Did Amon Goeth have the authority to order executions?

Amon Goeth’s mugshot after he was arrested by the Germans

In my blog post today, I am answering a comment made by one of my readers. The comment is quoted below:

“So he [Amon Goeth] didn’t shoot from the balcony. That excuses the thousands upon thousans whose deaths he ordered? Where did you study convoluted logic and denial at? You ought to have a master’s degree.”

Here is my answer to this question:

Several years ago, I went to visit the spot where the Plaszow camp was formerly located. I also visited a small museum in Krakow, where I copied Goeth’s mugshot photo at the top  of this page. Goeth had been arrested by the Germans for stealing from the warehouses of the Plaszow camp.

I read several books about Amon Goeth where I studied “convoluted logic and denial.”  In all my study of this subject, I never learned that Amon Goeth had had the authority to order thousands of deaths.

Amon Goeth, the commander of the Plaszow camp

As the commandant of the Plaszow camp, Goeth had been ordered to carry out the executions that were ordered by others. These executions took place at the Plaszow camp. The people who were executed were not prisoners in  the Plaszow camp.

According to David Crowe’s book, entitled Oscar Schindler,  Wilek Chilowicz was a Jewish prisoner, who was the head of the OD, the Jewish police at Plaszow. Crowe wrote that “Göth sought permission to murder Chilowicz and several other prominent OD men in the camp on false charges.”

In all the Nazi concentration camps, the staff had to get permission from headquarters in Oranienburg to punish a prisoner, but punishment did not include murder.

Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was a Waffen-SS officer and attorney, whom Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had put in charge of investigating murder, corruption and mistreatment of prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps in 1943. Dr. Morgen’s first investigation had resulted in the arrest of Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald, and his later execution by the Nazis.

According to David Crowe’s book, Goeth asked one of his SS officers, Josef Sowinski, to prepare a detailed, false report about a potential camp rebellion led by Chilowicz and other OD men. Based on this report, Koppe sent a secret letter to Goeth giving him the authority to carry out the execution of Chilowicz and several other OD men. The execution took place on August 13, 1944; Goeth was arrested exactly a month later and charged by Dr. Morgen with corruption and brutality, including the murder of Wilek Chilowicz and several others.

The office in Oranienburg did not have the authority to give an execution order; an execution could only be authorized by the Gestapo in Berlin.

Due to the fact that Germany was losing the war and the SS now had bigger problems, Goeth was never put on trial in Dr. Morgen’s court and this was the last investigation done by the SS.

After the war, Dr. Morgen was arrested as a “war criminal,” and imprisoned in the bunker at the Dachau concentration camp, which had been converted into “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1” by the American military. According to David Crowe’s book, Wilek Chilowicz was the head of the OD, the Jewish police at Plaszow. He wrote that “Göth sought permission to murder Chilowicz and several other prominent OD men in the camp on false charges.” In all the Nazi concentration camps, the staff had to get permission from headquarters in Oranienburg to punish a prisoner, but punishment did not include murder.

Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was a Waffen-SS officer and attorney whom Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had put in charge of investigating murder, corruption and mistreatment of prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps in 1943. Dr. Morgen’s first investigation had resulted in the arrest of Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald, and his later execution by the Nazis. When Goeth realized that he was being investigated by Dr. Morgen, he sought permission from Wilhelm Koppe in the central office in Oranienburg to execute Wilek Chilowicz, who could have testified against him.

Amon Goeth leaves the courtroom in Poland after he was convicted of war crimes

After World War II ended, the American military turned Amon Goeth over to the Polish government for prosecution as a war criminal. He was brought before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Krakow. His trial took place between August 27, 1946 and September 5, 1946. Goeth was charged with being a member of the Nazi party and a member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler’s elite army, both of which had been designated as criminal organizations by the Allies after the war. His crimes included the charges that he had taken part in the activities of these two criminal organizations. The crime of being a Nazi applied only to Nazi officials, and Goeth had never held a job as a Nazi official. In fact, at the time of Goeth’s conviction by the Polish court, the judgment against the SS and the Nazi party as criminal organizations had not yet been made by the Nuremberg IMT.

At Goeth’s trial, the Nazi party was said to be “an organization which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, through aggressive wars, violence and other crimes, aimed at world domination and establishment of the National-Socialist regime.” Amon Goeth was accused of personally issuing orders to deprive people of freedom, to ill-treat and exterminate individuals and whole groups of people. His crimes, including the newly created crime of genocide, came under a new law of the Allies, called Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Amon Goeth were as follows:

(1) The accused as commandant of the forced labour camp at Plaszow (Cracow) from 11th February, 1943, till 13th September, 1944, caused the death of about 8,000 inmates by ordering a large number of them to be exterminated.

Plateau at Plaszow camp where 8,000 people were executed

(2) As a SS-Sturmführer the accused carried out on behalf of SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase the final closing down of the Cracow ghetto. This liquidation action which began on 13th March, 1943, deprived of freedom about 10,000 people who had been interned in the camp of Plaszow, and caused the death of about 2,000.

(3) As a SS-Hauptsturmführer the accused carried out on 3rd September, 1943, the closing down of the Tarnow ghetto. As a result of this action an unknown number of people perished, having been killed on the spot in Tarnow; others died through asphyxiation during transport by rail or were exterminated in other camps, in particular at Auschwitz.

(4) Between September, 1943, and 3rd February, 1944, the accused closed down the forced labour camp at Szebnie near Jaslo by ordering the inmates to be murdered on the spot or deported to other camps, thus causing the death of several thousand persons.

(5) Simultaneously with the activities described under (1) to (4) the accused deprived the inmates of valuables, gold and money deposited by them, and appropriated those things. He also stole clothing, furniture and other movable property belonging to displaced or interned people, and sent them to Germany. The value of stolen goods and in particular of valuables reached many million zlotys at the rate of exchange in force at the time.

The last charge, as stated in number (5) above, was the crime for which he had been arrested by the Gestapo on September 13, 1944, after an investigation by Waffen-SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen.

 

New book by Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Schindler’s List

This news article in The Independent tells about Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Schindler’s List, who died just before his memoir was published.  I have not read the book; it has just “hit the shelves” according to the news article.

I previously blogged about the death of Leon Leyson here.

This quote is from The Independent:

He was one of the youngest Holocaust survivors to be saved by Oskar Schindler, and he waited almost 70 years to tell his story. Sadly, Leon Leyson died before he could see his memoir published. The extraordinary, horrifying and heart-breaking book The Boy on the Wooden Box, about a 13-year-old who found his way onto Schindler’s famous list, was released in the US by Simon & Schuster’s children’s division today.

