My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past

by Jennifer Teege

Crumbling walls, holding up the past.

  Over a year has gone by since I first found the book about my mother in the library. Since then I have read everything I could find about my grandfather and the Nazi era. I am haunted by the thought of him, I think about him constantly. Do I see him as a grandfather or as a historical character? He is both to me: Płaszów commandant Amon Goeth, and my grandfather.

  When I was young I was very interested in the Holocaust. I went on a school trip from Munich to the Dachau concentration camp, and I devoured one book about the Nazi era after another, such as When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, A Square of Sky, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. I saw the world through Anne Frank’s eyes; I felt her fear but also her optimism and her hope.

  The history teachers at my high school showed us documentaries about the liberation of the concentration camps, and we saw people who had been reduced to mere skeletons. I read book after book, looking for answers, to find out what drove the perpetrators to act the way they did, but in the end I gave up: Yes, I found some explanations, but I would never understand it completely. Finally, finished with the subject, I concluded that I would have behaved differently. I was different; today’s Germans were different.

  When I first arrived in Israel in my early twenties, I picked up books about Nazism again. Yet even there, where I was meeting the victims and their children and grandchildren on a daily basis, more important issues soon took over. I had read so much and asked so many people about it—I felt like I knew everything there was to know about the Holocaust. I was much more interested in the here and now: the Palestinian conflict, the threat of war.

  I had thought I knew it all, but now, at nearly 40, I have to start all over.

  One of the first books I pick up is a classic from 1967, The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. I like their approach; they look deep inside each person and try to understand without judgment. In their role as psychoanalysts, they regularly dealt with patients who were active members of the SS or other Nazi organizations before 1945. These people did not appear to have any sense of remorse or shame; they and their fellow Germans continued to live their lives as if the Third Reich had never existed. Reading the book with the knowledge of my family history, I think of my grandmother, who denied Amon Goeth’s actions until the end.

  The conclusion the Mitscherlichs drew at the end of the 1960s was that the Germans had denied their past and suppressed their guilt; ideally, the whole nation should have been in therapy. That conclusion no longer applies to today’s Germans.

  I also read books by other Nazi descendants, for example by Richard von Schirach, son of Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, and by Katrin Himmler, great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS. Their family histories are of great interest to me, and I look for similarities.

  I begin to dig deeper, I question family and friends. My adoptive mother’s stepfather in Vienna, for example, served in Africa under Erwin Rommel. On long mountain walks he would tell us children anecdotes from that time, thrilling adventure stories of valiant warriors fighting in the desert, stories of how they collected the early morning dew from the tent sheets for drinking water, or how they once had to dig their car out of the sand dunes. At first we thought that our “Opa Vienna,” as we used to call him, was Rommel’s personal driver, but he put us right: He was only one of the drivers in the German Africa Corps. One day “the Limey got him,” and he would tell us stories in his Viennese dialect about his time as a prisoner of war.

  He only told us one horror story from the war: A soldier had been murdered—beheaded—and afterward his decapitated body was still running around like a headless chicken. That story always gave us the creeps.

  When it came to talking about his superior, Opa only had words of praise. Rommel, the sly Desert Fox, was a “decent” Nazi? An urban legend. What skeletons are my adoptive family hiding in the closet?

  Memories of discussions with my adoptive father are coming back to me. He was a liberal, often volunteered his services to friends and neighbors, and played an active part in the peace movement. On the subject of the Holocaust, however, he could not let go of the question of whether the number of murdered Jews was really accurate, or if it hadn’t been less. He and his friends would argue fiercely about it. My adoptive brothers and I found the discussion unnecessary and didn’t understand why this issue was so important to our father.

  Suddenly I am not so sure anymore: Am I really so different? Have we really left everything behind us? What does it mean for me, for our time, that my grandfather was a war criminal?

