There is a photograph that will make you stop breathing. It shows a man and a woman standing together in the sun laughing. She is beautiful. He is dressed in uniform. They look like any couple from the 1940s. Romantic, ordinary, but just a few hundred feet behind them, through the trees, thousands of human beings are being starved, beaten, and shot every single day.
The man in that photograph is Amon Goeth, the most sadistic concentration camp commandant in the entire SS. The woman is his mistress, Ruth Irene Kalder. A woman who loved him, defended him, and after his execution told her own daughter that he was a good man. Their story produced a granddaughter, Jennifer Teege, a woman born in 1970 who grew up not knowing her grandfather’s name.
Then, at age 38, she walked into a library and pulled a book off the shelf. She saw a photograph. She recognized her mother’s face. She read the title. And everything she thought she knew about herself collapsed. Because her grandfather, the man whose blood runs in her veins, was Amon Goeth. You are watching Nazi history. If you are new here, subscribe right now and hit the bell.
We tell the stories that school never taught you. And this one will change the way you understand evil. To understand Amon Goeth, you need to understand the city that made him. March 12th, 1938. Nazi Germany annexes Austria in an event called the Anschluss. Within hours, not days, not weeks, hours, the streets of Vienna fill with swastikas.
Jewish shop owners are dragged outside and forced to scrub pavement on their knees while crowds cheer. Men in suits stand and watch. Some take photographs. Some applaud. This is the world Amon Goeth had been waiting for his entire life. He was born December 11th, 1908 in Vienna, the only child of a prosperous book and art publisher.
On paper, it was a privileged childhood. But Goeth was raised largely by his aunt, not his parents, and grew into a cold, undisciplined, and deeply angry young man. He He in school. He clashed with authority figures. He completed high school and briefly studied agriculture, but none of it held his interest. What did hold his interest was power, domination, ideology.
By his late teens, Goeth had already joined multiple anti-Semitic youth brigades and paramilitary groups. In 1930, he formalized his commitment, joining the Austrian Nazi Party and shortly after the SS, the ideological elite of the Third Reich, a force built not on military discipline alone, but on racial fanaticism.
The SS didn’t just accept men like Goeth, it manufactured them. It took ambitious, violent, ideologically committed men and gave them uniforms, ranks, weapons, and permission to act without conscience. When Austria banned the Nazi Party in 1933, Goeth moved to Munich and continued his work underground, smuggling weapons, radios, and propaganda pamphlets back across the Austrian border, acting as a courier for the SS network.
Austrian authorities arrested him once. They released him for lack of evidence. He never stopped. After the Anschluss in 1938, he returned to Vienna openly. That same year, he married his second wife, Anna Geiger, his family remaining in Vienna while he climbed through the ranks of a system built on murder.
Here is the detail that most history books skip over. While Amon Goeth commanded the Plaszow camp and murdered prisoners from his villa balcony, he was also conducting a love affair. Her name was Ruth Irene Kalder, a young, attractive German secretary who had come to occupy occupied Poland during the war. She moved into Goeth’s villa, just meters from the camp’s barbed wire. She hosted dinners.
She dressed elegantly. She was photographed smiling beside the man who killed people for sport. Survivors later testified about the bizarre, disturbing contrast of that villa. Luxury, music, and laughter on one side of the walls, starvation and daily executions on the other. Ruth Irene Kalder had a daughter by Goeth, Monika Hertwig, born after the war.
And even after Goeth’s execution in September 1946, Ruth Irene consistently defended him to their daughter. She told Monica he was a good man, a loving man, a man who was simply following orders. Monica grew up in the shadow of that defense, confused, traumatized, and loyal to a mother who had chosen not to see what was right in front of her eyes.
Then came Jennifer Teague. In 2008, Jennifer, Monica’s daughter, born to a Nigerian student her my mother had a brief relationship with, walked into a Hamburg library and found a book about her family. She recognized her mother’s face on the pages. She read her grandfather’s name. She collapsed. “It was very distressing,” Teague later said, “to know that Amon Goeth and I are genetically linked.
” She wrote a book titled Amon, “My grandfather would have shot me.” Because by the racial laws that Goeth enforced every day of his career, her mixed-race existence would have been a crime punishable by death. Ruth Irene Kalder died by suicide in 1983 after giving an interview about her relationship with Goeth.
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That is the love story at the center of this history. That is what romance looks like when it shares a bed with genocide. World War began September 1, 1939. Goeth volunteered for the Waffen SS almost immediately and was deployed to occupied Poland from 1940 onward. First in Upper Silesia, then deeper into the Nazi colonial administration known as the General Government.
His early work was bureaucratic but foundational to mass murder, confiscating Jewish property, organizing forced resettlements, coordinating deportation transports to the east. He was efficient, reliable, and emotionally indifferent to the scale of suffering around him. In the summer of 1942, Goeth was transferred to Lublin and placed under SS General Odilo Globocnik, the architect of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi program responsible for the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions of Jews were gassed and buried in mass
graves. Goeth helped organize the roundups and railway transports that fed those camps. His performance impressed his superiors so much that in early 1943, he was given his own command. He was ordered to build a new concentration camp near Krakow. The Krakow-Plaszow Concentration Camp was constructed on the grounds of two demolished Jewish cemeteries.