The Plaszow labor camp where Leon Leyson was a prisoner

Reading through the news article in The Independent, this quote grabbed my attention:

The [Leyson] family was sent to the Plaszow camp in 1940, and Mr Leyson only managed to rejoin his family after sneaking past a guard at huge personal risk. He described stepping through the gates like “arriving at the innermost circle of hell” adding the moment he arrived “I was convinced I would never leave alive”.

The Plazow camp was set up, as a forced labor camp for Jews, in the fall of 1942, according to the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel.  So Leon’s family could not have been sent to Plaszow in 1940.  Leon is the second person that I know of, who sneaked into the Plaszow camp.

Fence around the former Plaszow camp, which has been torn down

The quote from The Independent continues with this information:

The camp’s commandant was the infamous Amon Goeth. Among the frequent brushes with fate, Mr Leyson once had his leg bandaged at the infirmary, finding out later that Goeth had all the patients arbitrarily shot moments after he had left.

Amon Goeth was the Commandant of the Plazow camp from February 1943 to September 1944 when he was arrested by the German Gestapo for stealing from the camp.  How much contact did Leon actually have with Amon Goeth?

Did the reporter, who wrote the news article, make a mistake in the dates, or did Leon Leyson make a mistake in his memoir?

This quote is also from the news article:

In a final act of salvation, in April 1945 with the Germans fleeing, they were ordered to murder all the Jewish workers in the Brinlitz camp. Schindler managed to thwart the plan and have the SS officer in charged transferred out of the area.

Not according to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has this to say about Oskar Schindler’s factory:

Though classified as an armaments factory, the Brünnlitz plant produced just one wagonload of live ammunition in just under eight months of operation. By presenting bogus production figures, Schindler justified the existence of the sub-camp as an armaments factory and thus facilitated the survival of over 1,000 Jews, sparing them the horrors and brutality of conventional camp life. Schindler left Brünnlitz only on May 9, 1945, the day that Soviet troops liberated the camp.

There were stories about the Nazis planning to kill all the prisoners in all the camps, at the end of the war, but this turned out to be untrue. You can read about the alleged plan to kill all the prisoners at Dachau on my website here.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was accused of ordering all the prisoners to be killed at the end of the war.  You can read his testimony on another blog post which I wrote.

The heartwarming story of how Moishe Perlman escaped summary execution in the Plaszow camp

I have been doing a lot of research on the Plaszow concentration camp, near Krakow, which was made famous by the movie Schindler’s List.  This morning, I came across the story of Moishe Perlman, which is quoted below:

Moishe Perlman

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Submitted by his granddaughter Rivka Perlman

My grandfather, Moishe Perlman was in the concentration camp, Plaszow, for most of the Holocaust. Plaszow did not tattoo their prisoners, they simply had to memorize their numbers. One Yom Kippur, grandfather gave one of his non-Jewish workers his bread because he was fasting. As a means of thanking him, the worker made him a leather and metal bracelet with his ID number etched into it.

One night a soldier stopped my grandfather and demanded his ID number. Faced with no other choice, he slipped off his bracelet and handed it to the soldier. The next day a list of numbers were called to be shot, as a lesson to the rest of the camp. All but one person came forward. The camp ledger was checked out but the number did not exist! My grandfather looked down at his bracelet and realized that his number comprised digits that could be read upside down as well as right side up. He had given his bracelet to the soldier upside down, and the soldier dutifully copied down the wrong numbers. All the people who had been called up were killed. Thanks to a piece of leather and some crude metal I am able to have a grandfather.

It is a pretty ugly bracelet to look at, yet more precious than any other jewelry our family can own.

Apparently, Moishe Perlman’s identification number included only the numbers 1, 6, 8, 9, and 0, which read the same upside down or right side up.

My first thought was that his identification number would have been printed on a white piece of cloth and sewn to his striped prison uniform.  Many of the prisoners in the concentration camps wore ordinary clothes instead of the striped uniform, but the identification number on a white piece of cloth was required.

Some prisoners at Dachau are not wearing both pieces of the striped uniform

The photo above shows two prisoners at Dachau wearing striped pants with their identification number sewn to the pants leg.

Photo of Jewish prisoner at Plaszow not wearing a uniform

The photo above shows a Jewish prisoner, named Karp, wearing a suit, but he has a star of David and a prison number sewn to his jacket.  The normal procedure was to sew the prisoner’s identification number to the striped prison uniform, as shown in the photos below.

Prisoners at Sachsenhausen camp wearing identification on their striped uniforms

Striped uniforms with identification sewn onto the jacket was the norm in the concentration camps

Moishe Perlman was apparently a Jewish Kapo, who was supervising non-Jewish workers.  Kapos were privileged prisoners who helped the Nazis in the concentration camps.  (Note that the plural of Kapo is Kapos, which means that it is not a German word, but a word borrowed from another language.)  As a Kapo, Moishe Perlman might have been able to get by without wearing his prison number on his clothes.

Photo in the Dachau Museum in 1997 shows a prisoner not wearing an identification number

The photo above was scanned from the English language version of the Dachau Museum Guidebook for the Dachau Museum which was set up in 1965. The caption under the photo says “The youngest of the French prisoners.”

In the background of the photo is a barrack building of the type used at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. The Dachau concentration camp did not have barracks of this type, which clearly indicates that the photo was not taken at Dachau. Note also that the prison uniform does not have a badge, like those worn on the uniforms at Dachau. A prisoner in the background is wearing a yellow star on his uniform, like those worn by the Jews at Birkenau. There is no prison identification number on a white piece of cloth, because this photo obviously shows a prisoner at Auschwitz, who would have had a tattoo on his arm for identification.  Photographs displayed in the Dachau museum, that were taken in 1938, show most of the prisoners wearing a regular shirt and striped pants with their prison number worn on their pant’s leg.

According to the granddaughter of Moishe Perlman, the prisoners in the Plaszow camp had to memorize their identification numbers, since they didn’t have tattoos.  This implies that the prisoners did not have their identification number on their clothing.  The movie Schindler’s List shows prisoners with an ID number on a strip of white cloth on their clothing.

Moise Perlman was very lucky that an exception was made for him and he did not have to wear an identification number on his clothes at the Plaszow camp. Once again, a Jewish prisoner was able to survive the Holocaust because the Nazis were not vigilant in their administration of the camps.  The clip from Schindler’s List shows how inept the Nazis were.  They couldn’t do anything right.

