The horror of the Płaszów camp & the tyranny of Amon Göth, one of the worst Nazi monsters

On September 5, 1946, Amon Göth, former head of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, was found guilty of imprisonment, torture, and extermination of individuals and groups of people, the first conviction of homicide at a the war crimes court. From the article:

"The horror of the Płaszów camp & the tyranny of Amon Göth, one of the worst Nazi monsters.,

Remembering Soribor, the most daring mass-escape from a concentration camp during WW2
It wasn’t just the strict rules Göth imposed on the camp that left prisoners living in a permanent state of fear, however. The commandant’s psychotic behaviour made life in Płaszów almost unbearable. Prisoners who survived the war describe a huge, foul-tempered and often drunken man who liked to shoot at least one person dead every day before he’d had his breakfast.

Seasoned prisoners who knew of the delight Göth took from killing people would scatter and hide when they knew he was near. Those who didn’t hide were always in grave danger of being shot dead on sight. Göth would kill people simply for looking him in the eye; he would kill people who he thought were walking around the camp too slowly, shooting them with a high-powered rifle from the window of his office; he would kill people for making simple mistakes, such as serving his soup too hot or not cleaning his boots properly. Nobody was safe in the hellish world the commandant created.

And then there were Göth’s dogs. Rolf and Ralf were a Great Dane and a German Shepherd that Göth had personally trained to attack prisoners on command, tearing them limb-from-limb as their screams rang out across the camp. Not even the men who looked after Rolf and Ralf were safe. When Göth began to suspect the dogs preferred one of their handlers over their master, he had the man brought before him and shot.

'As a survivor I can tell you that we are all traumatized people,' recalled Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, a young woman forced to work as Göth’s maid who witnessed firsthand his appalling sadism. 'Never would I, never, believe that any human being would be capable of such horror, of such atrocities.'

The inhuman tyranny of Auschwitz was suddenly challenged.
There was, however, a glimmer of hope for the prisoners who lived under Göth’s vile regime. That glimmer took the form of the German-Czech industrialist and Nazi Party member, Oskar Schindler. Schindler had come to Kraków to set up an enamel cookware factory in the Podgórze district of the city in 1939. Initially, he employed Jews at his factory because they were paid substantially less than Polish workers. As a businessman, it made sound financial sense to employ Jews over Poles. It also meant that Schindler was left with much more money to spend on himself and his many influential friends.

However, as the war years went on, Schindler began to realise that the Nazi Party he had once supported was an abomination, and his initial exploitation of a cheap workforce morphed into an overwhelming desire to protect his workers from monsters such as Amon Göth. The industrialist managed to ingratiate himself with Göth by showering him with flattery, gifts and bribes. So good was Schindler at laying on the charm that Göth would go on to believe they were the best of friends. In reality, Schindler despised the sadistic commandant.

Thanks to Schindler’s charm, ingenuity and willingness to hand over increasingly expensive bribes to officials such as Göth, he was able to successfully rescue his workers from being gassed in Auschwitz when the decision was taken to close down Płaszów in late 1944 as the Red Army drew ever closer. Schindler persuaded Göth to let him transfer his workers to a new, supposedly SS-run camp in Brünnlitz in his home state of Bohemia-Moravia. Unaware that Schindler was deceiving him and had no intention of running Brünnlitz as a typical concentration camp, Göth agreed, and Schindler was eventually able to save 1,200 Jews from almost certain death, though not without first having to lay out even more bribes to the commandant of Auschwitz when three hundred of his female workers were sent there instead of Brünnlitz by Göth’s successor."