Amon Leopold Goeth, camp commander of the Plaszow concentration camp from February 1943 until September 1944. In the photograph, he can be seen standing on his balcony preparing to shoot prisoners.
Amon Leopold Goeth, the villain of the movie Schindler’s List, was born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 24, he joined the Nazi party. In 1940, Amon Goeth became a member of the Waffen-SS. He was assigned to the SS headquarters for Operation Reinhard in Lublin in German-occupied Poland in 1942. Operation Reinhard was the plan to evacuate the Jews from the Ghettos in Poland to three death camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, all of which were in eastern Poland.
In February 1943, Goeth received a promotion and became the third SS officer to hold the job of Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp. While he was the Commandant of Plaszow, Goeth was assigned to supervise the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto on March 13, 1943, and later the labor camp at Szebnie. The liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto in Krakow is shown in the movie, Schindler’s List.
His two dogs, Rolf and Ralf, were trained to tear inmates to death. He shot people from the window of his office if they appeared to be moving too slowly or resting in the yard. He shot to death a Jewish cook because the soup was too hot. He brutally mistreated his two maids, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig and Helen Hirsch, who were in constant fear for their lives, as were all the inmates.
This is how prisoner Joseph Bau (Prisoner Number 69084) described Goeth:
“A hideous and terrible monster who reached the height of more than two meters. He set the fear of death in people, terrified masses and accounted for much chattering of teeth. He ran the camp through extremes of cruelty that are beyond the comprehension of a compassionate mind – employing tortures which dispatched his victims to hell.
For even the slightest infraction of the rules, he would rain blow after blow upon the face of the helpless offender and would observe with satisfaction born of sadism, how the cheek of his victim would swell and turn blue, how the teeth would fall out and the eyes would fill with tears.
Anyone who was being whipped by him was forced to count in a loud voice, each stroke of the whip and if he made a mistake was forced to start counting over again. During interrogations, which were conducted in his office, he would set his dog on the accused, who was strung by his legs from a specially placed hook in the ceiling.
In the event of an escape from the camp, he would order the entire group from which the escapee had come, to form a row, would give the order to count ten and would, personally kill every tenth person.
At one morning parade, in the presence of all the prisoners he shot a Jew, because, as he complained, the man was too tall. Then as the man lay dying he urinated on him. Once he caught a boy who was sick with diarrhea and was unable to restrain himself. Goeth forced him to eat all the excrement and then shot him”.
(source)
https://youtu.be/GzG9qTyuaP8?t=79