The layout of the Plaszow camp, compared to the Schindler’s List movie set

It has come to my attention, after reading a comment on one of my blog posts, that there is a serious misconception, among today’s youth, about how the Plaszow camp actually looked and where the home of Commandant Amon Goeth was located.  Plaszow is the camp that is featured in the movie Schindler’s List.  Since Schindler’s List has been shown in American schools for years, young people think that everything in the film is the gospel truth and that the movie portrays accurate history.

Basically, the movie Shindler’s List is the story of the quintessential evil Nazi (Amon Goeth) and the one good Nazi (Oskar Schindler) who is the hero of the movie. The evil Nazi killed Jews for sport and the one good Nazi made a list of the Jews (Shindler’s List) that he was going to save from the gas chamber. In real life, both Amon Goeth and Oskar Schindler were notorious drunks and both were womanizers. They were the same age, the same height and build, and the same in their beliefs: they were both Nazis.

The Plaszow camp was located 10 kilometers outside the city of Krakow. The photo below shows an old photo of the Plaszow camp.

The Plaszow camp, with the city of Krakow in the background

The movie set was built inside the Liban quarry, where prisoners from the Plaszow camp worked, although there were no barracks inside the quarry, and the prisoners did not live inside the quarry.

The Liban quarry, where Spielberg built the movie set for Schindler’s List

The movie set was built at this end of the Liban quarry

Scene from Schindler’s List shows Amon Goeth shooting at actors on the movie set inside the Liban quarry, which is not where the  Plaszow camp was located

Path built from tombstones was part of the movie set for Schindler’s List

The actual Plaszow camp was built near the site of two Jewish Cemeteries.  According to the fictional movie Schindler’s List, the Nazis used whole tombstones to build a path through the camp.  Spielberg reconstructed this alleged path inside the Liban quarry and it was left there for tourists to see.

Would the Nazis really have made roads or paths from whole tombstones?  I don’t think so.  They would have crushed the tombstones to make crushed granite.  The paths in the main Auschwitz camp are covered with crushed brick and decomposed granite, as shown in the photo below.

Close-up of the crushed brick and decomposed granite which covers the streets of the main Auschwitz camp

In the movie, Schindler’s List, it appears that the house, where Amon Goeth allegedly shot prisoners from the balcony, was only a few feet from the Plaszow camp.  In real life, the house with the balcony was far away from the camp and behind a hill.

When I visited the site of the former Plaszow camp in 1998, my private tour guide drove us up a hill, on a rutted one-lane dirt road, thinly covered with small white granite rocks. This was the site of two Jewish cemeteries before the Nazis built a labor camp.  Amon Goeth’s house, which had a balcony on the rear of the building, was near the site of the two Jewish cemeteries, which are now long gone.

The granite quarry, near where the Plaszow camp was built, was at that time owned by a Jew, but the Nazis confiscated the property, without compensation, for their labor camp. There was a Jewish mortuary chapel near the cemetery, which the Nazis converted into a stable.

The Plaszow camp was formerly located on this spot

Shown in the background of the photo above, up on a high plateau, is the back side of the large Holocaust monument, which faces the city of Krakow. On the right side of the photo, you can see some of the buildings of the city of Krakow in the distance.

It was on this plateau that mass executions took place, according to testimony in the trial of Amon Goeth in a Polish court in 1946. According to survivors of the Plaszow camp, 8,000 bodies were later dug up and burned on pyres in order to destroy the evidence. Goeth, who was charged with responsibility for these 8,000 deaths, was convicted and hanged.

According to my tour guide, some of the barracks of the Plaszow forced labor camp were located on the terraced terrain that you see in the foreground of the photo above; portions of the barrack foundations are still visible.

The construction of the Plaszow camp began in June 1942. A guidebook, which I purchased at the Eagle Pharmacy museum in Podgorze, the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow, says this:

“According to the Heydrich plan the Plaszow camp and its sub camps were meant to constitute a stage in the concentration of the Jews deported to the East. The camp was built on the area of two cemeteries at Jerozolimska and Abrahama street. The location of the camp — near the Plaszow railroad station — made the access to communication tracks relatively easy.”

The “Heydrich plan” was a reference to the conference which SS officer Reinhard Heydrich led on January 20, 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. This is where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Today, it is not possible to walk around the former Plaszow camp because the area is now a nature preserve.  The photograph below shows a sign which stands just to the left of where the photo above was taken; the sign says that this is a nature preserve because of the rare plants, native to the area, which are located here. Because this is a protected area, Spielberg could not build a movie set here. Besides, the monument would have shown in the background.

The location of the former Plaszow camp is now a nature preserve

German soldiers picking flowers at the former Plaszow camp

The story of Amon Goeth shooting prisoners at random from his balcony is one of those events that happened, but are not true (as Elie Wiesel famously said).

Did Amon Goeth really shoot prisoners from his balcony? (Testimony from his trial)

I am blogging about Amon Goeth today in answer to comments made on a previous post about him.  As every school child in America knows, Amon Goeth was the Commandant of the Plaszow camp, near Krakow, and he shot prisoners in the camp from his balcony.  Testimony from his trial, which you can read here, proves it. Or does it?

The photo below, which shows Goeth’s house, was copied from the H.E.A.R.T website.

The three-story white house where Amon Goeth lived

Photo on H.E.A.R.T web site shows Amon Goeth on the patio of the white house

The most important testimony in Amon Goeth’s trial came from one of his former maids, Helena Horowitz. (Goeth had two maids, both named Helen or Helena.)

This quote is from Helena Horowitz’s testimony, which I copied from the H.E.A.R.T website:

Witness -Helena Horowitz (age 30, seamstress)

Witness: I arrived in the camp on the 13th of February I managed to obtain work in the camp kitchen, where I worked as a potato peeler. Right at the beginning I received 10 strokes on my back for allegedly not working hard enough. A short while after, I have been selected by the kitchen Kapo to work in the kitchen for the Germans.

I enjoyed the work there, and I have been promised that if I continue to work as at present, I will be retained there permanently. At that moment I was there in place of a maid who was taken ill with Typhus, at a later stage I have been retained to work there permanently.

At the beginning I believed this to be tremendously lucky, but at that time I have not been aware of the terrible behaviour of the accused (Amon Goeth). My first encounter with him (Goeth), was as follows;

After a dinner I threw out the bones remaining on a plate, in the evening the accused appears in the kitchen and demands to know where are the bones, I replied I threw them out. He struck me in the face, with such a force, that I fell over and he tells me that if I will not obey his orders, he will shoot me. Once in the “Red House” entering a room I noticed a rifle, or another type of weapon

Chairman: You must clarify what was this “Red House?”

Witness: This was the private residence of the accused. That is where I noticed how he held a rifle, and congratulating himself on its ability, or his expertise, in front of other Germans also present in the room, he was firing at a group of people working at a distance of maybe 200 metres from the apartment window.

