The 1910s

The 1920s

The 1930s

The 1940s

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

Speer Speer, Albert (1905-81), German architect and public official, born in Mannheim; minister for armaments and war production during World War II (1943-45); received architectural license 1927; joined Nazi party 1931; soon after became personal architect to Adolf Hitler; designed parade grounds at Nuremberg for party rallies; as war minister, devised system of conscript and slave labor, mainly supplied by concentration camps; served 20 years in Spandau Prison, Berlin, after war; author of 'Inside the Third Reich' (1970).   Himmler Himmler, Heinrich (1900-45), German officer and political leader, born in Munich, Germany; joined National Socialist party 1919; deputy leader 1927 and Reich leader of Schutzstaffel (SS) 1929; chief of Gestapo and carried out "purge" 1934; minister of interior and chief of Reich administration, also head of People's army; killed self when captured by British. German National Socialist (Nazi) official, notorious as the head of the Nazi police forces. He joined the party in 1925, and from 1926 to 1930 he was its director of propaganda. In 1929 he became chief of the Schutzstaffel (known as the SS, or Black Shirts), an elite military force of the party, and in 1934 he won control of the Gestapo (secret police). As head of all German police forces from 1936 to 1945 he carried out a ruthless program for the extermination of Jews and the suppression of all opposition to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Hitler appointed him minister of the interior in 1943, and in 1944 Himmler became director of home-front operations and chief of the German armed forces operating within the borders of Germany. In April 1945 he was captured by the British army. He was scheduled to stand trial with the other German leaders as a major war criminal, but committed suicide shortly after his arrest. Goebbles Goebbels, Paul Joseph (1897-1945), German propagandist and politician, born in Rheydt, and educated at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He joined the National Socialist (Nazi) party in 1922 and began directing the students who entered the organization. In 1925 Goebbels met the party leader Adolf Hitler. In 1926 he was made gauleiter, or party leader, for the region of Berlin, and in 1927 he founded and became editor of the official National Socialist periodical Der Angriff (The Attack). He was elected to the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1928 and a year later was chosen as propaganda leader of the Nazi party, in which capacity he became the apostle of unreasoning hatred of the Jews and other "non-Ayran" groups such as the Slavs. His work as a propagandist materially aided Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In that year, Goebbels was appointed Reichsminister for propaganda and national enlightenment. From then until his death, Goebbels used all media of education and communications to further Nazi propagandistic aims, instilling in the Germans the concept of their leader as a veritable god and of their destiny as the rulers of the world. In 1938 he became a member of the Hitler cabinet council. Late in World War II, in 1944, Hitler placed him in charge of total mobilization. On May 1, 1945, as Soviet troops were storming Berlin, Goebbels committed suicide. The Goebbels Diary for 1942-43, found among his papers, was published in English in 1948. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June, 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference is one of the internationally acclaimed documents that not only came into being at a crucial point in the history of troubled Europe and of the world, but serves as a point of reference to the turnout of the events after the World War I. The document addressed measures against Germany for its prominent role in the WWI; it contained reparations that Germany was to pay to the victorious countries that fought on the side of the Allied Powers and enforced Germany to accept the blame as the sole cause of the war. The conference itself opened on 18 January, 1919 and came to a close on 21 January, 1920 with the inaugural General Assembly of the League of Nations. Though the conference was attended by diplomats from more than 30 countries: Kings, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Advisers and Journalists with different interests, the actual outcome and basic decisions contained in the treaty were determined by the five major victorious powers in the WWI (United States of America, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan). The final signing of the document was later left due to the “Big Four” (Britain, France, US and Italy) due to the “unhappy compromise” among the victorious powers. Japan had to shun the conference due to issues it deemed as unfair and unequal to the Japanese nation. Even at that, Italy could only play the role of a nominal signatory. Representation of the victorious powers was made by Woodrow Wilson, US President, Georges Clemenceau, France Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando, Italian Prime Minister and Saionji Kimmochi, who led the Japanese delegate. Russia being a major European power and a formidable member of the Entente (or Allies) should have been included in the conference; she was however excluded because she had signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1918 after losing a large fraction of her land to Germany in a defeat. The Trial at Nuremberg During World