Eyewitness Testimony and the Holocaust: The Trial of Amon Göth
A historiographical examination of eyewitness testimony, trauma, and evidentiary standards in Holocaust war crimes trials. Originally written as graduate work (University of Edinburgh) as “Daming Attesation: The Limits and Value of Witness Testimony in Crafting the Historical Record of The Holocaust.”
“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable,” asserts psychologist Christopher French. Yet, much of what constitutes accepted historical truth is derived from witness testimony. In this very brief methodological examination of the validity and usefulness of testimony in crafting the historical record of The Holocaust, I will focus in particular the trial of Nazi war criminal Amon Göth.
Testimony signifies ‘proof or demonstration of some fact’, evidence or a piece of evidence. It is certainly true that witness testimony has been utilised extensively in criminal trials and in general historical study, but how reliable is a human eyewitness, especially compared to documents, photographs, and other material evidence of a historical event? I assert that witness testimony has its place in historiography, but necessitates a sceptical viewpoint which critically analyses the inherent flaws in testimony.
There are many factors which may disqualify testimony outright, or at least sow seeds of cynicism, particularly when eyewitness testimony is being relied upon as a damning source of evidence in a criminal trial. As historians seek to align research as closely as possible with the truth of a historical event, the weaknesses of testimony must be taken into account. There is, of course, a glaring issue with the historical validity of testimony, which is human memory. As more and more time elapses from the event in question, memory becomes less reliable.
The testimony itself can be unreliable even when memory serves well. The intent of the testimony is critical. Is there a bias in the story being told, a determination to seek vengeance that leads to exaggeration or false accusations? Human communication of historical events can also fall short as evidence when a witness contradicts themselves within a testimony. Cross-examination in a criminal trial can unearth flaws in the story by interrogating these inconsistencies. Of course, testimony can be strengthened substantially when the witness statements are corroborated by objective evidence like documents, photographs, and independently attested testimonies. When a witness tells a tale that lines up neatly with other evidence used to draw conclusions, that testimony becomes far more valuable to historians.
Another very human challenge facing testimony as a reliable source is the fact that eyewitnesses rely on sensory experiences to give their account of an event. Sensory history is both transient and subjective. In cases such as the Holocaust, where trauma is embedded in survivors’ testimony, sensory-based memories are frequently conveyed. But these very subjective and deeply individual interpretations can lead to contradictions between testimonies, or can alter the way an event is remembered.
Occasionally, witnesses will give testimony that is so far beyond the boundaries of believability that it is dismissed outright. In the case of the Holocaust, many suvivors’ testimonies were considered too outrageous to be believed. Nothing on the scope and scale of the Holocaust had a place in historical research. It was a genocide more neatly and completely organised than anything that occurred before or since. Unlike in criminal cases where the witness makes histrionic assertions, Holocaust survivor testimony was often affirmed by defence accounts, photographs, documents, bystander testimony, and other sources of information on this unprecedented and ghastly phenomenon.
When two or more individuals witness the same event, their testimony is only useful to historians if those testimonies corroborate one another. There is little use to be derived from three very different accounts of the same event. As mentioned, flaws in the veracity of testimony can come from issues with human memory or suggestibility, but in testimonies that tell different versions of the same event, one must seek out commonality. Where do the witnesses agree? Does other historical evidence dovetail with the common threads between testimonies? From a methodological perspective, it is useful to examine many witness testimonies and question why they differ and where they are united.
Another blow often served to historians seeking to use witness testimony as historical evidence is translation. Some translations are nearly pure in maintaining the bare-faced meaning of what the eyewitness conveyed. Others take artistic licence, supposedly in order to maintain the “voice” of the witness. But some translations make substantive changes to the testimony. At best, they alter the tone and timbre of what is already an inherently biased and human piece of evidence. At worst, translations demonstrably shift the connotation of the information itself. Translation of eyewitness testimony must be carried out with the aim of maintaining the integrity of the source, or else it risks delegitimising the testimony for historians.