Next another fact, following the liquidation of the Ghetto in Krakow, Jews were brought into the camp and on to the hill only to be shot there. After the execution a party took place there, at which I have been subjected to abuse and torment.

There were women in the party as well, and despite the fact that they were of low morals, frequently they came to my defence. He would tell them that I am Jewish criminal who must be treated without pity.

Another fact in the “Red House” he drunk round the clock, still drunk he would come to me asking if I have prepared a dinner party, which he intended to give in honour of a president called Brauling, I believe that was his name. I replied clearly to this, that I am not aware of this at all, as I have not received any instructions to this effect.  At that point he grabbed me with both his hands by my throat, choking me, as a result of which I fell unconscious to the ground.

After regaining my consciousness I asked why he did this? He replied first of all because you ask questions, and secondly because you did not carry out my order, which in reality, he never gave, because he was drinking that day round the clock.

He then told me at the time that if the dinner party will not be a success, in the evening, I will be shot. Naturally, following such a threat, I did what I could, so that the dinner party was prepared in a exemplary way. All the food used to prepare this dinner came from the camp prisoner’s kitchen.

Luckily for me the party turned out to be a success, and to my surprise, the following day he was furious again. I did not know that an additional person would turn up for the party, Goeth summoned me to him, asking why was the table laid short for one person? Without waiting for my reply, he threw a sharp knife at me, which penetrated my leg.

Another fact, in the camp there was one German called Biegel who worked in the camp commercial buying and selling administration office. At one dinner party this officer Biegel gave an order to a boy, who worked there as well, he should fetch a carriage from the stables. The boy froze when told by Biegel, he will be whipped 25 times, if he fails to carry out his order.

Naturally, the boy brought the carriage, as ordered, which Goeth learned later. Goeth summoned the boy to him and asked him who gave him the order to bring that carriage there. The boy replied, explaining the circumstances and how it arose. Goeth without listening to the boy, killed him on the spot, the boy was 20 years old.

Chairman: Have you seen this?

Witness: Yes I have been present, when it happened.

Once I have been summoned to his room in the morning, where he showed me his uniform thrown against a wall. He asked me why I have neglected and failed to clean it?

I was unable to explain this, Goeth, assuming that I was neglectful, hit me across my face, that made me more nervous, it must have shown itself on my face, as he dragged me into another room, and there beat me without a stop, damaging my ear drum. Only following the interference of his mistress, that the beating stopped.

Chairman: What was her name?

Witness: Ruth Kalber
Chairman: Not Majola?
Witness: That was how she was called in the camp

Now let’s look at the photo of the house again.

The white house where Goeth lived with Ruth Kalder

I have proof that I saw this house, since I took a photo of it when I was there.  You can see in the photo below that the house is white, although it was badly in need of a fresh coat of paint when I took the photo in 1998.

White house where Amon Goeth lived with Ruth Kalder

The balcony and the patio on the rear of the white house where Amon Goeth lived

As the photo above shows, tourists are taken to see the WHITE HOUSE on Jerozolimska street where Amon Goeth lived.  When I visited this house, it was at least a 10 minute drive from the location of the former camp.

Now let’s read the testimony of his maid again:

….Once in the “Red House”entering a room I noticed a rifle, or another type of weapon

Chairman: You must clarify what was this “Red House?”

Witness: This was the private residence of the accused. That is where I noticed how he held a rifle, and congratulating himself on its ability, or his expertise, in front of other Germans also present in the room, he was firing at a group of people working at a distance of maybe 200 metres from the apartment window.

The testimony at his trial was that Amon Goeth was firing his rifle at a “group of people” who were “maybe 200 meters from the apartment window.” And there were other Germans present, presumably SS men, and maybe even his good friend Oskar Schlindler was there.

So he was NOT killing PRISONERS in the Plaszow camp.  He was FIRING HIS RIFLE….and not at prisoners, but at a GROUP OF PEOPLE who were very close to the RED HOUSE, not the white house that tourists are shown today.

The house that is shown to tourists is behind a hill which is between the house and the camp.  What was Amon Goeth really shooting at when he lived in the Red House?  No one knows because Helena was the only witness.

The movie Schindler’s List was based on a novel entitled Schindler’s Ark.  In the book, the author says that Goeth stepped out of the front door of a “temporary residence” and shot prisoners at random. Later when he moved into a three-story white house on Jerozolimska Street, Goeth shot prisoners from the balcony, according to the novel. In the movie, Schindler’s List, Goeth is shown standing on the balcony in the rear of his house, shooting prisoners, who were not working fast enough, with a high-powered rifle.

The “temporary residence” that is mentioned in the novel Schindler’s Ark might be the RED HOUSE where Goeth stepped out of the front door and shot at something at random.  We will never know because there was only one witness to this event.

Amon Goeth was arrested by the Nazis on September 13, 1944. Oskar Schindler was arrested a few days later and interrogated by the SS as part of the Goeth investigation, according to a book by David Crowe, entitled Oskar Schindler. Crowe wrote that Schindler “did move a lot of the former Plaszow commandant’s war booty to Brünnlitz” where Schindler had set up a new concentration camp. Göth, who still considered Schindler to be his friend, visited Brünnlitz several times during the latter months of the war while on parole, according to Crowe’s book.

David Crowe wrote that Amon Goeth had been arrested after a 6-month investigation of Goeth’s tenure as Plaszow’s Commandant.  The man who investigated Goeth was Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, a Waffen-SS officer and attorney whom Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had put in charge of investigating murder, corruption and mistreatment of prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps in 1943.

Dr. Morgen’s first investigation had resulted in the arrest of Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald. Koch was convicted by a Nazi court and executed.  When Goeth realized that he was being investigated by Dr. Morgen, he sought permission from Wilhelm Koppe in the central office in Oranienburg to execute Wilek Chilowicz, who could have testified against him.
According to David Crowe’s book, Goeth asked one of his SS officers, Josef Sowinski, to prepare a detailed, false report about a potential camp rebellion led by Chilowicz and other OD men. Based on this report, Koppe sent a secret letter to Goeth giving him the authority to carry out the execution of Chilowicz and several other OD men. The execution took place on August 13, 1944; Goeth was arrested exactly a month later and charged by Dr. Morgen with corruption and brutality, including the murder of Wilek Chilowicz and several others. The office in Oranienburg did not have the authority to give an execution order; an execution could only be authorized by the Gestapo in Berlin. Dr. Morgen did not charge Goeth with shooting prisoners at random from his balcony.

