Ruth Irene Kalder

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Ruth Irene Kalder (* probably 1918 in Gleiwitz , Silesia ; † January 29, 1983 in Munich ) was a German beautician . She became known through her relationship with Amon Göth , the camp commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp .

Life

Göth's villa in the Płaszów concentration camp ( → location )

Second World War

Kalder's father ran a driving school in Gleiwitz and was an early member of the NSDAP . As an adolescent, Kalder lived for a while in Essen, where he learned the profession of actress; however, an activity as such cannot be proven. She also had a diploma as a beautician. She was in a relationship with an older man during this time. When she became pregnant, Kalder separated from this man and had an abortion performed . At the beginning of the war she worked as a secretary for the Wehrmacht and was drafted into service in Krakow . There she met the bon vivant and factory owner Oskar Schindler and occasionally did secretarial tasks for him.

Since Kalder had a preference for men in officer's uniforms when choosing a partner , Schindler specifically introduced his secretary to Göth. By deepening this acquaintance, Schindler hoped to ease the assignment of Jewish forced laborers from the Płaszów camp.

Kalder fell in love with Göth at first sight and pushed through his own activity to start a love affair with the married SS-Hauptsturmführer . After just a few weeks, she moved to Göth's villa in the immediate vicinity of the camp and was nicknamed “Majola” by Göth . Göth's Jewish housemaid Helen Rosenzweig , whom he had recruited from the camp, described Kalder as a “young, beautiful woman with dark hair and wonderful milky skin. She must have loved Amon Göth very much because she stared at him the whole time. ”She viewed the events in the camp with disinterest: she constantly mixed egg yolks with cucumber and yoghurt, wore cucumber masks for hours and listened to music. If shots were fired, she turned the music up to drown it out. Once her mother Agnes Kalder came to visit, but left in a hurry when she realized the gloomy place in which her daughter enjoyed the luxury life at the side of a commander. Her day usually began with a ride with Amon Göth. Then she instructed the maids what to have for lunch and otherwise indulged in idleness .

Goeth was prone to outbursts of anger, which he often took out on his maids. He also struck these with ox peaks ; Helena Hirsch, the other Jewish maid, went deaf in one ear from the abuse. Kalder intervened during a beating and was also hit by a bull whip. This hit seemed to take Goeth out of his mind. He kept apologizing and, according to Kalders, never again used an ox pizzle in the villa. Kalder once told her daughter Monika that she had threatened Göth not to sleep with him any more if he kept shooting Jews from the balcony . According to her statement, Göth then stopped doing it.

Göth's clerk and later chief witness Mieczysław Pemper stated that the threat of chastity  - if at all - only had an effect for a few days. He also suspected Kalder of having participated in a death list on which unwanted witnesses were entered and which was supposed to serve to accuse the named persons of a planned camp uprising at some point in order to execute them together. In this context, Pemper also reported his fear of appearing last on this list.

When Rosenzweig's sisters were to be deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp , Helen Rosenzweig pleaded with Kalder to prevent this. At first Göth's lover refused to do this, but then saved the sisters by calling the camp police.

According to her statement, Helena Hirsch owes her to Kalder that she was not raped by the drunk Göth . Kalder followed their cries for help into the cellar and called Goeth to order. There are several reports of witnesses who say that Kalder had a moderating effect on Göth, that she even dragged him away from being flogged; However, Kalder himself always claimed that he had never entered the camp.

Amon Göth, 1946

Emilie Schindler thought she remembered that Oskar Schindler once told her that Göth had had enough of his mistress; she is too "peace-loving and constantly tries to dissuade him from his sadistic excesses."

In January 1945, Kalder and her mother fled from the advancing Red Army from Katowice . On January 9, she arrived in Vienna and met Amon Göth's wife there. She successfully persuaded them to file for divorce.

post war period

In November 1945 she gave birth to Göth's daughter Monika Kalder in Bad Tölz . Göth had previously been arrested by members of the US Army . In the summer of 1946 he was extradited to Poland and hanged in Krakow in September 1946 after a death sentence . When Kalder found out about the execution in a newsreel in 1946 , she said she was immediately grayed and from then on dyed her hair black.

In the early post-war period, a knife attack was carried out on her daughter, who was pushing Kalder in a stroller, in which the toddler was seriously injured. Since the perpetrator was able to flee undetected, it remained unclear whether the attack was related to Amon Göth's crime and whether it would have provided an explanation as an act of revenge.

In 1948 Kalder applied for a name change to the name Göth and justified this request with the fact that only the chaos of war and the execution of the meanwhile divorced Göth had prevented a marriage. Göth's father Amon Franz testified in this connection that the two were engaged . Your application was granted. A picture of Amon Göth hung in Kalder's bedroom all his life.

She moved to Munich in the district of Schwabing , where he worked as a secretary, Opportunity Model , private beautician and as a barmaid in the "Green Goose". She always wore her lipstick in a color matched to the respective dress and roamed the trendy district in the company of an equally stylish poodle. Her daughter Monika describes her mother as cold-hearted and lying about her father, because she was initially told that he had died in the war. It was not until her grandmother Agnes Kalder, with whom she grew up temporarily, that she learned the murderous truth about her father at the age of eleven .