Historians have long struggled with the reliability of eyewitness testimony in historiography. The methodology of making use of testimony has been examined and shaped by several key figures. Most notably, R.J. Shafer created a checklist to determine the validity of testimony. This checklist interrogates tone and literal meaning in testimony, the reliability of sensorial experience, the method and ability of reporting the event witnessed, the presence of bias, time elapsed between observation and reporting, the intention and audience of a report, intention to mislead, improbability of testimony, difficulty of observation and reporting of a specific event, and internal contradictions.
From Plato to Shafer to Canadian philosopher Trudy Govier, many have contributed to the conversation surrounding the vulnerabilities and reliability of human testimony in forming the historical narrative. The ongoing debate centres around how closely eyewitness memory and sensory experiences can be trusted, particularly with confounding factors such as contradiction from other witnesses or evidence and the unintentional intrusion of bias. The historical record certainly stands to benefit from the contribution of eyewitness testimony. However, close examination of testimony’s inherent flaws and weaknesses must render historians sceptics to a certain degree when making use of these sources. The decision to utilise witness testimony as a piece of historical knowledge must be undertaken only after interrogating the testimony deeply.
The most universal issue confronting the validity of witness testimony is the problematic nature of human memory. Far too often, whether in deciding the fate of a criminal defendant or when shaping the historical narrative, human recollection is considered to be raw knowledge. Neuroscience tells us differently. A common misunderstanding is the perceived correlation between confidence and accuracy, but neuroscience shows confidence does not guarantee truth. Human memory is susceptible to several other phenomena that can render testimony unreliable. Humans forget, distort, and formulate false memories. External factors take advantage of the malleability of human memory; suggestibility and the “misinformation effect” are hugely problematic. Memories formed under stress or trauma are also more likely to become altered in the mind. Historians confronting the incredibly subjective nature of human recollection must parse through these potential disqualifiers.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus is noted for introducing the forgetting curve and the spacing effect into the epistemology of human memory as knowledge. The forgetting curve is focussed on the decline of memory retention over time. This type of memory failure, transience, indicates that within even a relatively brief span of time, a substantial portion of memories are permanently forgotten. This is problematic in constructing the historical record, as even in the case of the Nuremberg and Krakow trials of Nazi criminals, many months or even years had passed between the witnessed event and the trial itself. When memory erodes and holes in the narrative remain, they are often filled with distorted or even wholly invented details to complete the recollection. Compounding this problem is the issue of stress. Nearly all Holocaust survivors experienced the events about which they testified while undergoing an enormous amount of psychological and physical trauma. Contrary to the common assumption that traumatic memories “burn” themselves into the psyche in explicit detail, never to be forgotten, neuroscientific research demonstrates that mental stress induces difficulty in cementing a memory fully. The traumatised witness instead remembers specific, haunting details.
Though most of the Nazi criminal trials occurred shortly after the end of World War II, eyewitness testimony was already subject to the “misinformation effect.” This phenomenon, in which the ability to recall episodic memories is influenced by “post-event information,” further muddies the ability to testify the complete and unadulterated truth. Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and expert in the field of human memory, argues that the “misinformation effect” takes advantage of two inherent weak points in memory: suggestibility, in which cues or details are provided to a witness and then used by the mind to fill in gaps or incomplete parts of memories; and misattribution, in which an eyewitness attributes a deed, quotation, or even identity to the wrong individual or source. To be certain, there are few more reliable human sources from which to glean knowledge about the Holocaust than the victims of the genocide themselves. However, human memory is inherently problematic in obtaining unquestionable knowledge for the historical record, and the issues with memory must be factored in when examining eyewitness testimony for the purposes of historiography.
Beyond the roadblocks human memory places before the ability to confidently take testimony into consideration, there exists the question of intent. Shafer asks the historian to examine the bias of testimony as well as its intended audience. In the Nazi criminal trials, it is almost without question that the eyewitnesses, who had been victims of unthinkable atrocities, carried bias into the courtroom. The prosecution minimised the use of testimony, afraid that cross-examination would expose contradictions or false memories. Instead, prosecutors relied heavily on the extensive documentation of the Holocaust left behind by Nazis and contemporaneously recorded. Some survivors did testify, however, and while historians ought to be cautious of the inevitable bias within the courtroom testimonies, they should also take heed of how witnesses humanised the reality of the genocide the defendants had perpetrated.
