Amon Göth

Amon Leopold Göth was an Austrian SS functionary and war criminal who served as the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Born in Vienna to a family in the book publishing industry, he joined a Nazi youth group at seventeen and was a member of the antisemitic paramilitary Heimwehr before joining the Austrian Nazi Party in 1930. He also entered the Austrian SS that year.

After the Austrian Nazi Party was outlawed in 1933, Göth fled to Germany, where he smuggled radios and weapons into Austria and acted as an SS courier. He was arrested twice by Austrian authorities but escaped custody after the failed Nazi coup attempt that killed Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, fleeing to the SS training facility at Dachau. He temporarily left the SS and Nazi Party until 1937, then returned to Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938 and resumed his activities.

He married in an SS civil ceremony after passing physical tests required by the SS. During the war, he served as an action leader and financial officer in East Upper Silesia, gaining a reputation as an administrator in Nazi efforts to isolate and kill Jews. He was commissioned as an SS officer in 1941. Transferred to Lublin in 1942, he joined the staff of Odilo Globočnik as part of Operation Reinhard, responsible for rounding up victims for the extermination camps.

Trial and execution

In February 1943, he was assigned to oversee the construction of the Kraków-Płaszów camp, built on the grounds of two old Jewish cemeteries using slave labor. After the Kraków ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, he became the camp’s commandant, telling prisoners, “I am your god.” He was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland and convicted of personally ordering imprisonment, torture, and extermination, as well as homicide—the first such conviction at a war crimes trial. He was executed by hanging near the former site of the Płaszów camp.