Amon Leopold Göth (also spelled Goeth) was an Austrian SS officer who ran the Płaszów camp on the southern edge of Kraków from February 11, 1943, until September 13, 1944. In the late summer of 1946 he stood trial in Kraków before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland, a court set up to try the leading German war criminals surrendered to Poland. The indictment held him responsible for the deaths of about 8,000 inmates of the camp he commanded, for about 2,000 deaths during the closing of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943, for further deaths in the closing of the Tarnów ghetto and the Szebnie labor camp, and for taking property worth many millions of złoty from the people held in his charge.
On September 5, 1946, the tribunal found him guilty of the crimes alleged and sentenced him to death, with the loss of his public and civic rights and the forfeiture of all his property. The President of the State National Council declined to pardon him. He was executed in Kraków on September 13, 1946, two years to the day after the SS had arrested him and ended his command. In reaching its judgment the court tried a foreign national under a Polish decree for acts done on Polish soil, rejected the defense that he had only followed orders, declared the Nazi Party and the Waffen SS criminal organizations, and stated that the destruction of Jews and Poles it had heard described bore all the characteristics of genocide.
Göth was born in Vienna on December 11, 1908, and grew up in the city. In 1928 he left agricultural studies after two semesters and took work at a Viennese publishing firm that put out military titles. He had no interest in books. By then he had already found his way into the National Socialist movement.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1930. About two years later he entered the Austrian SS, where he carried the membership number 43 672 and rose to the rank of SS-Scharführer, a junior noncommissioned grade. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 he rejoined the party in the enlarged Reich. He was called up in March 1940 and served from that year in the Waffen SS, the armed branch of the organization. By 1941 he had been commissioned as an SS-Untersturmführer, the lowest officer rank.
The war opened a career for him in the territory Germany had seized from Poland. His first posts there were with the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, the SS office that handled ethnic German settlers, in Cieszyn and Katowice in the annexed southwest of the country. In 1942 he was transferred to the Lublin district of the General Government, the occupied zone of central Poland, where he came under the authority of the district's SS and Police Leader, a fellow Austrian.
That officer directed what the SS called Operation Reinhard, the plan begun in the autumn of 1941 to murder the Jews of the General Government. His time in the Lublin district did not form a separate charge at his trial. It ended with a personnel conflict with a senior officer on the district staff, and in early 1943 he was moved to the Kraków district.
On February 11, 1943, on the order of the SS and Police Leader of the Kraków district, Göth was appointed commandant of the camp at Płaszów. The SS and police leadership in Kraków had set up the camp in October 1942 as a forced labor camp for Jews. Göth's first task was to enlarge it.
The camp grew steadily through his tenure. From the autumn of 1943 it took in Jews moved from other ghettos in southern Poland, and unlike the largest German camps it held mainly Jewish families. Jewish women brought from Hungary and Slovakia passed through it in 1944 on the way to Birkenau. A separate section held Poles, some of them people arrested for minor offenses and others the inhabitants of villages that the Germans had punished collectively. Until 1944 most of the guards were Ukrainian auxiliaries trained at the Trawniki camp. In January 1944 Płaszów was formally converted into a concentration camp, and at its peak that year it held more than 20,000 people at one time.
The court found that Göth, as commandant, caused the deaths of about 8,000 inmates, many of them on his orders. It also found that a number of the deaths were the result of acts he committed on his own initiative rather than under any instruction from above. The court spoke of the dead by number and by group, as the Jews and Poles held in the camp.
The second charge concerned the Kraków ghetto, which the SS and police closed beginning on March 13, 1943, a month after Göth took up his post. The indictment charged that he carried out the operation on behalf of SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase, the chief of staff of the SS and Police Leader in Kraków and the officer charged with supervising Operation Reinhard in the district. The court found that about 10,000 people were deprived of their liberty in the operation and that about 2,000 died. Those judged able to work were marched to Płaszów, among them the surviving members of the Jewish council and the ghetto's Jewish police. Others were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in two transports that arrived on March 13 and March 16.
The third charge dealt with the closing of the Tarnów ghetto, which began on September 3, 1943. For Tarnów the court did not fix a number. It found that an unknown number of people died, in the town itself, in transport, and in other camps, chiefly Auschwitz.
