Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German Catholic from Sudeten Czechoslovakia, was a thirty year old Abwehr agent and amateur businessman when he arrived in Kraków in October 1939 to take over a Jewish-owned enamelware factory whose owner had been arrested. The factory was at Lipowa Street 4 in the Zabłocie industrial district outside the city. Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party. He had joined in 1939 to help his career. He was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker, an unsuccessful businessman in his pre-war Czech career, a serial adulterer, and not, by any standard pre-war reading of his character, a good candidate for moral heroism. He saved approximately twelve hundred Jewish lives between 1939 and 1945. The case is the most contradictory in the literature on the rescuers and is, for that reason, also the best known.

Schindler took over the factory, which he named Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik or DEF, with the support of his Polish Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, who had worked for the previous owner and who provided Schindler with the technical knowledge he himself did not have. The factory began as a typical wartime profit-making operation: it manufactured kitchenware for the German army using Jewish slave labour from the Kraków ghetto, paid the SS labour fees for each worker, and made Schindler a substantial fortune. The shift in his behaviour came gradually through 1942 and decisively in March 1943 with the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto, which Schindler witnessed from a hill above the city. He decided over the next year to use his factory and his SS connections to keep his Jewish workers alive.

The methods were the standard combination of bribery and bluff. Schindler bribed the SS officers running the labour allocation in Kraków, including the camp commandant Amon Göth at Płaszów, with vodka, cash, jewellery and access to his black market suppliers. He bribed officials in the Reich economic administration to keep his factory classified as essential to the war effort, which gave him the standing to keep his Jewish workforce together rather than have it transferred to other camps. He claimed for his payroll skilled workers who were not skilled, in particular the elderly and the sick who would otherwise have been selected to die at Płaszów. He paid the SS the full slave-labour fee for each worker on the list, including the unskilled, the elderly and the children, on the strength of fictitious enamelware production orders that he had falsified for the German army. The SS accepted the documents because Schindler kept paying.

The decisive episode was in October 1944, when the eastern front was approaching Kraków and the SS was preparing to liquidate the Płaszów camp and send its prisoners to Auschwitz. Schindler proposed to the SS that he be allowed to relocate his factory and its Jewish workforce to a new location at Brünnlitz, in his native Sudetenland, on the grounds that the factory would continue to produce munitions for the war effort. The SS approved the relocation. Schindler then drew up a list of the names of the workers he would take with him. The list, which he typed personally with the help of Itzhak Stern and the German clerk Mietek Pemper, contained approximately twelve hundred names, including the names of workers’ family members who had no connection to the factory and the names of children who could not work. Schindler paid the SS the full slave-labour fee for each name on the list. The Jewish workers and their families were transferred to Brünnlitz between October 1944 and January 1945. Schindler kept them alive, fed and out of further selections for the next eight months until liberation by Soviet forces in May 1945.

Schindler had ruined himself financially by the end of the war. He had spent the wartime profits and most of his pre-war assets on bribes, food and medicine for his workers. He left Brünnlitz on 8 May 1945 with his wife Emilie and a small group of Jewish workers who had volunteered to escort him on the journey out of Soviet-occupied territory. He spent the postwar years in West Germany and Argentina, failed at several business ventures, was supported financially in his final years by the Schindler Jews, the surviving workers from the list, who arranged for an annual stipend through the Joint Distribution Committee. He died in Frankfurt in October 1974 at the age of sixty six. His grave is on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, at his own request.

Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1993. The case became globally famous through Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark, based on extensive interviews with the surviving workers, and through Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List. The film won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. The case has been criticised in the literature for the obvious reason that Schindler had been a Nazi and a war profiteer before he became a rescuer, and that the postwar accounts in some respects sanitise the earlier behaviour. The defence against the criticism is the simple one: twelve hundred people were alive at the end of the war who would otherwise have been dead, and Schindler had personally seen to it. The contradictions in his character are part of what makes the case interesting; they are not a reason to discount the result.

See also

Sources

  • Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark, Hodder and Stoughton, 1982; Schindler’s List, Simon and Schuster, 1982
  • David M. Crowe, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List, Westview, 2004
  • Mietek Pemper, The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler’s List, Other Press, 2008
  • Yad Vashem, file on Oskar and Emilie Schindler, Righteous Among the Nations, 1993
  • Steven Spielberg, director, Schindler’s List, Universal Pictures, 1993
  • USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, oral histories of the Schindler Jews