Before breakfast he would stride on to the balcony of his villa overlooking Plaszow camp and shoot Jewish workers at random with his hunting rifle. Then he would return to bed to join his mistress — Frau Goeth’s mother.

Plaszow is just a short drive from Auschwitz. Some of the Jews there were murdered or worked to death. Some were sent to Auschwitz to die. Some were saved by Oskar Schindler, who wheeled and dealed with Goeth to buy the freedom of many hundreds of Plaszow inmates. Goeth personally killed 500 Jews, and the prosecutor at his trial in Cracow in 1946 called him “a modern incarnation of the biblical Satan ”. He was executed.

On the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Monika Goeth faces the dilemma common to all children of Nazi guards and SS torturers: “How far do you separate the murderer from the father? How much of the murderer is in me?”

Those children are the absent guests at today’s ceremonies at Auschwitz. The survivors — some lame, some blind — will be there for one of their largest and probably last reunions. They could be seen walking bent through snow-driven Cracow yesterday, slightly baffled, trading memories in cafés, their camp numbers flashed as if they were exchanging business cards.

So too will the presidents of Russia, Israel, France and Germany, Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, Prince Edward and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary.

They and many other dignitaries will be addressed by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the Polish Foreign Minister and Auschwitz prisoner No 4427, and Simone Veil, the former French Health Minister and Auschwitz prisoner No 78651.

Frau Goeth will be watching on television from her home near Nuremberg. “I would have liked to go,” she told The Times. “It’s so important. But I would not have wanted to go alone. The people have got to get used to the idea of me.”

Frau Goeth has spent much of her life trying to understand her father, and suffering for his evil. As a small baby lying in her pram in southern Germany, a former inmate tried to stab her, crazed with anger.

She was whipped when she asked her mother about her father’s wartime record. “When I asked my mother about what he had really done, she would take a strip of cable out of the cupboard and beat me,” she said.

In 1983 Frau Goeth’s mother killed herself after giving her first interview to a British television team. The questions brought flooding back the blanked-out memories of her life of luxury and the wild parties in a concentration camp. “She wasn’t a Nazi, wasn’t an anti-Semite, but she was completely wrapped up in love with a bad man in the very heart of darkness,” her daughter said.

Later, when Frau Goeth met 17 Jewish camp survivors as part her search for an explanation of her father’s crimes, “they started to shout at me, attacked me”, she recalled. “One in particular was shaking with anger as everything poured out. He walked out and the others saw what a state I was in and started to comfort me. Now a real friendship has grown up.

“Sometimes survivors push you away, but then you have to accept it, respect their feelings, and be there for the moment when they want to make contact again with the offspring of their torturers.”

Although she cannot go to Auschwitz today, she will continue to seek rapprochement with her father’s victims. “I am completely drawn to Judaism. It’s the real religion. Jews were the true heroes and I feel nothing but contempt for those who still idolise the Nazis, those cowardly rabid dogs,” she said.

And tomorrow, when the Auschwitz ceremonies are over, she will visit a local school in Germany to explain to a younger generation how people like her father came to commit some of the world’s most awful crimes.

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