The fourth charge concerned the labor camp at Szebnie, in southeastern Poland. Between September 1943 and February 3, 1944, the court found, Göth closed the camp by ordering its inmates killed or deported, causing several thousand deaths.
The fifth charge was one of plunder. The court found that he seized valuables, gold, money, clothing and furniture from people who had been deported or interned, and sent goods back to Germany. Their value ran to many millions of złoty.
Göth's command ended on September 13, 1944. He was on leave in Vienna when an SS and police court had him arrested. The charges against him in that proceeding concerned his treatment of prisoners and, above all, the property he had taken from Jews: money and valuables he had kept for himself instead of passing them to his superiors, which the SS treated as damage to the economy of the Reich, and food meant for the camp that he had sold. The German case against him moved slowly, and he never appeared before a German court.
Płaszów outlived his command by only a few months. As Soviet forces approached in the summer of 1944 the SS began moving prisoners to camps in Germany and Austria and deporting others to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The last prisoners were sent to Auschwitz in January 1945 for evacuation further west.
United States forces took Göth into custody in May 1945, at Bad Tölz in Bavaria, and former prisoners identified him as the commandant of Płaszów. In 1946 the American authorities in Germany handed him over. He was brought to Kraków and held there until his trial and sentence.
Prosecutors in Kraków spent the months after his transfer building the case. They summoned former prisoners of Płaszów to give evidence, and more than forty came forward. Some of those who did not appear cited their health. Among the witnesses was a former prisoner who had worked in the camp administration and who gave a detailed statement to the investigating judge. The investigation produced a large body of documents, among them witness lists and statements, a description of the camp, and the records of interrogations of German prisoners of war.
One of the two prosecutors drafted the indictment, which was lodged on July 30, 1946. It named Göth as an Austrian subject, a member of the Nazi Party and of the Waffen SS, and, at the time of the crimes, an SS-Sturmführer and later SS-Hauptsturmführer. He had held no office in the party and was an ordinary member. The five charges set out the deaths at Płaszów, the closing of the Kraków and Tarnów ghettos, the closing of Szebnie, and the seizure of property. The prosecution argued that the acts violated the decree of August 31, 1944, the Polish Criminal Code's provisions on murder, grievous bodily harm, torture, unlawful detention and the appropriation of property, and Article 46 of the Hague Regulations, and that they amounted to crimes against humanity.
The trial opened on August 27, 1946, in the District Court building in Kraków. The courtroom held several hundred people, but more wanted admission than it could seat, and the proceedings were carried by loudspeaker to those left outside.
The bench was led by the president of the Special Court in Kraków, sitting with the president of the Court of Appeal in Warsaw and a judge of the Special Court in Katowice. Four lay members, all deputies of the State National Council, completed the panel. Two prosecutors presented the case. Göth was defended by two Polish lawyers appointed by the tribunal. He was allowed to comment on the evidence as the witnesses testified, and at the close he made a defense speech of his own.
The hearings ran from August 27 to August 31 and resumed from September 2 to September 5. Göth denied some of the facts put to him, shifted responsibility for others, and tried to reduce the scale of the rest. He admitted that he had been strict and demanding toward the prisoners but insisted that he had treated them fairly. He said that he was a subordinate who had carried out the orders of superiors, and that political and moral responsibility lay with them. He said he had not known the consequences of the orders he carried out. He disputed the numbers of the dead, relying on census figures and official lists, and argued that witnesses could not have seen what they described.
His lawyers raised three lines of legal defense. The first was superior orders: as a soldier, he had acted on command. The second was that the penalties imposed in the camp fell within his disciplinary authority as commandant under German camp regulations. The third was that the decree of 1944 applied only to Polish subjects and could not reach an Austrian.
The tribunal delivered its judgment on September 5, 1946. It found Göth guilty of the crimes alleged in all five charges and sentenced him to death, together with the loss of public and civic rights and the forfeiture of all his property. The sentence rested on Article 1 §1 of the decree of August 31, 1944, as amended on February 16, 1945, concerning the punishment of fascist-Hitlerite criminals guilty of murder and ill-treatment of the civilian population and prisoners of war, read with Articles 47 §1a and 52 §2 of the Penal Code.