War II the Allies were determined that both Hitler and the men around him should be punished for starting World War II and the crimes they had committed while they were waging it. These crimes included the extermination of the Jewish people of Europe known as the Holocaust or the Shoah. After some debate it was decided that the fairest way to proceed was the public trial of the men and organizations who committed the crimes. At the most famous of these, the Nuremberg Trial, 22 individual Nazi officials, and seven groups that had been organized to carry out the Nazi programs, were placed on trial for their crimes. Martin Bormann was tried in absentia. Additionally Robert Ley was charged as a defendant but committed suicide before the trial, and Gustav Krupp, who was named in the indictments, was found to be medically unfit to stand trial. Many of the leading Nazis, such as Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, were not present at the Nuremberg Trial because they has committed suicide at the end of the war. The first step was to agree upon the rules for the trial. They adopted a combined procedure of the four Allies (the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union). The defendants were given the right to be represented by counsel, call witnesses, and present evidence in their own behalf. They were not given the right to a jury trial which was part of the law only in Great Britain and the United States. Finally, after all the evidence was presented, the defendants were permitted to make statements to the court without being sworn or cross-examined. The next step was the indictment, a statement of the charges against each defendant. The Allies charged the defendants with four types of crimes: conspiracy against peace, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Allies stated that the Nazis, when they started the war, had deliberately broken the treaties that Germany had signed. The Holocaust was included as part of the crimes against humanity. Not all of the defendants were charged under all counts of the indictment. Doenitz, Raeder, and Schacht were not accused of participating in the Holocaust. The trial was held before a panel of judges selected by the Allies called the Tribunal and presided over by a British judge named Lord Lawrence. The Allies presented their evidence which consisted almost entirely of the words and documents of the Nazis themselves. During the investigation that led up to the trial, the U.S. and British investigators had discovered literally tons of documents which proved the charges against the defendants. The decision was made, therefore, to rely on the words of the defendants themselves in the trial. Certain witnesses were presented to flesh out the evidence. This is especially true in the case against the concentration camps where witnesses ranging from a member of the French parliament -- who had been imprisoned as a slave laborer at Auschwitz -- to an American army officer who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald testified. Several Nazi officers also testified about how the Holocaust occurred. Of all the belligerents in World War II, Japan was the only nation that used both chemical and biological weapons in battle.  The other major combatants possessed stores of chemical weapons, (cw) but did not commit any on the battle field.  Some countries either possessed the means for producing biological weapons (bw), or had crash programs seeking to develop such unconventional tools of war.  However, none were employed against the enemy before Japan surrendered in mid-August 1945. Japan, under the growing influence of ultra-nationalist militarists, began research on both bw and cw weapons in the late 1920s.  Although many of the ultra-nationalists who were in a position of influence within the Military endorsed investigation of the possibilities of utilizing germ and chemical warfare in future conflicts, the man most responsible for launching Japan’s  bw and cw programs was a young Army doctor, Shiro Ishii.  A charismatic, charming, unscrupulous, amoral, but brilliant researcher, Ishii held both  medical and Ph.D. degrees from Kyoto Imperial University, one of Japan’s premier institutions of higher learning.  Ishii achieved a meteoric rise in the Army, gaining promotion to higher rank every three years during his military career.  At the time of Japan’s surrender, he held the rank of Lt. General, the highest rank achievable in the Medical Corps.  From the beginning of his military career, Ishii enjoyed the patronage of key figures within the Japanese High Command.  As such, he avoided virtually any supervision of his activities, and was free of any restraint in conducting the most sordid investigations in pursuit of the development of bw and cw weapons. From the start, Ishii engaged in involuntary human experiments.  There is clear evidence that he experimented on humans at the Medical Military College in the Shinjuku district in Tokyo.  In the mid-1980s, a construction site on the grounds of the former headquarters of the Japanese Military High Command, unearthed human bones, including several skulls with bullet holes.  The bones were discovered on the very spot where the Medical Military College was formerly located.  Forensic experts identified the bones as of mongoloid origin, but they definitely were not of Japanese background.  Further investigation was prohibited by the Japanese Government. Ishii came into his own in Manchuria shortly after the Japanese seized control of the region in 1931-32.  