Read My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past for Free Online Page B

expect the worst. His two dogs, a Great Dane and an Alsatian mix, were called Rolf and Ralf, and he trained them to attack people on his command.
    In 1944, Amon Goeth had children from the Płaszów camp herded onto trucks—to be transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He ordered waltz music to be played over the loudspeakers in order to drown out the desperate cries of their parents.
    In other words: Amon Goeth was perfect Hollywood material. Just as Adolf Eichmann was for many years the epitome of the callous, bureaucratic mastermind behind the scenes, denying any responsibility, Amon Goeth serves as the grotesquely excessive personification of the sadistic murderer. The image of the trigger-happy concentration camp commandant, accompanied by his two dogs trained to tear humans apart—it seems like a grim archetype, like a template for Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue . Steven Spielberg portrays Amon Goeth as a twisted psychopath, cruel, and at the same time almost laughable.
    Other, big- and small-screen documentaries about Amon Goeth are often accompanied by ominous background music, but actually his crimes don’t call for any embellishment.
    Amon Goeth’s crimes were so reprehensible that it seems easy enough to distance oneself from them. In his dissertation about concentration camp commandants, the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev writes: “They were by no means Germans like all the other Germans, not even Nazis like all the other Nazis. They are not characterized by the banality of evil, but much more so by their inner identification with this evil. Most of the concentration camp commandants joined the Nazi movement in its early days . . . ; they had been vehement supporters of these radical rightwing politics right from its beginnings. The majority of Germans never even joined the Nazi party.”
    But Segev’s theory might be too simple after all: The late Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary critic and Holocaust survivor, had good reason to oppose the fact that famous Nazis such as Adolf Hitler are usually portrayed purely as monsters. “Of course Hitler was a human being,” Reich-Ranicki said, adding, “What else would he have been? An elephant?”
    It is very easy to demonize the prominent Nazis, to treat them like animals in a zoo: Look, aren’t they cruel and perverted? It offers a way out of having to deal with one’s own actions, one’s family’s actions—or indeed those of the many people who joined in on a small scale, those who no longer greeted their Jewish neighbors, and those who looked away and walked past when Jews were being beaten up in the streets and their businesses were destroyed.
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    THEY CALLED GOETH THE “BUTCHER OF PŁASZÓW.” I keep on asking myself how it was that he became that way. I don’t think that it was his childhood or even his hatred of the Jews. I think it was much more banal than that: In this world of men, killing was a contest, a kind of sport. It reached the point where killing a human being meant nothing more than swatting a fly. In the end the mind goes completely numb; death has entertainment value.
    I have a terrible image in my head, which used to haunt me even in my sleep: It is said that Amon Goeth once caught a Jewish woman who was boiling potatoes in a large trough for the pigs—just as she, driven by hunger, ate one of the potatoes herself. He shot her in the head and ordered two men to throw the dying woman into the boiling water with the potatoes. One of them refused, so Goeth shot him, too. I don’t know if this story is true or not, but I cannot get the image of this half-dead woman thrashing around in the boiling water out of my head.
    These stories of how Amon Goeth considered himself superior, how he played music to accompany executions, used scarves and hats as props for his killings, how he played the master in his pathetic little villa—it would be comical if it wasn’t so sad. He was a narcissist—but not just in the