Amon Goeth: A Misinterpreted Sociopath?
"When you saw Goeth, you saw death."--Poldek Pfferberg
Amon Goeth first joined the Austrian Nazi party at the age of seventeen, he journeyed to Germany where he worked as guard in many failed labor camps and later in 1942 he was introduced to Oskar Schindler and became the commander of his Jewish forced labor camp. In 1994 Steven Spielberg released the film “Schindler's List”, which told the true story of Oskar Schindler using Jews to start a factory in Poland during World War Two. He witnessed the horror the Jews endured by the Nazi Party and started to save them. In the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler's List”, the character of Amon Goeth was exaggerated to better show the mistreatment of Jews in slave labor camp.
Amon Goeth was used in the film “Schindler's List” to symbolize the Nazi party as a whole, not Goeth himself. Using one individual to symbolize a worldwide terror organization gave him an obvious, negative representation. Ralph Fiennes, the actor who played Goeth made Hitler himself look like a cowering puppy. Though behind the Hollywood mask does not lay a saint; Amon Goeth was represented as a sadistic, human killing machine. Goeth can be seen as pulling the trigger on every execution in the movie. He made his appearance by shooting a female Jewish engineer who advised him that he needs to re-pour a foundation. Goeth was hardly the only member of the Nazi party employed to guard Schindler's labor camp, yet he is seen as the only member to have executed any of the workers. It is not possible with mistreatment of Jews all throughout the Holocaust that Amon Goeth was the only man with blood on his hands. Steven Spielberg used this technique to highlight Goeth's brutality, to position the audience to see him as evil, as he was symbolized as everything evil in the Nazi party. Steven D. Greydanus, a movie critic commented that “Amon Goeth's brutally was not necessarily heightened but that everyone else's...