Primo Levi stated, “We are neither historians nor philosophers, but witnesses.” Epistemological realities are still in play when examining survivor testimony; memory, intent, and psychological factors must be interrogated. However, though eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust was and is inescapably biased against the Nazi defendants and intends to humanise and to encourage remembrance and education of the atrocities of the genocide, the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed the crimes must contribute to the historical record of the events. Even testimony which stretches the bounds of the imagination, for it paints a picture so far exceeding reason and logic, must be considered mostly true if corroborated by physical evidence and other testimonies. In the case of the Holocaust, witnesses portrayed the horrors of the genocide that demonstrated human behaviour almost beyond belief. But because so many survivors’ testimonies have endorsed others’, and because the Nazis left behind extensive material evidence of their deeds, Holocaust survivor testimony bears witness to what is now accepted as historical knowledge.
Amon Leopold Göth was made famous by the film Schindler’s List, in which a fictional version of the war criminal was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. Prior to the release of the blockbuster, Göth was largely unknown compared to other Nazis convicted and executed in the post-war trials. Göth was condemned on the basis of physical records and very notably by eyewitness testimony.
It bears mentioning, perhaps, that when Schindler’s List was filmed in Poland, many of the Holocaust survivors on set were deeply shaken by the sight of Ralph Fiennes in the costume version of Göth’s uniform, finding his resemblance to Göth and his acted mannerism almost unbearably traumatic to endure. At the same time, Fiennes experienced the opposite reaction from some elderly Poles around the set, who disturbingly “thanked” him and expressed happiness to see him in costume dressed up as if he were the real Göth. Fiennes also witnessed antisemitic threats directed at Jewish cast members. These reactions vividly reveal how representations of atrocity can both reawaken trauma and expose the persistence of prejudice and remind us that testimony and cultural memory remain fraught long after the events themselves.
Göth, born in Austria and eager to join the Nazi Party from a young age, rose swiftly through the Schutzstaffel. After being assigned to the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Unit), Göth was given the task of building and overseeing the Płaszów camp, located on the grounds of two Jewish cemeteries near Kraków, Poland. Originally a forced labour camp, Płaszów was still the site of myriad systematic executions, random killings, and deaths due to starvation and disease. In his post-war criminal trial, Göth was accused of incredible brutality toward the prisoners he oversaw from his comfortable villa. In fact, Göth was so vicious that he was arrested by SS leadership in late 1944. Detained for thieving personal belongings during the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto, for stealing food supplies from official distribution, and for exacting impermissible punishment upon the prisoners at Płaszów, Göth was held until the end of the war, when he was captured by American authorities. A survivor from Płaszów was “Nazi hunting” in an American prisoner-of-war camp on the grounds of Dachau and asked if there were any strangers in the prisoners’ ranks. A German officer revealed that one man in a nondescript Wehrmacht uniform was unknown to the other prisoners. Josef Levkovich, the camp survivor, immediately identified Göth, and the reunion elicited a violent outburst borne of trauma. Göth was extradited to Poland, where he was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków from 27 August to 5 September 1946 and was found guilty of Nazi Party membership, personally ordering the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of prisoners, and homicide. The last charge was highly unusual insofar as proving that a war criminal had personally killed camp prisoners had proven difficult. In Göth’s case, it was witness testimony which sealed his fate. He was hanged on 13 September 1946, very near the location of the Płaszów camp.
Göth’s trial in Poland saw him accused of such acts as arbitrarily shooting prisoners from the balcony of his villa, executing ten prisoners for every one who escaped, personally ordering executions during the liquidation of the Tarnów and Kraków Ghettos, pillaging valuables from the liquidated ghettos and keeping many for himself, and mauling prisoners with his notorious attack dogs. All of these accusations were supported by witness testimony from survivors of the camps and ghettos that Göth oversaw. Josef Levkovich, who had discovered Göth in the prisoner-of-war camp, testified that he was left scarred and bloodied from one attack by the dogs, then threatened again by them when Göth felt Levkovich was slow in his work. By far, though, the most damning testimony of Göth’s trial came from Mietek Pemper.