  My perception of time is changing. Events that happened a very long time ago are suddenly feeling very recent again. In the last few months I have read so much, have watched so many films; everything seems so immediate. Maybe it’s because, to me, this old story is now very new, very fresh. Often, when I delve into this world my grandfather inhabited, it feels as if these crimes happened only yesterday.

  And now I am standing here in this dilapidated villa in Krakow. I am not quite sure what I’m doing here, in this house, in this city. Does being here make any sense at all? I just know that I had needed to come to Krakow now. Shortly before I came I was in the hospital—I’d had a miscarriage.

  I am feeling sad and exhausted. My therapist advised me not to travel to Krakow in my condition, but I had really wanted to make this trip. First I flew to Warsaw and then I took the train on to Krakow, the city where my grandfather was infamous, where it rained ashes at the end of the war when he had the remains of thousands of people cremated.

  I want to see where my grandfather committed his murders. I want to get close to him—and then put some distance between him and me.

  On the ground floor, the old man is now showing me the living room. This is where the parties were held, he says with a sweep of his arm. Here they sat, my grandfather and the other Nazis, drinking schnapps and wine. Oskar Schindler was there, too. The old man leads me onto the patio. He explains that my grandfather had some building work done, had balconies and patios added. The view of the countryside was important to him, he says.

  The house must have been beautiful once; I like the style. Did my grandfather redesign the building himself? Was he interested in architecture like me? Why am I even thinking about whether we share the same tastes? Amon Goeth is not the kind of grandfather you want to find similarities with. The crimes he committed override everything else. In the book about my mother, I read that my grandmother used to gush about Amon Goeth’s table manners, even long after the war was over. He was a real gentleman, she said.

  Amon Goeth’s former commandant’s villa in Płaszów in 1995

  ■ ■ ■

  A concentration camp commandant who set great store by table manners.

  Emilie Schindler, Oskar Schindler’s wife, later said about Amon Goeth that he had a “split personality.” “On the one hand he played the gentleman, like every man from Vienna; on the other he subjected the Jews under his control to unrelenting terror. . . . He could kill people in cold blood and yet notice any false note on the classical records he played endlessly.”

  Amon Leopold Goeth was born in Vienna on December 11, 1908, the only child of a Catholic family of publishers. His parents Bertha and Amon Franz Goeth named him after his father and grandfather: Amon. In ancient Egypt, Amon was the ram-headed god of fertility. In Hebrew, Amon means son of my people. In the Old Testament, Amon was a king of Judaea who worshipped pagan gods and was killed by his servants.

  Amon Goeth’s parents came from a humble background but had come into money with their bookselling business. They could afford to live in a middle-class neighborhood, have a maid and eventually own a car, too. The Goeths sold religious literature, icons, and picture postcards. Later on they expanded into publishing, producing books about military history which mourned the Germans lost to World War I. Amon Goeth’s father was often away traveling for the business while his mother managed the shop, and as a young boy
Amon was often looked after by his childless aunt.

  Amon, or “Mony” as he was often called, went to a private Catholic elementary school. He wasn’t a very good student. His parents eventually sent him to a strict Catholic boarding school in the country. His biographer, historian Johannes Sachslehner, suggests that Goeth’s future “tendency to play strange sadistic jokes” might stem from experiences he had during this time, but there is no evidence to support this claim.

  Amon Goeth left the boarding school at the end of tenth grade against his parents’ wishes. At 17 he was already enthralled by radical right wing ideas and had joined fascist youth organizations. He was athletic and reckless—characteristics that impressed his new friends.

  In 1931 he became a member of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi party for short, and soon after he joined their security force, the SS.

  Heinrich Himmler’s SS, also responsible for experiments on humans and mass murder in the concentration camps, was regarded as the elite unit: “The best of the best, you couldn’t be more Nazi if you tried,” journalist Stephen Lebert once described the spirit of this corps in a nutshell. Hans Egon Holthusen wrote, in his 1966 confessional autobiography Volunteering for the SS, “This organization with their black uniform and death-head emblem was seen as elite, chic and elegant, which is why it was the organization of choice for the privileged youths who considered themselves too posh to go running around in the ‘shitty-brown colored’ outfit of the SA, the storm battalion.”

