Monika Hertwig

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Monika Hertwig (born November 7, 1945 in Bad Tölz as Monika Kalder , now Monika Göth ) is the daughter of the concentration camp commandant Amon Göth and the beautician Ruth Irene Kalder . She became known through the book "I must love my father, right?", Published together with Matthias Kessler , in which she dealt with her life story as the daughter of a Nazi criminal.

Life

Monika Kalder comes from Göth's illegitimate relationship with Ruth Irene Kalder. At the beginning of 1945 the pregnant Kalder fled from the advancing Red Army from Katowice . Amon Göth was hanged in Krakow in September 1946 . Ruth Irene Kalder successfully applied for a name change to Ruth Irene Göth in 1948. She later moved to the Schwabing district of Munich , where her daughter Monika Göth grew up. As a toddler, Monika Göth was seriously injured with a knife in a stroller by an unknown person. It remained unclear whether it was an act of revenge for her father's crimes.

Her mother never addressed Amon Göth's actions as the camp commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp . So the daughter learned nothing about his crimes and his execution after the war. Instead, the mother claimed that the father “stayed in the field”. Monika Göth was mostly raised by her grandmother. Monika Göth learned from her for the first time at the age of 11 that her father had been “in the SS ”, served as “commandant of a labor camp in Poland” and had also killed Jews there. In this connection, the grandmother assured her that Plaszow was not a “real extermination camp ”.

She repeatedly received fragmentary statements about her father through family members and chance acquaintances. Monika Göth's relationship with her mother deteriorated noticeably. After a drastic argument, her mother accused her in 1965 of the risk of suicide and had her daughter locked up for three months. Together with her mother, she later met Oskar Schindler in Frankfurt am Main; but he told her little new about her father.

The daughter Jennifer Teege emerged from a brief relationship with a Nigerian in 1970 . Monika Göth met the father of her child in her mother's apartment when he was visiting one of Kalder's sub-tenants, who was also from Nigeria. A few weeks after the birth, she gave the child to a home and later agreed that the seven-year-old could be adopted by a foster family . Monika Göth's first marriage in the early 1970s ended in a fiasco. Her husband abused her and forced her into prostitution . Monika Göth's second daughter emerged from the marriage. Göth later married again and took the name Hertwig at this second marriage.

After Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's List was published in 1982 , Monika Göth's seriously ill mother met with a BBC team and gave him an interview, believing it was about Schindler. The documentary filmmaker Jon Blair only wanted to talk to her about Göth. Monika Göth witnessed the entire interview in an adjoining room and thus learned the full extent of her father's actions for the first time. The following day, January 29, 1983, Ruth Irene Göth committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. In a letter to the news magazine Der Spiegel a few weeks later, Monika Göth objected to the depiction of her father in Keneally's work. After watching Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List , in which her father was played by Ralph Fiennes , in 1993 , she suffered a nervous breakdown and was unresponsive for several days. She later sought contact with survivors of the Plaszow concentration camp and traveled with them to memorial sites or to Jerusalem . Some of the former prisoners have been on friendly terms since then.

Monika Hertwig first told the journalist Matthias Kessler about her life story in the spring of 2001. On the basis of this material was created in 2002 the book "I must love my father, right?" 2003 turned Kessler with Hertwig the documentary Amon daughter . In 2006 the documentary Der Mördervater was released, which documents Hertwig's encounter with her father's former maid, Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, in Amon Göth's service villa on the site of the former concentration camp in what is now Płaszów . She was also involved in the making of the 2011 documentary My Family, the Nazis and Me by Israeli director Chanoch Ze'evi . The trained secretary made up her A- levels at the age of 64 and then studied Old Hebrew .

The daughter Jennifer Teege, who was given up for adoption by Monika Hertwig in the 1970s, lived for years in Israel without knowing her family history and also studied there. She only found out about her origins through the book “I have to love my father, don't I?” . Together with the journalist Nikola Sellmair, Teege researched the history of her family and published the results under the title Amon at Rowohlt Verlag in 2013 . My grandfather would have shot me. In the course of the processing, Teege also made contact with her birth mother again.

Monika Hertwig now lives with her second husband in Weißenburg in Bavaria . Since 2001 they have been raising the son of Hertwig's daughter from his first marriage, baptized after his great-grandfather Amon.

Publications

  • Together with Matthias Kessler: "I have to love my father, right?" The life story of Monika Göth - daughter of the concentration camp commandant from "Schindler's List". Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-8218-3914-7 ( review notes at perlentaucher.de ).

Filmography

  • 2003: Amon's daughter (Director: Matthias Kessler, Germany, NEF Filmproduktion und Vertriebs GmbH)
  • 2006: Murderer's Father ( Inheritance , Director: James Moll, United States, Allentown Productions)
  • 2011: My Family, the Nazis and I ( Hitler's Children , Direction: Chanoch Ze'evi, Israel, Maya Productions)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h NS crimes: Unmasking the charming sadist at faz.net, accessed on October 24, 2013
  2. ^ Monika Göth in the Library of Congress, accessed October 29, 2013
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h David M. Crowe: Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List. Westview Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8133-3375-5 , pages 209-215
  4. ↑ a b c d e Schinder's daughter at taz.de, accessed on October 24, 2013
  5. ↑ a b Jennifer Teege; Nikola Sellmair: Amon: My grandfather would have shot me ( Memento from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 309 kB) , excerpt from fuxx-online.de
  6. ↑ Amon's daughter at filmfesthamburg.de, accessed on October 24, 2013
  7. ↑ Jennifer Teege at rbb-online.de, accessed on November 29, 2013
  8. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 2013, quoted from Susanne Greiter: Flight and Expulsion in Family Memory: History and Narrative , Herbert Utz Verlag, 2014, p. 225
personal data
SURNAME Hertwig, Monika
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goeth, Monika; Kalder, Monika (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Tölz