Pemper was instrumental in creating the famous “Schindler’s List” of Jews to be spared from extermination. Though his role was nearly erased in Steven Spielberg’s popular culture representation, with his role being attributed almost entirely to Itzhak Stern, Pemper worked very closely with both Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth. In fact, as Göth’s secretary, Pemper was particularly knowledgeable about the day-to-day operations of the camp at Płaszów, and as a witness in Göth’s case, he came armed with detailed factual insights. Pemper testified from a notably analytic rather than emotive stance. At the risk of invalidating the experiences of Göth’s many victims, it is undeniable that many survivors’ testimonies were tainted by methodological issues previously raised, such as faulty and faded memory, suggestibility, bias, and perhaps most significantly, the impact of trauma. In reading Pemper’s testimony, it is obvious that his account suffers very little from these issues which can render an account problematic or even unreliable.
When Pemper was uncertain of a detail, he made it clear that he was estimating or simply did not know. Asked by the judge, “Is the witness able to establish the number of victims in the camp of Płaszów?” Pemper immediately cautioned, “This would not be easy for me, as I worked in the camp command office.” Pemper did go on to make estimations of those executed in the wake of escapes and to give a rough approximation of those transported to the camp and those who were liquidated from the ghetto. Pemper did correctly remember many details of the camp, however, and many of his accusations were corroborated by witnesses in Göth’s trial and the trials of other SS members.
For instance, Pemper was asked what happened to the gravestones from the cemeteries upon which the camp had been constructed. Pemper testified that in some cases the marble from the headstones had been pulverised and added to concrete for building foundations, and that in other cases the stones were turned face-down to make their original purpose less obvious, then used to construct stairs and to pave paths within the camp. Pemper’s testimony is upheld not only by other witness testimony, but by other proven instances of such use of Jewish tombstones by the Nazis. In 2019, an elderly Polish woman was walking her dog when she discovered several unearthed Jewish tombstones during the construction of a new highway in Gora Kalwaria, Poland. After more headstones were unearthed, it was concluded that they had been used by the Nazis to pave the road, turned upside-down like those about which Pemper testified in Göth’s trial. The independent corroboration of Pemper’s testimony, in which similar events have been proven through physical evidence, can be logically extrapolated in order to lend credence to Pemper’s testimony as a whole.
Another instance in which Pemper’s witness testimony lined up neatly with physical evidence was when he asserted that Amon Göth habitually and recreationally shot prisoners in the camp. Even with Pemper’s questionable elaboration on the events, in which he makes assumptions and presents them as truth, the crux of his testimony is supported by photographic evidence. “There were frequent cases when the accused, having not slept at night, as he spent the night at some orgy, went out at six in the morning, when the prisoners were assembling into their work groups, and there started shooting them without any reason or warning,” Pemper testified in Göth’s trial. The idea of the camp’s commander arbitrarily sniping prisoners is portrayed in the film Schindler’s List, and though the scene seems too barbaric to be true, it is supported by testimony from Pemper and others, as well as a photograph of Göth which was recreated almost precisely by actor Ralph Fiennes. In the photograph, discovered in the US National Archives by researcher Yair Shor, Göth stands shirtless on his balcony, puffing on a cigarette with his rifle thrown casually over one shoulder. The photograph corroborates Pemper’s account, strengthening his reliability as a witness to Göth’s character and crimes.