With the protection of the Kwantung Army High Command (also known as the Kanto Army), the Kampeitei (secret Japanese police), and local police collaborators, Ishii engaged freely in extensive research on innocent victims in his laboratories in the city of Harbin, later in Beiyinhe, and still later in an extraordinary facility in Harbin’s suburb known as Ping Fan (g).  It was in the last facility that Ishii began construction in 1936 of  the world’s premier bw research center.  It was completed in 1939, contained more than one hundred fifty buildings, including two secret prisons and three crematoria, and was the largest bw research center in the world. Each year hundreds of prisoners were fodder for  fiendish experiments.  They were exposed to every known disease.  These  ranged from anthrax to yellow fever.  Some were used for hyperthermia experiments.  Others were forced to endure gangrene experiments; and still others were forced to engage in sexual intercourse with individuals known to be infected with venereal .                                  diseases. They were then monitored as the disease took its toll on the victims. Who were the victims of these heinous experiments?  They were captured communist partisans, ordinary criminals, political dissidents, those who were mentally handicapped but physically fit, and, when candidates among these groups were scarce, the secret police would pick up the poor, the homeless, off the streets in cities throughout occupied China and Manchuria.  The police would be given orders to send prisoners to Harbin/Ping Fan by “Special Delivery.”  Everyone engaged in this sordid business understood that “Special Delivery” was the code words for new human experimental prey.  Prisoners to be tested were of various nationalities.  The overwhelming majority were Han Chinese.  However, Koreans, Soviet prisoners of varying ethnic backgrounds, and, occasionally, Europeans and Americans were used. Victims were frequently vivisected while still living.  They were not given an anesthesia since Ishii and his colleagues wanted to be certain that their tests were not influenced by an outside source.  Those individuals whose experiments required a course of study usually lasted about six weeks.  Then, of no longer any value to the researchers, they were “sacrificed”, the euphemism used instead of “killed.”  The bodies, men, women, and children, would then be dissected by pathologists, and, eventually, deposited in either large burial pits or burned in the three crematoria housed at Ping Fan. Ishii was given enormous resources in men, material, and money to conduct his work in Manchuria.  He also was given permission to use various subterfuges in order to conceal secretly his real activities.  Ishii originally named his research unit, the Togo Unit, after one of his heroes of the Russo-Japanese War.  Later, the unit’s name was changed to the Ishii Unit.  It was also known as a Water Purification Unit.  And, finally, it was given the name by which it is known today, the infamous Unit 731. Once research in laboratories showed promising results, Ishii, his superiors, and his collaborators agreed that more extensive tests were needed in order to prove the viability of bw and cw weapons being developed.  Consequently, field tests were ordered beginning in 1939, if not earlier.  Bw and cw artillery shells, bombs, canisters and barrels filled with deadly pathogens were used in border skirmishes with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939.  Later, from 1940-1942, extensive field tests were conducted throughout Manchuria (Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known), and in Eastern and Central China.  Many cities and towns were saturated with pathogens disseminated by aerosol spraying from airplanes, by lacing water wells with germs, and by providing innocents with food, scraps of cloth, and sweepings of wheat, rice and assorted fruits and vegetables that were filled with a host of different germs. There is no firm data on the toll of victims killed in laboratory experiments, and in those field tests that can be certified by independent observers who lived in the affected communities at the time of the attacks.  However, one can deduce some conservative figures based on an assortment of documents still extant, statements made to Occupation investigators in Japan by some individuals who were former members of bw and cw Units, and by a recent flurry of memoirs and “confessions of guilt” by aging ex-members of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces.  It can be postulated with a degree of certainty that somewhere between ten and twelve thousand men, women and children were “sacrificed” in laboratory experiments conducted at Ping Fan and elsewhere.  Perhaps as many as two hundred fifty thousand others were killed in the field tests, and in post-war outbreaks of epidemics that can be attributed directly to the activities of the bw and cw human experiment researchers.  These figures exceed greatly the number of victims of the Nazi doctors experiments with their hapless victims.  Some of the Nazi doctors were held accountable for their crimes in the famous 1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials.  There were no comparable Japanese Doctors Trials. Unquestionably, Shiro Ishii was Japan’s leading exponent of bw and cw research.  However, he did not act alone.  His was not a renegade operation.  Instead, he was aided by many thousands of skilled physicians, scientists, veterinarians, dentists, and others with some scientific or medical technical expertise.  