Prisoners, Jews from the surrounding area, were forced to dig through gravestones and human remains to lay the camp’s foundations. When progress was too slow, Goeth ordered executions to enforce speed. On March 13, 1943, the Krakow Ghetto was liquidated in a single brutal operation. Thousands of Jews were driven from their homes at gunpoint.
The elderly, the sick, and children deemed unable to work were sent directly to extermination camps and murdered on arrival. Those who could still work were marched to Plaszow. Goeth was appointed commandant. I am your god. From his first day in command, Goeth declared to the prisoners that he was their god, that their lives and deaths belonged entirely to him.
It was not a metaphor. It was a daily operating policy. Goeth personally murdered prisoners almost every morning. From the balcony of his luxury villa overlooking the camp, he took his rifle and picked off inmates who appeared slow, weak, or simply caught his eye. He killed people for resting. He killed people for failing to salute.
He killed people for no reason that witnesses could identify, because he didn’t need a reason. He shot a Jewish cook because the soup was too hot. He had his Jewish dog handler executed, according to multiple reports, because his two Great Danes, trained to kill prisoners on command, preferred the handler’s company to his own.
He trained those dogs, named Rolf and Ralph, to tear prisoners apart, and he watched. Collective punishment was constant. If one prisoner escaped, 10 were shot. Entire work groups were executed for the actions of one individual. On multiple occasions, Goeth ordered every second or every fifth prisoner in a line to be killed as a demonstration of control.
And then there was the birthday concert. On his birthday in 1943, a transport arrived at Plaszow carrying new prisoners. Among them was Natalia Karp, a Polish Jewish concert pianist of considerable reputation. Goeth ordered her to the piano immediately. She sat down terrified and played Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor, one of the most delicate emotional pieces in the classical repertoire.
She played as if her life depended on it, because it did. When she finished, Goeth was silent for a moment. Then he told her and her sister they could live. That was the system at Plaszow. Music could save you. A wrong glance could kill you. Everything depended on the mood of one man. Survivor testimonies later estimated that between 8,000 and 12,000 people were murdered at Plaszow under Goeth’s authority.
The main killing site was a hill called Hujowa Górka, used for mass executions carried out on a near daily basis. There is one name inseparable from Goeth’s story, Oskar Schindler. The German industrialist and war profiteer cultivated Goeth deliberately, attending his parties, drinking with his staff, handing over substantial bribes. Schindler understood exactly the kind of man Goeth was, and he used that knowledge strategically.
Eventually, Goeth allowed Schindler’s Jewish workers to move to barracks outside the camp entirely, a decision that saved hundreds of lives. Schindler saved people because he understood Goeth. He knew that with the right bottle of cognac and the right amount of flattery, the commandant could be managed.
That contrast, one man using power to destroy, another using it to save, is the moral axis of one of the darkest chapters in human history. By 1944, Goeth’s position began to crack, but not because of the murders. The SS didn’t investigate the killings. They investigated the theft. Goeth had been stealing on an industrial scale. Diamonds, foreign currency, paintings, carpets, and furniture seized from murdered prisoners.
He treated their possessions as personal trophies. SS regulations stated clearly that such property belonged to the German state. Complaints were filed by fellow officers, not out of moral concern, but because Goeth had violated internal discipline and enriched himself too visibly. In September 1944, the Gestapo arrested him.
The charges made no mention of mass murder. They cited theft and violations of SS prisoner treatment protocols. As Germany collapsed militarily in early 1945, the case was quietly abandoned. SS doctors declared him mentally unfit for duty and transferred him to a sanitarium in Bad Tölz, Bavaria, where American troops found him in May 1945.
He was wearing a regular German army uniform. He denied being SS. He hoped no one would recognize him. Former Plaszow survivors recognized him immediately. They informed American authorities. The denials collapsed. In 1946, Goeth was extradited to Poland. The Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow tried him between August 27 and September 5, 1946.
The courtroom was packed with survivors who had lived under his rule. Witness after witness described daily shootings, mass executions, the murder of children, the dogs, the balcony, the rifle. Evidence confirmed he bore direct responsibility for the deaths of over 10,000 people across Plaszow, the Krakow Ghetto liquidation, the Tarnow Ghetto, and Szebnie. Goeth showed no remorse.
He claimed he had only followed orders. While survivors testified, he sat in the dock polishing his fingernails. He looked at the packed courtroom and said, “What are so many Jews doing here? They told us that none of them would remain.” The tribunal found him guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and mass murder.
The sentence, death by hanging, September 13, 1946, Montelupich prison, Krakow. Executioners prepared the rope, then they stopped. The rope was too long. Goeth stood 2 m tall, over 6 and 1/2 ft, and the drop would not be sufficient. The rope was shortened. They tried again, still wrong. It was shortened a second time. Only on the third attempt did the hanging succeed.
His last words were “Heil Hitler.” He was 37 years old. His body was cremated. His ashes were scattered into the Vistula River. The same river that flows through the city where he had murdered thousands of people. There was no grave, no memorial, no marker. His mistress Ruth Irene, the woman in that photograph, laughing in the sun, eventually took her own life in 1983.
His granddaughter Jennifer Teague wrote a book about the grandfather who would have murdered her under the very laws he enforced. History does not always close cleanly, but sometimes justice arrives, even if it takes three attempts. You just watch Nazi history. If this story moved you, if you believe this history must never be forgotten, hit the like button right now.
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