Due to the fact that Germany was losing the war and the SS now had bigger problems, Goeth was never put on trial by Dr. Morgen’s court and this was the last investigation done by the SS. After the war, Dr. Morgen was arrested as a “war criminal,” and imprisoned in the bunker at the Dachau concentration camp to await his own trial.

The charges brought against Amon Goeth by the Polish government did not include the charge that he had shot prisoners from his balcony. Nor did the charges brought against him by Dr. Morgen. If Dr. Morgen had talked to Goeth’s maid and learned that Goeth had shot at a group of people, he would have included this charge against him.

Unfortunately, Dr. Morgen never talked to Helena Horowitz, the only witness to the shooting at the RED HOUSE, who testified about this alleged crime.

The photo below, which purportedly shows how close Amon Goeth’s house was to the camp, is on the H.E.A.R.T website.

The title of this photo is “View of the Plaszow camp from Goeth’s terrace”

How do we know that the photo above was taken from Goeth’s terrace.  I would like to see something in the foreground that would prove that the photo was taken from the terrace.

View of Krakow from the location of the Plaszow camp

I took the photo above, from the location of the Plaszow camp, to show how close the camp was to the city of Krakow.  Whoever took the photo of the camp from Goeth’s house should have included the steps of the house in the photo.  In other words, the old black and white photo of the camp proves nothing.

I took the photo below to show how close houses are to the location of the former Plaszow camp.

The fence around the former Plaszow camp with a house in the background

Did the Nazis use Jewish tombstones to pave roads?

Today I read this on the blog of a Derbyshire student who had recently visited the Auschwitz camp and the nearby town of Oswiecim:

“When the Nazis invaded Poland the cemetery (in Oswiecim) was destroyed and the gravestones were reportedly used as paving slabs. After the war someone rounded up as many of the gravestones as they could and rebuilt the cemetery.”

The operative word here is reportedly.  Who reported this?  The claim of gravestones being used as paving slabs is reminiscent of the scene in Schindler’s List which shows a road through the Plaszów labor camp that was allegedly built with tombstones.

Road made with tombstones

The photo above is from this website.  The caption reads:

Krakow – “Liban” quarry. Place, where prisoners from nazi concentration camp “Plaszow” was working…

But this is not real – this is only scenography made for movie “Schindler’s List”… Nevertheless – this is scary place…

Schindler’s List is a fictional movie, loosely based on a true story.  Here is a quote from a web site which explains the symbols and themes in Speilberg’s movie:

The road through the Plaszów labor camp, paved with headstones torn up from Jewish cemeteries, is a replica of the actual road that existed there. The road adds to the historical accuracy of the film but also symbolizes the destruction of the Jewish race. The removal of the headstones from the cemeteries represents the enormity of the Holocaust. Unsatisfied with simply wiping out existing Jews, Goeth, by planning the road, denies acknowledgement of many Jews’ final resting places. By removing the grave markers, Goeth in effect erases the existence of the dead. Moreover, Goeth forces the Jews in the camp to build the road, rubbing in their faces the fact that they, too, will soon be erased. The message is clear: the Nazis view the Jews as not worth even grave markers and want only to erase them from history.

Are there any photos of the “actual road that existed” at Plaszów?  There are plenty of old photos of the Autobahn, but I’ve never seen a photo of “an actual road” that was paved with tombstones.

Location of the former Plaszów concentration camp

In October 1998, I visited the site of the former Plaszów camp and took the photo above; it shows the spot where the barracks of the Plaszów concentration camp once stood. The camp was surrounded by houses on three sides and on the fourth side was a road, which is shown in the picture.

The camp Commandant, Amon Goeth, lived in a house that is out of camera range in the above picture; his former house is located to the right and behind a hill so that it cannot be seen from this spot. The fictional Schindler’s List movie shows Amon Goeth shooting prisoners from the balcony of his house although the camp cannot be seen from his house.

To reach the site of the former Plaszów camp, which is 10 kilometers from the city center of Krakow, my private tour guide drove up a hill on a rutted one-lane dirt road, thinly covered with small white granite rocks. Maybe that was the road that was allegedly paved with tombstones, and my tour guide neglected to mention it.

The construction of the Plaszów labor camp began in June 1942.  The photo below shows part of the fence around the camp.

Original fence posts around Plaszów camp

This quote is from a guidebook which I purchased at the Eagle Pharmacy museum in Krakow:

“According to the Heydrich plan the Plaszów camp and its sub camps were meant to constitute a stage in the concentration of the Jews deported to the East. The camp was built on the area of two cemeteries at Jerozolimska and Abrahama street. The location of the camp — near the Plaszow railroad station — made the access to communication tracks relatively easy.”

The “Heydrich plan” was a reference to the conference which SS officer Reinhard Heydrich led on January 20, 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. This is where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

According to my 1998 tour guide, the granite quarries near the future location of the Plaszów camp were owned by a Jew, and the Nazis confiscated his property without compensation. There was a Jewish mortuary chapel near the cemetery, which my guide told me the Nazis converted into a stable. There are many other stories of the Nazis using a Jewish place of worship as a stable.

Although crushed granite from the quarries was readily available, the Nazis allegedly desecrated Jewish graves by ripping out the tombstones, then using slabs of the broken grave stones to pave the camp road, like stepping stones in a garden.

Gravestones used for a road, as shown in Schindler’s List fictional movie  Photo Credit: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Poland/East/Malopolskie/Krakow/photo990498.htm

A street in the main Auschwitz camp that is paved with decomposed granite

Close-up of a street in the main Auschwitz camp

As shown in the two photos above, the streets of the Auschwitz main camp were paved with crushed granite, but according to the fictional Shindler’s List movie, the Nazis couldn’t be bothered with making a crushed granite road through the Plaszów camp.   Now British teen-aged students are being told the story that the Oswiecim cemetery was reportedly raided for stones to pave roads in Auschwitz.

It would have required a lot of unnecessary work to pave the streets of the Plaszow camp with unbroken headstones; it is difficult to make a level path with stones of different thickness.

On my trip to Poland in 1998, I also visited the Majdanek death camp, where I purchased a guidebook, which said that the path into the camp, called “the black path,” was paved with tombstones.

I also visited a Jewish cemetery in Krakow in 1998 and again in 2005. According to my 1998 tour guide, the cemetery adjacent to the Remu’h Synagogue in Krakow was desecrated by German soldiers who used the grave stones for target practice. The broken pieces of the stones were put into a memorial wall, which the guide said is called the Wailing Wall.

Wailing Wall in Krakow is made of broken tombstones

View of the Wailing Wall from outside the cemetery

Did Amon Goeth save more Jews than Oskar Schindler?

