Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… Austrian-born lieutenant in the SS who is carrying out the final solution. He has arrived in Plaszow, a suburb of Krakow, to oversee the construction of a new concentration camp. He often lounges on his balcony of his Plaszow villa with rifle close at hand so that if he feels so compelled, he can shoot unsuspecting Jews below in the square. For Goeth, this is but a form of hunting, and Jews are fair game.
Personality… callous and pitiless. For Goeth, Jews are no better than rats, sub-humans that are best when they are dead. He believes that it would be “cruel” to give them hope – better to never let them out from under the heel of his boot. His views are firmly in line with the Nazi dogma, and he carries out his orders with great enthusiasm. Nobody in Krakow dares confront him, at least not openly – which is why factory owner Oskar Schindler is so careful to ply Goeth with bribes and expensive gifts as he tries to save his Jewish workers.
Get to Know him in...
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The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.
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The acclaimed bestselling classic of Holocaust literature, winner of the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and the inspiration for the classic film—“a masterful account of the growth of the human soul” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). A stunning novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden—Schindler’s Jews—to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.