Many of Japan’s premier doctors and scientists volunteered to serve in the various Units that ultimately would engage in the practices outlined above.  Few in Japan refused to serve, rejecting either the blandishments or threats should they decline the call to duty. Execution by firing squad is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in military circumstances or in times of war. The firing squad is generally composed of several soldiers  or peace officers. The method of execution requires all members of the group to fire simultaneously, thus preventing both disruption of the process by a single member and identification of the member who fired the lethal shot. Some official protocols  called for inclusion of one or more blank cartridges randomly distributed among the live ammunition, giving each squad member a chance of not having killed. The condemned is typically blindfolded  or hooded, as well as restrained - though in some cases, condemned prisoners have asked to be allowed to face the firing squad without their eyes covered. Executions can be carried out with the condemned either standing or sitting. Göring, Hermann Wilhelm (1893-1946), German field marshal, commander in chief of the German air force, and the second most powerful leader of Nazi Germany. Göring, whose last name was also spelled Goering, was born on January 12, 1893, in Rosenheim, Bavaria, and educated at the cadet college in Karlsruhe and the officers' school at Lichterfelde, near Berlin. During World War I he served in the German air force, and in 1918, upon the death of his squadron leader, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, he became squadron leader. Göring met Adolf Hitler in 1921 and a year later became a leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) party. He was wounded in the unsuccessful Munich beer-hall Putsch of 1923, and morphine given to ease his pain from the wound made him a permanent drug addict. After an exile in nearby countries for four years, he was elected a member of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1928 and became president of that body in 1932. Göring became Reich minister for air forces upon the National Socialist accession to power early in 1933; he also served as premier of Prussia and, for one year, as minister of the interior and head of all German police forces. In 1936 he became economic "dictator" of Germany. As commander in chief of the German air force, Göring planned much of the strategy, involving close and highly effective coordination between the German ground and air forces, that resulted in the rapid conquests of Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in 1939 and 1940. He also devised the policy of terror bombing, whereby entire cities, such as Rotterdam, Holland, and Coventry, England, were nearly leveled by aerial bombardment as a means of subjugating their civilian populations. He used his position to enrich himself and systematically looted the art treasures of the Nazi-occupied countries for his private collection. Göring surrendered to U.S. forces in 1945 and was tried, with other German war leaders, by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death by hanging, he poisoned himself on October 15, 1946, hours before his scheduled execution. Hess Hess, Rudolf (1894-1987), German Nazi functionary, one of Adolf Hitler's principal lieutenants in the 1920s and '30s. Hess, the son of a German merchant, was born in Alexandria, Egypt. After serving in the German army during World War I, he joined the fledgling Nazi party in 1921. Hess participated in the Nazi attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in 1923 and was imprisoned with Hitler at Landsberg, becoming the Nazi leader's private secretary assisted Hitler in writing 'Mein Kampf'; became Hitler's deputy in Reichstag 1933;. After Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, he appointed Hess his deputy in charge of the party organization. In 1934 he was elevated to the rank of minister and appointed a member of Hitler's cabinet. Hitler named him third deputy of the Reich in 1939, placing him directly below the Nazi leader Hermann Göring in line of succession. Two years later, when World War II was reaching its height, Hess made a solo airplane flight to Scotland; May 1941, landed by parachute, surrendered to British on his immediate arrest as a prisoner of war he announced that he had flown to Great Britain to persuade the British government to conclude peace with Germany. He remained a prisoner and at the war crimes trials held at Nuremberg in 1945-46, he was convicted as a major war criminal. Sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau Prison, West Berlin, he was its solitary inmate from 1966 until his suicide in 1987. Religion is not the common denominator of all war. Nor, for that matter is atheism. We should really extend our original question to "does religion also cause terrorism, torture or indeed any acts that violate the life, liberty and human rights of the individual?"  Recent history tells us pretty emphatically that while religion has often been used as an excuse for barbaric conduct, men inclined towards act of barbarism have found other justifications as well as religion to make their slaughter of their fellow human beings appear perfectly reasonable or "unavoidable."  Hitler's ethnic cleansing, for example, actually had "science" as its excuse - the bogus science of Eugenics.  