The court dealt with each defense in turn. On superior orders, it applied Article 4 of the decree, which provided that acting under an order or under duress from the enemy did not exempt a person from criminal responsibility, and it added that many of the crimes had been committed on his own initiative. It rejected the claim that the deaths in the camp were a matter of internal discipline. It held that the acts had no military justification, that they violated the laws and customs of war, and that a plea of military necessity was therefore inadmissible. On nationality, it relied on Article 3(1) of the Polish Criminal Code, which applied Polish law to anyone who committed a crime on Polish territory, whatever that person's citizenship.
The tribunal also declared the Nazi Party and the Waffen SS to be criminal organizations. It went further on the nature of the crimes. The extermination of Jews and Poles, it said, "had all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term," and it had also destroyed the cultural life of the people it struck.
After the judgment the prosecutor asked the tribunal for its opinion on clemency. The tribunal advised that Göth did not deserve it, because it had found no mitigating circumstances. Göth appealed to the President of the State National Council, who declined to exercise the power of pardon.
He was executed in Kraków on September 13, 1946. The prosecutor of the Special Criminal Court in Kraków announced the execution in a public notice.
The law under which Göth was tried predated the end of the war. The Polish Committee of National Liberation issued its decree on the punishment of fascist-Hitlerite criminals on August 31, 1944. Article 1 made punishable by death anyone who, acting on behalf of the German occupation authorities, took part in killing, ill-treating or persecuting civilians or prisoners of war. Article 4, in its original text, closed off the defense of superior orders. The decree was amended on February 16, 1945.
The timing of the Göth case mattered to its law. His indictment was lodged before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg gave its judgment, and the Polish judgment was delivered only weeks ahead of Nuremberg's. Polish law at that point had no provision on membership in a criminal organization; one was added by a decree of December 10, 1946. When the Kraków court declared the Nazi Party and the Waffen SS criminal, then, it did so ahead of both the Nuremberg finding and its own statute, and the sentence rested on Article 1 §1, not on membership. Nuremberg later limited its finding on the party to the Leadership Corps, which meant that Göth's ordinary party membership did not fall within it, while his membership of the Waffen SS did.
Göth contested much of the case against him. He denied many of the acts charged and disputed the numbers of the dead, and the defense argued that the witnesses could not have seen what they described. More than forty former prisoners came forward to give evidence, and the tribunal rejected those arguments. The numbers of the dead in its judgment are the court's own: about 8,000 at Płaszów, about 2,000 in the Kraków ghetto, several thousand at Szebnie, and an unknown number at Tarnów.
The legal points the defense raised were also argued in court and decided there. The tribunal rejected the pleas of superior orders, disciplinary authority and military necessity, and the argument that a Polish decree could not apply to an Austrian. The one finding with a narrower reach than the court's own words concerns the party: the court declared the Nazi Party criminal as a whole, but under the later Nuremberg judgment only the Leadership Corps was criminal, and Göth, an ordinary member, held no party office.
December 11, 1908: Amon Leopold Göth is born in Vienna.
1928: He leaves agricultural studies after two semesters.
1930: He joins the Nazi Party.
About 1932: He joins the Austrian SS.
March 1940: He is called up and serves from that year in the Waffen SS.
1942: He is transferred to the Lublin district.
February 11, 1943: He is appointed commandant of the Płaszów camp.
March 13, 1943: The closing of the Kraków ghetto begins.
September 3, 1943: The closing of the Tarnów ghetto begins.
September 1943 to February 3, 1944: The Szebnie labor camp is closed.
January 1944: Płaszów becomes a concentration camp.
September 13, 1944: Göth is arrested by an SS and police court in Vienna and loses his command.
May 1945: United States forces take him into custody at Bad Tölz.
1946: He is handed over to Poland.
July 30, 1946: The indictment is lodged.
August 27 to September 5, 1946: Trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków.
September 5, 1946: He is found guilty and sentenced to death.
September 13, 1946: He is executed in Kraków.