Amon Goeth was the Commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp; he was shown in the movie Schindler’s List as an evil monster who heartlessly shot innocent Jews from the balcony of his home.  In the movie, Goeth also beat his maid and committed many other atrocities. So why would anyone think that Amon Goeth, the epitome of evil, saved Jews during the Holocaust?

Scene from the movie Schindler’s List

After World War II ended, Amon Goeth was put on trial in Poland, but he was not charged with shooting prisoners from his balcony, nor with beating his maid.  He was charged with “liquidating” the Krakow ghetto, the Tarnow ghetto and the labor camp at  Szebnie near Jaslo.  During these liquidations, prisoners who tried to escape were shot and Amon Goeth was responsible for their deaths, although he didn’t personally shoot anyone.

When the ghettos were liquidated, some of the Jews were sent to forced labor camps, such as the Plaszow camp that is shown in Schindler’s List, but others were sent to the death camps at Belzec or Auschwitz. Amon Goeth took bribes from some of the Jews in the ghettos and then sent them to a labor camp instead of sending them to a death camp.  Goeth was arrested by the Nazis themselves on September 13, 1944 and charged by SS judge Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen with taking bribes from the Jews in exchange for not sending them to a death camp.  The movie Schindler’s List did not mention Goeth’s arrest and his absence in the camp was never explained.

How many Jews did Amon Goeth save from certain death in the death camps?  No one knows, but he was amassing a fortune from the bribes that he took, and this attracted the attention of the SS Criminal Police; he was investigated for six months before he was finally arrested.

Amon Goeth at the Plaszow camp

Goeth’s first job, after he joined the Waffen-SS, had been to liquidate several ghettos in the Lublin area. In exchange for money or other valuables such as furs and furniture, Goeth had sent Jews to labor camps instead of sending them to the death camp at Belzec.  In the eyes of the Nazis, this was a crime because all possessions taken from the Jews belonged to the Third Reich, not to SS officers like Goeth.

According to Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark, Amon Goeth was “selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jewish prisoner named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants and even restaurants in Cracow.”   Thomas Keneally explained that Chilowicz was allegedly killed by Goeth because he was a potential witness to Goeth’s crime of stealing the prisoner’s food. (The movie Schindler’s List was based on the novel Schindler’s Ark.)

So Amon Goeth, whose name is synonymous with evil for a whole generation of Americans, was actually working with the Jews to become rich during World War II.  However, it is doubtful that Goeth was stealing food from the Plaszow camp when there was a jewelry factory there as well as a furniture factory and a custom tailor shop.  The Jews who made it onto Schindler’s List stole diamonds from the jewelry factory and used them to bribe Marcel Goldman, the Jew who made up Schindler’s List.

After Goeth was arrested by the Nazis on September 13, 1944, Oskar Schindler was arrested a few days later and interrogated by the SS as part of the Goeth investigation, according to David Crowe’s book entitled Oskar Schindler.

David Crowe wrote that Schindler

“did move a lot of the former Plaszow commandant’s war booty to Brünnlitz. Göth, who still seemed to consider Schindler his friend, visited Brünnlitz several times during the latter months of the war while on parole.”

Goeth had been kept in prison in Breslau until he was released on parole on October 22, 1944 because he was suffering from diabetes. He was recuperating in an SS sanitarium in Bad Tölz near Munich when he was arrested by General Patton’s troops in 1945. His mistress, Ruth Irene Kalder, was with him at Bad Tölz and their daughter, Monika, was born there in November 1945.

Mietek Pemper, a prisoner at Plaszow who worked as Goeth’s stenographer and was privy to secret SS documents, was the main witness against Amon Goeth when he was put on trial in Poland after the war. Pemper told author David Crowe that:

“the basis of Chilowicz’s wealth came from the goods that Göth had collected from Krakow’s Jews after the closing of the (Podgorze) ghetto. Though Göth was supposed to send these valuables to the Reichsbank, he told Chilowicz to keep most of it for his (Göth’s) own expenses. These goods became the basis of Göth’s black market empire at Plaszow. Chilowicz, who handled Göth’s black market deals, always managed to skim something off the top for himself.”

According to David Crowe’s book, Wilek Chilowicz was the head of the OD, the Jewish police at Plaszow. He wrote that “Göth sought permission to murder Chilowicz and several other prominent OD men in the camp on false charges.” In all the Nazi concentration camps, the staff had to get permission from headquarters in Oranienburg to punish a prisoner, but punishment did not include murder.

Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was a Waffen-SS officer and attorney whom Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had put in charge of investigating murder, corruption and mistreatment of prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps in 1943. Dr. Morgen’s first investigation had resulted in the arrest of Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald, and his later execution by the Nazis. When Goeth realized that he was being investigated by Dr. Morgen, he sought permission from Wilhelm Koppe in the central office in Oranienburg to execute Wilek Chilowicz, who could have testified against him.

Wait a minute!  Amon Goeth, the man who shot prisoners at random from his balcony, “sought permission” to execute the Jew that he was working with to steal goods when the ghettos were liquidated?  That doesn’t make any sense at all.

According to David Crowe’s book, Goeth asked one of his SS officers, Josef Sowinski, to prepare a detailed, false report about a potential camp rebellion led by Chilowicz and other OD men. Based on this report, Koppe sent a secret letter to Goeth giving him the authority to carry out the execution of Chilowicz and several other OD men. The execution took place on August 13, 1944; Goeth was arrested exactly a month later and charged by Dr. Morgen with corruption and brutality, including the murder of Wilek Chilowicz and several others. The office in Oranienburg did not have the authority to give an execution order; an execution could only be authorized by the Gestapo in Berlin.

Oskar Schindler had a lot in common with Amon Goeth, including the fact that both were Catholic and both were arrested by the Nazis for engaging in black market activities. Both were out to get rich from the war-time economy in Poland. Both were born in the same year, 1908; both were hard drinkers and both had a “massive physique.” Goeth was Austrian, as were his fellow Nazi criminals Adolph Eichmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Adolph Hitler. Schindler was an ethnic German living in what is now the state of Moravia in the Czech Republic.

Amon Goeth  after he was arrested

After World War II ended, the American military turned Amon Goeth over to the Polish government for prosecution as a war criminal. He was brought before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Krakow. His trial took place between August 27, 1946 and September 5, 1946. Goeth was charged with being a member of the Nazi party and a member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler’s elite army, both of which had been designated as criminal organizations by the Allies after the war. His crime was that he had taken part in the activities of these two criminal organizations.