  The young Amon Goeth, unsuccessful at school and constantly pressured by his parents, was among those drawn to the idea of belonging to an elite. Later he would tell his live-in lover Ruth Irene Kalder that his parents had neglected him as a child and that he had turned his back on the middle-class values that they had tried to instill in him. It is true he returned to the family business for a short period of time, successfully publishing military history with his father. He even married a woman his parents introduced him to, although he wasn’t in love. This “arranged marriage” soon ended in divorce.

  An SS man has to start a family though, so Goeth married for a second time, this time to Anna Geiger, a sporty girl from Tyrol whom he had met at a motorcycle race. Since the aim of the marriage was above all the conception of healthy, “Aryan” offspring, the pair had to undergo a number of tests for the SS. For example, they had to have their pictures taken wearing only swimsuits to demonstrate their physical flawlessness. They were married by an SS man. Anna soon gave birth to a son, but the baby died after just a few months.

  Shortly afterward, in March 1940, Amon Goeth reported for duty with the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, and left Vienna for Poland. He was ambitious and climbed the ranks quickly. At first he was only charged with administrative tasks. An appraisal from 1941 states that he was an “SS man willing to make sacrifices, fit for service,” “SS leadership material,” and that the “overall racial image” was there, too. In 1942, in the Polish city of Lublin, Amon Goeth was given orders to establish labor camps to accommodate Jewish forced laborers.

  In 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered his infamous speech in front of top SS officials where he propagandized an ideology of hatred and contempt: “Whether other nations are living in prosperity or are starving to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture. . . . Whether or not 10,000 Russian women die of exhaustion during the construction of an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the ditch is being finished. I also want to mention . . . a very difficult subject here. . . . I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. . . . Most of you will know what it is like when 100 bodies are piled up together, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have seen this through and to have stayed decent—with the exception of human weaknesses—that is what has made us tough.”

  Amon Goeth soon went on to prove his toughness. The SS taught him how to kill.

  ■ ■ ■

  UPSTAIRS, THE OLD MAN UNLOCKS the door to the former bedroom. There are hooks in the ceiling. This is where Amon Goeth did his exercises, the old man claims. Or maybe, he adds with a wink, he had a love-swing hanging from there.

  I step onto the balcony and look out over the hills covered in brushwood. A cold wind blows in my face. It is a rainy October day. The camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by watchtowers, was located near the house. My grandfather could keep an eye on his prisoners; in the mornings it was only a short walk to work. That blurred photograph of Amon Goeth on the cover of the book about my mother—his open mouth, the bare chest, the rifle in his hand, wearing only shorts on his balcony—who took that photo? Was it my grandmother? Amon Goeth is said to have been proud of his firearms; he liked to carry them around with him. Did that impress my grandmother, or did it frighten her? What did she know? What did she suppress? I cannot imagine her living in this house, yet not being aware of what was happening in the camp. Amon Goeth is said to have beaten his maids. My grandmother must have seen or at least heard that, too. The house isn’t that big.

  After my arrival in Krakow the previous night, on my way to the hotel, I drove past Wawel Castle, the former residence of the kings of Poland, high above the Vistula. The castle was brightly lit. After the German invasion, Hans Frank, Hitler’s governor of Poland, made himself at home there, living a life of luxury surrounded by servants, employing composers and chess players. I can imagine the life he had up there, how powerful he must have felt residing in that grand castle with its view over Krakow.

  By comparison Amon Goeth’s house looks very normal, almost modest. I had imagined it to be bigger, more ostentatious. I find it difficult to imagine that glamorous receptions were held here and that its owner was a man who was master of life and death for thousands of people. A man who thrived on having absolute power, and who wielded and relished this power in the most cynical way.

