Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

Amon Goeth

Shmoop has seen a watched a lot of movies in order to bring you our awesome Learning Guides. And in our not-so-humble opinion, Amon Goeth is right up there with Hannibal Lecter, Nurse Ratched, and the guy who killed Bambi's mother. Goeth is definitely the guy to stop in this film: holding absolute authority over the Jews in the camp and using it to terrorize, dehumanize and straight-up murder those in his power.

He's just so casual about it all. He's handsome, he's decadent, he seems almost bored by what he has to do, and seriously: does the man even raise his voice in the whole film?

That passivity and detachment makes him an interesting villain, but it also makes him a great stand-in for the larger villain of the piece: Nazi Germany itself. The Holocaust was essentially conducted by bureaucrats: dry, dull people who filled out a lot of paperwork and marked up forms. They weren't cackling fiends, though said fiends did crop up on the ground to do the wetwork.

But the passivity of their evil—the everydayness of it, as Fiennes described it—was far more terrifying than if they cackled maniacally. Goeth's the embodiment of that evil: a human (well…) face to put on a murderous regime that took the efforts of the entire world to stop.