoke the flames.¹⁷⁶ When they had completed their experimental work at Chełmno and Auschwitz, where they emptied mass graves containing over 100,000 bodies, Blobel’s units then did the same thing at Beł`zec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Himmler then sent them to occupied Russia and Poland. By the time a Sonderkommando 1005 unit arrived in Płaszów in the fall of 1944, their work was coming to an end. Several months earlier, Blobel took command of Einsatzgruppe Iltis to fight partisans on the Yugoslav-Austrian border. Many of the men who had served under him in the Sonderkommando 1005 units joined his new antipartisan unit.¹⁷⁷

In the summer of 1944, Blobel and SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in Kraków, met with SD, Sipo, and police officials to discuss the creation of regional Sonderkommando 1005 units to operate throughout the General Government. It was one of these new units that arrived later in Płaszów to begin its grisly work. Spielberg poignantly captured the horror of these efforts in Schindler’s List, though the scene with the body of “Red Coat” Genia was fictional. Francisco Wichter, the only Schindler Jew remaining in Buenos Aires and a close friend of Emilie Schindler’s before her death in 2001, was forced to work for the Sonderkommando 1005 unit in Płaszów. A calm, kind, gentle man, it is hard to imagine what he went through during the time that he worked exhuming and burning bodies. Normally, the Germans shot the workers after they had completed their work. Somehow, Francisco survived. The work crews were ordered to dig up the bodies and carry them to the large pyre for burning. Francisco’s job was to carry the bodies exhumed the night before to the wooden pyre. One morning as he walked to the stack of bodies, he saw the body of an eighteen-year-old girl sitting up and staring at him. He said he could not eat for two days afterwards and could still see her face.¹⁷⁸

Maurice Markheim’s experiences were even more gruesome. He was forced to work on one of the exhumation details during the winter when the ground was frozen solid. The inmates used axes to open the ground and, according to Markheim, if they struck someone’s head, the brains would splash out. “When you discovered the face, you had to holler. A man came down with a pair of pliers, opened the mouth and pulled the gold teeth. You could recognize one thing: a child. [You could tell] a woman from a man by the hair only. The inmates on the exhumation details were forced to eat among the dead bodies and sit close to the pyres that were aflame twenty-four hours a day. After a while, the inmates working among the dead began to smell of death. Markheim said that even after two or three months in Brünnlitz, his body was “still smelling like the dead bodies, because the smell got under your skin.”¹⁷⁹

Jack Mintz (Jehuda Minc; Anschell Freimann) said that they carried the bodies on stretchers from the mass graves and then manually put them on the pyres. He added that the scene in Schindler’s List where the inmates were loading bodies on a conveyor belt was wrong. Everything was done by hand. They then stacked wood on the bodies and lit the fire with tar paper. Jack worked with his older brother Iser on the exhumation detail. He particularly remembered one of the Kapos (Italian for boss or chief), Ivan, who supervised his work crew. Ivan took gold teeth from the bodies to buy vodka, which he drank constantly. He would hit his workers over the head with a shovel to keep them in line though he seemed to favor Iser, who could take “a whole body on the shovel and put it on the stretcher.” As a reward for his toughness, Ivan let Iser go to the kitchen for his crew’s food ration. This allowed Iser to have the first bowl of soup, which meant he could scoop “from the bottom, where anything of nutritional value might have sunk.”¹⁸⁰

All these experiences helped those Jews who worked for or were saved by Oskar Schindler during the war appreciate the time they spent in Emalia or Brünnlitz. Oskar Schindler was no angel and certainly had his flaws. Moreover, his motives were not solely humanitarian. He was a businessman who made a great deal of money during the war and hoped to do so afterwards, hopefully with the Jews who were part of his workforce in Kraków and Brünnlitz. But life as an SS slave laborer in one of Oskar Schindler’s factories was heaven compared to the constant threat of death in Płaszów under Amon Göth. And even though Oskar Schindler seemed close to Göth, this relationship had more to do with the role he had to play to have a free hand with his Jewish and Polish workers than it did with sympathy for Göth’s murderous behavior in Płaszów. Yet many of Schindler’s Jews remained suspicious of him because of this relationship and his relationship with the SS until after the war. In conversations among themselves and with other survivors, they came to realize the remarkable efforts of Oskar Schindler to save their lives, regardless of the motivation. Simply stated, they were alive because of him.