  ■ ■ ■

  Amon Goeth on the balcony of his villa

  “I am your God,” said Amon Goeth to the prisoners in his inaugural address as commandant of the Płaszów camp. “I dispatched 60,000 Jews in the district of Lublin. Now it’s your turn.”

  In the Polish city of Lublin, Amon Goeth had worked for Odilo Globocnik, an SS man known for his brutality, whom Heinrich Himmler had charged with killing the Jews in occupied Poland. In December 1940, Globocnik updated Hans Frank on the goal he had set out with these words: “In this one year, I have obviously not been able to eradicate all the lice and all the Jews. But I am convinced that in the course of time it can be achieved. . . .”

  When the “Final Solution” was being strategically coordinated at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the deportation and mass murder of Polish Jews was already in full swing.

  Goeth’s superior Odilo Globocnik was co-responsible for the construction of concentration camps and the installation of gas chambers. In consultation with Adolf Eichmann he planned the factory-style murder of millions of people. In Poland, extermination camps were being commissioned: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

  Soon Odilo Globocnik charged Amon Goeth with the liquidation of the ghettos. Liquidation meant rounding up the able ghetto population into forced labor; those too weak or too ill to work were shot, including children and the elderly. Historian Johannes Sachslehner describes the process as “blood-thirsty manhunts following a proven formula. . . . In the thick of it is Amon Goeth, who is soon entrusted with leading roles.”

  If he hadn’t done so already, Goeth surely now discovered the lucrative side of genocide: Jews who offered him valuables such as furs, fine china, or jewelry were not killed immediately but were “allowed” to go to the labor camps.

  Around this time Amon Goeth also started to drink more and more heavily.

  Soon the ambitious Goeth was given more tasks: He was to lead the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and establish a forced labor camp in Płaszów. In letters to his friends and to his father in Vienna he said, “Now I am t
he commandant at last.”

  On March 13 and 14, 1943, he ordered the clearance of the Krakow ghetto. Around 2,000 people are killed during these two days; a further 4,000 are deported, many to Auschwitz.

  The survivors were taken to Amon Goeth’s realm: Płaszów. Almost 200 acres in size, the camp was first a labor camp and later a concentration camp. The German occupiers had built it on Jewish cemeteries. They built barracks on top of the demolished graves and used the gravestones to pave the streets in the camp.

  ■ ■ ■

  THE OLD MAN LEADS ME into the basement. “This is where the commandant stored his wine,” he says. And then he points proudly to a rusty tub: “Amon Goeth’s authentic bathtub.”

  Opposite the wine cellar and next to the kitchen was the maids’ room. So this was Helen’s place, here in the basement—Helen Rosenzweig, Amon Goeth’s former Jewish maid from the American documentary I watched on TV the day after I discovered the book.

  My mother met Helen here in this house. Ultimately it was a very sad encounter: Helen was shocked because my mother had such a striking resemblance to Amon Goeth. And even though Helen and my mother both try very hard, they cannot form a relationship with each other; history stands between them. Helen sees Amon Goeth in my mother.

  In the film, when my mother tries to find an explanation for Amon Goeth’s actions, Helen snaps angrily: “He was a monster. He was smiling and whistling when he came back from killing. He had the urge to kill, like an animal. It was obvious.”

  My brother Matthias has given me the documentary on DVD so that I can watch it again and again. At first I focused only on my mother and didn’t pay much attention to Helen. The film begins with my mother writing a letter to Helen asking her for a meeting. In the letter she says that she imagines Helen might be afraid of meeting her—she herself is scared to meet Helen.

  At the start, I wasn’t so concerned about the actual contents of the letter. All I could think was, why does my mother spend so much time writing a letter to Helen? Why doesn’t she write to me? Why does she share Helen’s pain but not that of her own child?