In the early 1970s she gave an interview to the Israeli historian Tom Segev , a German-born Jew, in her apartment. At that time Segev was writing his doctoral thesis on concentration camp commanders and their relatives at the University of Boston . According to Segev's description, Kalder stood out from the ranks of those questioned who similarly made protective claims by carefully staging her appearance in her apartment as an actress. She received him lying on a sofa and wore a yellow Chinese silk wrap dress. During the interview, she smoked continuously and used a long cigarette holder , which she lifted to her mouth with her little finger spread in an elegantly elegant gesture. Like all the other people interviewed before, Göth's mistress played down his actions and tried to justify her liaison: “It was a good time, we were happy to be together. My god was king and I was queen. Who would not put up with it? ”She regretted that the good times were over, and when asked about the victims, she replied:“ They weren't really people like us. They were so dirty. "

In the early 1980s, Jon Blair prepared a documentary on the life of Oskar Schindler in consultation with Hollywood director Steven Spielberg ; this documentation later served Spielberg as the main source for his Oscar-winning feature film Schindler's List . In this context, Blair also contacted Kalder, who gave him an interview appointment at the end of January 1983, despite severe lung disease and bed restraint. In this interview, she said in fluent English that she regretted the time but that she did not harm anyone back then.

One day after the interview, Kalder killed himself with sleeping pills. She left a suicide note mentioning her serious illness and the fear that stares at her from every corner. The letter ended with the words: “I loved you as much as you love your child. Your mother."

Daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren

Their daughter Monika (née Kalder, later Göth), married Hertwig, dealt intensively with their origins, took part in TV documentaries on the subject of descendants of the Nazi criminals and also acted as a book author in this regard. Hertwig also visited Płaszów as part of one of these documentaries and met Helen Rosenzweig, Göth's former service slave. The women talked and touched; together they mourned their story.

In 1970 Monika Göth gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Jennifer. The daughter came from a brief relationship with a Nigerian. She had met her child's father in her mother's apartment when he was visiting a sub-tenant Ruth Irene Kalders, who also came from Nigeria - a remarkable detail, because at the end of the 1960s a dark-skinned sub-tenant was staying with an unmarried war widow in the capital of the conservative Free State of Bavaria a social scandal .

A few weeks after the birth, Kalder's daughter gave her grandchild to a home and later agreed that the seven-year-old could be adopted by a foster family .

Monika Göth only took her husband's name when she was married for the second time. Another daughter was born from the first marriage. When she had a son, the mother baptized Kalder's great-grandson , referring to her grandfather Amon .
According to another source, however, things were a little different: "Charlotte chose a Jewish first name for her son and then combined it with the name of her grandfather Amon , that's how Jennifer Teege's half-sister called her son with the middle name."

At the age of 38, Kalder's first granddaughter, now mother of two Jennifer Teege (née Göth), who had studied in Israel for five years, happened upon her birth mother's book in a Hamburg library, then recognized her ancestry and got caught by it into a serious life crisis.

Teege processed her trauma in her own book, which was published in September 2013 under the title Amon. My grandfather would have shot me was released. In the course of the processing, she made contact with her birth mother and her birth father. She fondly remembered her grandmother Ruth Irene Göth (née Kalder), who until her adoption had regularly visited her granddaughter in the home and with the foster parents; she writes: “I will not justify my grandmother being close to me. It's just like that. When I was a kid, she made me feel like I wasn't alone. I'll never forget that. "

literature

Movies

  • Steven Spielberg : In Schindler's List , USA 1993, Universal, Kalder was cast in a supporting role with Geno Lechner .
  • Matthias Kessler: Amon's daughter , Germany 2003, NEF
  • James Moll: killer father (Inheritance), USA 2006, Allentownsproduktion
  • Jon Blair: Schindler , The Documentation. GB 1983, Polygram Video 1993
  • Chanoch Ze'evi: My family, the Nazis and I (Hitler's Children), Israel 2011

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , p. 81.
  2. ↑ a b Website of Göth's clerk Mietek Pemper , details on Kalder's withdrawal of love for Göth
  3. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , pp. 81–83.
  4. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , pp. 90-93.
  5. ↑ Johannes Sachslehner: Death is a master from Vienna. Styria 2008, ISBN 978-3-222-13416-6 , p. 357.
  6. ↑ Johannes Sachslehner: Death is a master from Vienna. Styria 2008, ISBN 978-3-222-13416-6 , p. 171.
  7. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , pp. 109–110.
  8. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , pp. 115–119.
  9. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , pp. 100-102.
  10. ↑ Kalder's great-grandson was baptized in the name of Amon. In Merkur online: The subsidiary of the command dated August 22, 2002
  11. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , p. 192.
  12. ↑ Verena Lugert: The horror in the family. Portrait of Jennifer Teege, in: annabelle 19/13 Zurich, pp. 42, 43, 44.
  13. ↑ Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. My grandfather would have shot me. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8 , p. 125.
personal data
SURNAME Kalder, Ruth Irene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Göth, Ruth Irene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German employee, secretary to Oskar Schindler
DATE OF BIRTH 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Gliwice
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 1983
Place of death Munich