Oskar Schindler, page 30
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-Standarten-führer (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 Lu-dobójcy 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 Verän-derungsmeldungen). 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 Turner-bund). 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 Orts-gruppe 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 Himm-ler’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 Stan-darte, 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