The fact that religion is used as an EXCUSE for an atrocity is no more a reason to condemn religion than the use by the unscrupulous of science as their excuse should prompt us to abandon science.  What men need to knock off is buying the "reasons" put forth by some loony for common assault, grievous bodily harm, murder, arson, extortion and mugging.  All this nevertheless begs the question as to what is happening when a religion apparently becomes the driving, motivating, justifying force behind the collective move of one large human group to do violence to another large human group.  How does a religious group wind up pursuing policies and actions completely contrary to the original teachings of its founder and, indeed, the instincts of its members?  Very few religions were built upon a message of violence. Almost all began life and achieved broad popular acceptance on the basis of "maybe we should all try to treat one another better." If you look closely at the original "horse's mouth" words of religious founders, you'll find this to be the case.  This corruption of a group purpose occurs not only in the field of religion. Many groups, despite being founded upon high ideals and good intentions, operate a million miles distant from that original intent. Democratic governments for example, frequently wind up bludgeoning their own electorate with truncheons and refine all manner of covert ways to chip away at their citizenry. Socialist governments wind up standing the workers before firing squads; revolutions intended to liberate the people require revolutions to liberate the people from the revolutionary government; resistance groups formed to defend the people against an oppressive power, descend into extortion, gangsterism and the knee-capping of teenagers, with the people they were formed to protect as their primary victims; ..... and so on. The Holocaust was the effort of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany to exterminate the Jews and other people that they considered to be inferior. As a result about 12,000,000 people - about half of them Jews - were murdered. The murders were done by every means imaginable but most of the victims perished as a result of shooting, starvation, disease, and poison gas. Others were tortured to death or died in horrible medical experiments. Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and almost immediately began the chain of events that led to the Holocaust. This first phase was the persecution of Jews in Germany and the other countries invaded by Hitler. It lasted until 1941. During this period, while Hitler built his power, Jews were persecuted and brutalized but there was no organized effort to systematically murder them. In late 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. In mid-1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. At about the same time - historians do not agree on exactly when - Hitler also decided that there should be a "Final Solution" to "the Jewish question." The "Final Solution" was the murder of the Jews and was mainly carried out by a military group known as the SS and a security service known as the SD. The Gestapo was part of the SD. They arrested Jews and other victims, ran the concentration camps and organized the murder squads. During the first part of this extermination 1,500,000 Jews and other people were murdered by military groups which rounded them up and shot them. Gradually the emphasis changed to concentration camps, where the prisoners were worked to death as slave laborers, and extermination camps, where they were murdered in the gas chambers. The most famous of these was Auschwitz, which was both a labor camp and an extermination camp. About 1,300,000 people perished at Auschwitz; approximately 1,000,000 of those died in the gas chambers. Their horrible suffering and the conditions they endured were beyond belief. People would tell each other lies just to give hope. "The allies have landed in Greece". The implication was that they would be rescued soon. There were many other stories concocted to keep one another from utter despair. After Auschwitz was closed and the inmates released there was a reckoning. The Nazis were hunted down over the years and brought to account for their crimes one by one. The time of Nazi Germany has ended. Yet, there exists forced labor camps in China today while Holocaust survivors still live. Have we learned nothing from history? The labor camps in China, much like the Nazi death camps, are used to harm those whom the Chinese Communist Party does not like. They are also used to attempt to break the will and spirit of those who practice the peaceful meditation practice of Falun Gong. From these camps the Chinese Communist Party derives a source of free labor. The goods are exported for profit and consumption around the world. Similar to the Nazi camps, these nightmarish dens of horror are a source of suffering, torture and death. Why are they tolerated? Isn't it time that they are dismantled and eliminated? The famous poet Elie Wiesel, himself an Auschwitz survivor, had this to say, "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." Simon Wiesenthal, another labor camp survivor who helped bring many Nazi criminals to justice said this. "For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice." Auschwitz was the most notorious of the Nazi labor camps in WWII. There, a man or woman could expect at any moment to be sent to the gas chambers, used for medical experiments or given a phenol injection to the heart which would cause death in 15 seconds. If lucky, they would instead be used for exhaustive labor under the most grueling conditions. A selection committee decided who was fit for labor and who would be used for medical experiments or exterminated. One 'doctor' drew an arbitrary height line of 5 feet 2 inches and any child who was not tall enough was sent to the gas chambers immediately. Many were sent to the chambers directly upon arriving at Auschwitz. For that reason records do not exist for all of the people who were killed. In 1959, Mossad  was informed that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires under the name Ricardo Klement (Clement) and began an effort to locate his exact whereabouts.