Goeth was also charged with the following crime:

(5) Simultaneously with the activities described under (1) to (4) the accused deprived the inmates of valuables, gold and money deposited by them, and appropriated those things. He also stole clothing, furniture and other movable property belonging to displaced or interned people, and sent them to Germany. The value of stolen goods and in particular of valuables reached many million zlotys at the rate of exchange in force at the time.

The last charge against Goeth, as stated above, was the crime for which he had been arrested on September 13, 1944, after an investigation by Waffen-SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen.

So how did Goeth manage to “deprive the inmates of valuables, gold and money” in connection with the liquidation of the ghettos, as stated in the charges against him by the Polish government?  This is probably a reference to the bribes that Amon Goeth took to save some of the Jews from being sent to the death camps when the ghettos were liquidated.

Oskar Schinlder saved 1,200 Jews by putting them on a List of prisoners to be taken to his factory in what is now the Czech Republic.  Amon Goeth was in charge of liquidating at least 6 ghettos.  If he saved as many as 200 Jews from being sent to Belzec or Auschwitz from each of these ghettos, then his total of saved Jews would be comparable to the number on Schindler’s List.

Maybe Steven Spielberg should make a sequel in which he would show Amon Goeth taking bribes and sending Jews to labor camps instead of sending them to certain death.  It could be entitled “Goeth’s List” as a reference to the list of Jews from whom Goeth accepted bribes to save their lives.

“Inheritance,” a documentary about Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Amon Goeth

Still photo of Monika Hertwig from the film Inheritance

Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Amon Goeth, is the subject of the 2008 PBS documentary film entitled Inheritance.  James Moll, the film maker, deliberately used bad lighting to make Monika look like a scary monster when she is actually a beautiful woman, just like her mother Ruth Irene Kalder, a movie actress who was the mistress of Amon Goeth while he was the Commandant of Plaszow, the camp that is shown in the movie Schindler’s List.

Still shot from Inheritance shows the balcony where Amon Goeth allegedly shot prisoners in the Plaszow camp

The most famous scenes in the movie Schindler’s List show Commandant Amon Goeth shooting prisoners in the camp from the balcony of his villa. In the photo above, note the patio doors underneath the balcony. The photo below shows the real life Amon Goeth standing on the patio, not the balcony.

Amon Goeth shown on the patio of his house at the Plaszow camp

Pictures don’t lie.  The photo above shows Amon Goeth, caught red-handed, with a rifle in his hand, but he is not standing on a balcony. Note the patio doors in the background.

Did the Commandant of Plaszow really shoot prisoners at random, from his balcony, just for the fun of it?  Not unless he had some special kind of rifle that could shoot bullets over a hill.

Ruth Irene Kalder, standing on the patio of the house where she lived with Amon Goeth

Monika’s mother was Ruth Irene Kalder who was Oskar Schindler’s secretary before she became the mistress of Amon Goeth; she was a former movie actress.

The front of Amon Goeth’s house at Plaszow, 1998

In the fall of 1998, I visited the site of the former Plaszow camp and my tour guide took me to see Amon Goeth’s house, which is shown in the photo above.  I asked the guide where the camp was located and she said, “You can’t see the camp from here because it is behind a hill.” The guide told me that the house next door, shown in the photo below, was actually used in the film “Schindler’s List” because it was nicer than Goeth’s real house.

House that was used as Goeth’s villa in movie Schindler’s List

The photo below is a still photo from the movie “Schindler’s List.” In the movie, the balcony of Goeth’s house is only a few yards from the camp. Visitors to Goeth’s villa today can see that the house was actually behind a hill and the camp was not visible from the balcony.

Still shot from “Schindler’s List” shows Amon Goeth shooting prisoners from his balcony

The quarry where “Schindler’s List” was filmed was not the actual location of the camp

In the film Schindler’s List, which is a fictional story based on a novel entitled Schindler’s Ark, the villa where Amon Goeth lived is shown being right next to the Plaszow camp when it was actually far away from the camp. The camp was located in a quarry, but not the quarry where Steven Spielberg filmed the movie.

Thomas Keneally, the author of the book Schindler’s Ark, explained in his novel that Amon Goeth was not arrested for shooting prisoners from his balcony because Plaszow was a labor camp at that time and it was not yet under the jurisdiction of the SS Economic Administrative Main Office in Oranienburg, which controlled the concentration camps.  A Commandant of a concentration camp was not allowed to shoot prisoners without permission from the Oranienburg office.

Tourists are told that Amon Goeth shot prisoners from the balcony of this house

The house shown in the photo above was the last of three houses where Amon Goeth lived at the Plaszow camp. He did not live in this house when, according to the novel Schindler’s Ark, he shot prisoners from the balcony.

Of course, this is not mentioned in the documentary entitled Inheritance.

In the documentary Inheritance, Monika is shown at the site of the Plaszow camp as she meets Helen Jonas, who was one of the two women prisoners who worked for Amon Goeth in his home.

Helen Jonas on the left talks with Monika Goeth at the former Plaszow camp

Commandant Amon Goeth had two Jewish housemaids who lived in the basement of his villa: Helen Hirsch and Helen Sternlicht. Helen Hirsch is now Helen Horowitz and Helen Sternlicht, who is shown in the photo above, is now Helen Jonas, formerly Helen Rosenzweig. According to a book, entitled Oscar Schinlder, written by David Crowe, Goeth differentiated between the two Helens by calling Helen Hirsch by the nickname Lena and renaming Helen Sternlicht with the name Susanna. In the movie, the two Helens are a composite of the two real life Helens, although both Helens appear together briefly in one scene.

Helen Hirsch moved to Israel after World War II ended, and became part of the close-knit circle of the “Schindler Jews” in Israel who provided the information that became the basis for Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark and Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List.

According to author David Crowe, Helen Hirsch was the older of the two Jewish maids who worked for Goeth. She had originally worked in the camp’s Jewish kitchen and was chosen by her superior, Leon Myer, to work for Goeth. 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 the maid’s quarters in the cold, damp cellar of Goeth’s villa. Living with Goeth, she said after the war, “was almost like living under the gallows twenty-four hours a day.”

David Crowe wrote that Helen Hirsch Horowitz told Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964 that “insofar as she was concerned, he (Goeth) 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.”

The story that is told in the movie about how Amon Goeth chose his housemaid is actually closer to the story of how Helen Sternlicht Jonas was selected by Goeth.

