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

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