[21]  Through relentless surveillance, it was concluded that Ricardo Klement was, in fact, Adolf Eichmann. The Israeli government then approved an operation to capture Eichmann and bring him to Jerusalem  for trial as a war criminal. The Mossad agents continued their surveillance of Eichmann through the first months of 1960 until it was judged safe to take him down, even watching as he delivered flowers to his wife on their 25th wedding anniversary on March 21. Eichmann was captured by a team of Mossad and Shin Bet agents in a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960, as part of a covert operation. The Mossad agents had arrived in Buenos Aires in April 1960 after Eichmann's identity was confirmed. After observing Eichmann for an extensive period of time, a team of Mossad agents waited for him as he arrived home from his work as foreman at a Mercedes Benz factory. One kept lookout waiting for his bus to arrive, while two agents pretended to be fixing a broken down car. An unconfirmed fourth would ride on the bus to make sure he would leave. Once Eichmann alighted and began walking the short distance to his home, he was asked by the agent at the car, Zvi Aharoni, for a cigarette. When Eichmann reached in his pocket he was set upon by the two by the car. Eichmann fought but team member Peter Malkin, a Polish Jew and a black belt in karate, knocked Eichmann unconscious with a strike to the back of his neck and bundled him into the car and took him to the safe house. There a preliminary interrogation was conducted and it was proved that Klement (Clement) was undoubtedly the Nazi Eichmann. The agents kept him in a safe house until they judged that he could be taken to Israel without being detected by Argentine authorities; then smuggled him out of Argentina on board an El Al Bristol Britannia flight from Argentina to Dakar and then to Israel on May 21, 1960, heavily sedated and disguised, like the agents, in the uniform of the El Al crew. Amon Leopold Göth (11 December 1908 – 13 September 1946; pronounced [gøt]) was a Hauptsturmführer (Captain) of the SS  and was the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Płaszów, General Government (a German occupied area of Poland). After the war, the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland at Kraków found Göth guilty of murdering tens of thousands of people. He was hanged on September 13, 1946, age 37, not far from the former site of the Płaszów camp. Göth was born in Vienna, Austria, to a family in the printing industry. He became internationally known through his depiction by Ralph Fiennes in the movie Schindler's List, although this grim portrayal (where, for practicing shooting, he sniped Jews from the balcony of his house) showed only a subset of his crimes. He allegedly shot 500 Jews himself; Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the Schindler Jews, famously said, "When you saw Göth, you saw death." During his time at Plaszow, he caused the death of about 8,000 inmates by ordering a large number of them to be exterminated. He carried out the "liquidation" of the Krakow ghetto, beginning on March 13, 1943, causing the death of another about 2,000 people. On September 3, 1943, he closed down the ghetto at Tarnow, where an unknown number of people were killed on the spot. Most of those who survived the executions were later killed in, or on the way to, the concentration camps they were transported to. Until February 3, 1944, he was responsible for shutting down the concentration camp at Szebnie (not depicted in the movie) by ordering the inmates to be murdered on the spot or deported to other camps, again causing the death of several thousand persons. The exact nature of the relationship between Göth and Oskar Schindler is not known, but it is suggested (in the movie, too) that in order to save the lives of the Jews working for him (and keep his own profits), Oskar Schindler made friends with Göth. These Jews initially lived in a sub-camp in his factory. On September 4, 1944, with the Soviet army approaching Krakow, this sub-camp was closed by the Nazi authorities and the Jews were forced to move to the Plaszow camp. Schindler continuously bribed Göth with money and black-market goods. When Plaszow itself was shut down on October 15, 1944, Schindler thus managed to establish his famous list of Jews that were not murdered, but instead sent to a new kriegswichtige (war-essential) factory at Brunnlitz in Czechoslovakia. Göth was later charged with theft of Jewish property (which, according to Nazi legislation, belonged to the Reich), and arrested in September 1944. After the war, the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland at Krakow found Göth guilty of murdering tens of thousands of people. He was hung on September 13, 1946, not far from the former site of the Plaszow camp, saluting the Führer in a final act of defiance.