In Amon Göth’s case, it is important to bear in mind that witnesses were often interrogated about acts and deeds that were only tangentially related to the capital crimes for which Göth was being tried. This was likely an attempt by the prosecution to garner as much antipathy toward the defendant as possible. Utilising Jewish gravestones as pavers is, to most people, a despicable act, but it is not generally considered to warrant execution. Instead, these anecdotal details were sprinkled throughout the trial via witness testimony in order to effectively and thoroughly paint Göth as a particularly cruel and heartless Nazi. Historians must, therefore, view some of these anecdotes with a bit of scepticism, owing to the undeniable bias present in the interrogation. The prosecution in Göth’s case asked witnesses leading questions, contributing to the issue of testimonial suggestibility. For example, one of the witnesses in the Göth case, Henryk Mandel, was in the process of explaining that two female prisoners had been executed for going into the ghetto without permission. The prosecution immediately asked, “They were hanged on orders of the accused?” and Mandel replied, “The accused was there, and gave the order to hang them.” While, with existing knowledge of Göth’s particular cruelty, it is quite likely that Göth did indeed order the hangings, in the case of this witness testimony, the prosecution prompted the answer he wished to receive from the witness. This certainly does not discount Mandel’s eyewitness account, nor does it reduce him to an unreliable witness. However, the leading question must render a historian sceptical of the details of this incident.
In other cases, the prosecution pushed for detail and specificity from witnesses. In examining Pemper, the prosecution asked about random executions, “I am aware this did not happen regularly, but how often would incidents of this nature occur - once a week or more often?” Pemper replied, “These were unexpected incidents, but in the main, and from experience, we knew that every time Göth entered the area of the camp, prisoners would without doubt die. Every appearance of the accused in the camp produced more victims.” The prosecution immediately responded, “I will repeat my question. I know it did not happen on a regular basis, but did this happen every day?” Pemper reiterated that the appearance of Amon Göth in the camp meant inevitable executions, giving more anecdotal instances, including a woman who did not completely fill her wheelbarrow with rocks and was killed for “not working hard enough.” In this line of questioning, the witness maintained that Göth’s presence universally signaled random executions, backing up his claim with stories he remembered well.
It was witness testimony such as this which succeeded in convicting Amon Göth of homicide, a charge which was rarely levied against individual Nazis and even more rarely convicted. The witness testimony in instances like Göth arbitrarily shooting Jews from his villa, or always carrying out sporadic killings upon entering the camp, is again corroborated by other sources, making it a more reliable contribution to the bank of historical knowledge. Nazi documents about Göth’s 1944 arrest also accused him of violating SS protocol regarding the treatment of prisoners. His laissez-faire attitude toward random killings and executions in what was nominally a hard labour camp did not adhere to the systematic methods laid forth by the SS. Somewhat ironically, it is the corroboration of a Holocaust survivor’s witness testimony with official Nazi documentation which makes the testimony more valid for the purposes of historiography.
The methodology of the use of witness testimony as a contribution to the historical record requires healthy scepticism but not outright dismissal from historians. Witness testimony can be enormously problematic as it is inherently subjective and, almost without exception, biased, but can also be a useful contribution to the corpus when crafting the narrative. One might make the argument that other forms of historical record suffer from these same challenges. Some of the issues with witness testimony are also present in sources such as memoirs or diaries. In evidence like this, one must remember the exceedingly human nature of recollected sources. The unreliability of memory, the impact of trauma, the intent of the testimony, the susceptibility of a witness to suggestion, and the completeness of a testimony are all factors which affect how easily and truthfully testimony contributes to the historical record.
The case study of the trial of Amon Göth demonstrates both the usefulness and the issues with witness testimony. Some of the testimony in the case involved assumptions, estimations, and extrapolation, all of which align with the human errors inherent in this testimony as a historical source. Other pieces of testimony complement official documentation and photographic evidence, or are supported by modern-day findings which are in line with assertions made during the trial. In any case, a historian who chooses to utilise Holocaust survivors’ witness testimony as entries in the historical record must be aware of the failings of memory, the impact of bias, the human tendency to rely on conjecture, and the effect of trauma and stress on human recollection of historical events. Indeed, historiography as a practise would benefit enormously from this degree of scepticism and interrogation when considering the use of nearly all sources. As in Göth’s trial, testimony becomes most probative when it converges with the documentary and material record.
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