According to David Crowe’s book, the true story is as follows:

When the Germans began the construction of Plaszow in late 1942, Helen Sternlicht’s mother, Lola, and one of her older sisters, Sydel (Sydonia), were sent there to work. As the Krakow ghetto was being liquidated, Helen Sternlicht decided to try to sneak into Plaszow because she did not have the blue Kennkarte which was necessary for identification. Helen had already learned about the death trains to Belzec and was desperate to join her sister and mother at Plaszow. She hid in a milk wagon going to Plaszow but was discovered by the driver just before he arrived at the camp. 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 Goeth 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.”

Of course, the documentary does not tell you that Helen Sternlicht Jonas actually sneaked into the Plaszow camp.

When Plaszow was being closed in the fall of 1944, Oskar Schindler requested that Helen Sternlicht and her sister, Anna, be put on the female “Schindler’s List.”

In his book Oskar Schindler, David Crowe wrote that Helen Sternlicht Jonas never mentioned sexual advances toward her from Goeth. The sex scenes in the movie Schindler’s List involved Helen Hirsch.

The following quote is from the book Oskar Schindler, by David Crowe:

Mietek Pemper told me that Goeth, who had liver and kidney problems, was not attracted to women. In fact, he found the idea that Goeth was somehow sexually attracted to Helen Hirsch Horowitz pure “baloney.” She was not, he added, “Miss Krakow or Miss Poland.” Helen Rosenzweig added that Goeth 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 Goeth tried to sexually abuse her when he was drunk. However, the idea, as depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film, that Goeth was somehow infatuated with Helen Hirsch and even toyed with the idea of kissing her is totally fictitious.

In February 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum did a series of interviews with Holocaust survivors called Voices on Antisemitism. As part of this project, Helen Sternlicht Jonas was interviewed by Aleisa Fishman.

The following quote is the words of Helen Sternlicht Jonas in her interview with Aleisa Fishman:

When I arrived in Camp Plaszow, I was assigned to clean barracks. At the third day, a tall SS walked in the room, and he was Amon Goeth. At the time, I didn’t know who he was. But he looked around and he said to the woman that was in charge of us to send me to his house. And I really didn’t know what a brutal man he is, but he was a madman. He was a madman. He always, from the balcony he watched the camp, and he’s standing with the little machine gun through the window. He said, “You see those dumb heads? They’re standing, doing nothing.” He says, “I’m going to shoot.” And you could hear shooting like hell. And I could hear him whistling a happy tune, like he did so well. And this face with such satisfaction! I can’t forget that. The dreams after so many years he’s chasing me, I’m hiding. Because I lived in constant fear, constant fear, just looking at him. He was barbaric.

So there you have it — actual eye-witness testimony that Amon Goeth shot prisoners, who were behind a hill, from a house in which he didn’t live at that time.

Amon Goeth’s mug shot taken after he was arrested, August 29, 1945

In 1943, SS Judge Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen of the Haupt Amt Gericht (SS-HAG) was given an assignment to investigate and prosecute corruption and unauthorized murder at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His next assignment was to investigate the Plaszow camp. As a result of his investigation, which involved interviewing the prisoners, Amon Goeth was arrested by the Central Office of the SS Judiciary and imprisoned. Goeth was charged with stealing from the warehouses and factories at Plaszow, but not with shooting prisoners from the balcony of his home. There is no evidence whatsoever that Amon Goeth shot prisoners from his balcony, which was not even possible in real life.

After World War II ended, the American military turned Amon Goeth over to the Polish government for prosecution as a war criminal. He was brought before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Krakow. His trial took place between August 27, 1946 and September 5, 1946.

Goeth was charged with being a member of the Nazi party and a member of the Waffen-SS, Hitler’s elite army, both of which had been designated as criminal organizations by the Allies after the war. His crime was that he had taken part in the activities of these two criminal organizations. The crime of being a Nazi applied only to Nazi officials, and Goeth had never held a job as a Nazi official. In fact, at the time of Goeth’s conviction by the Polish court, the judgment against the SS and the Nazi party as criminal organizations had not yet been made by the Nuremberg IMT.

At Goeth’s trial, the Nazi party was characterized as “an organization which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, through aggressive wars, violence and other crimes, aimed at world domination and establishment of the National-Socialist regime.” Amon Goeth was accused of personally issuing orders to deprive people of freedom, to ill-treat and exterminate individuals and whole groups of people. His crimes, including the newly created crime of genocide, came under a new law of the Allies, called Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Amon Goeth were as follows:

(1) The accused as commandant of the forced labour camp at Plaszow (Cracow) from 11th February, 1943, till 13th September, 1944, caused the death of about 8,000 inmates by ordering a large number of them to be exterminated.

(2) As a SS-Sturmführer the accused carried out on behalf of SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase the final closing down of the Cracow ghetto. This liquidation action which began on 13th March, 1943, deprived of freedom about 10,000 people who had been interned in the camp of Plaszow, and caused the death of about 2,000.

(3) As a SS-Hauptsturmführer the accused carried out on 3rd September, 1943, the closing down of the Tarnow ghetto. As a result of this action an unknown number of people perished, having been killed on the spot in Tarnow; others died through asphyxiation during transport by rail or were exterminated in other camps, in particular at Auschwitz.

(4) Between September, 1943, and 3rd February, 1944, the accused closed down the forced labour camp at Szebnie near Jaslo by ordering the inmates to be murdered on the spot or deported to other camps, thus causing the death of several thousand persons.

(5) Simultaneously with the activities described under (1) to (4) the accused deprived the inmates of valuables, gold and money deposited by them, and appropriated those things. He also stole clothing, furniture and other movable property belonging to displaced or interned people, and sent them to Germany. The value of stolen goods and in particular of valuables reached many million zlotys at the rate of exchange in force at the time.

The last charge, as stated in number (5) above, was the crime for which he had been arrested by the Gestapo on September 13, 1944, after an investigation by Waffen-SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen.  Note that he was not charged with shooting prisoners from his balcony.

At his trial, Goeth’s defense was that he was a Waffen-SS soldier who had to follow the orders of his superiors. He denied killing anyone except when ordered to carry out an execution.  He called Helen Hirsch as a defense witness on his behalf.

The photograph below shows Amon Goeth as he was escorted from the courtroom after being sentenced to death. At 6 foot 4 inches tall, Goeth towered over his Polish guards.

Amon Goeth leaves courthouse after being sentenced to death

Amon Goeth was found guilty on all counts. He was hanged in Krakow on September 13, 1946, exactly two years to the day that he left the Plaszow camp after being arrested. The scene of his hanging was filmed and the film clip is included in the documentary “Inheritance.” Goeth’s body was cremated and his ashes were thrown into the Weichsel river.

Holocaust denial is punishable by five years in prison in many European countries.   But what about Holocaust exaggeration?  For that, you get recognition, millions of dollars, and an Academy Award.