Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (born April 28, 1908, Svitavy [Zwittau], Moravia, Austria-Hungary [now in the Czech Republic]—died October 9, 1974, Hildesheim, West Germany) was a German industrialist who, aided by his wife and staff, sheltered approximately 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by employing them in his factories, which supplied the German army during World War II.

Schindler was the eldest of two children born to a farm machinery manufacturer and his wife. Svitavy, where the family lived, was located in the Sudetenland, and, though the region passed from the Austrian Empire to Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Schindlers were ethnically German. After leaving school in 1924, Schindler sold farm equipment for his father, during which time he met his future wife, Emilie, whom he married in 1928. He took a variety of odd jobs, including running a driving school, before enlisting for a stint in the Czechoslovak army. Schindler then briefly lived in Berlin before returning to Czechoslovakia to start a poultry farm, which he soon abandoned. A self-professed sybarite, he spent much of his time drinking and philandering.

In 1935 Schindler joined the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei; SdP) and the next year began collecting counterintelligence for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency. In 1938 he was arrested by Czechoslovak authorities on charges of espionage and sentenced to death. After the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany late that year as part of the Munich Agreement, Schindler was pardoned by the Reich and rose through the ranks of the Abwehr. His application for membership in the Nazi Party—thought to have been submitted out of pragmatism rather than ideological affinity—was accepted in 1939. That year, on the heels of the German invasion and occupation of Poland, Schindler journeyed to Kraków, where he became active in the emerging black market. Thanks to the network of German contacts he had arranged through liberal bribes, he secured the lease of a formerly Jewish-owned enamelware factory. He renamed the facility Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik Oskar Schindler (known as Emalia) and commenced production with a small staff. Three months later he had several hundred employees, seven of whom were Jewish. By 1942 nearly half of the workers at the expanded plant were Jewish. (Ostensibly “cheap labour,” Schindler paid their salaries to the SS.)

In the fall of that year the Płaszów work camp opened nearby, and by February 1943 it was under the command of the notoriously sadistic SS officer Amon Göth, who would be executed after the war. Capitalizing on the officer’s appetite for drink and other luxury items available mainly on the black market, Schindler cultivated his friendship by ensuring a constant stream of them to the villa from which he oversaw the camp. Schindler thus managed to prevail upon Göth to create a separate camp for his Jewish workers, where they were free of the abuses suffered at Płaszów. Though Schindler’s motivations prior to this point are unclear, many scholars interpret his efforts to extricate his workers from Płaszów as indication that his concern for them was not purely financial.

When in August 1944 his factory was decommissioned, Schindler successfully petitioned to have it moved to Brnĕnec (Brünnlitz) in the Sudetenland, close to his hometown. Schindler and his associates composed a list of Jewish workers that he deemed essential for the new factory and submitted it for approval to the Jewish labour office. (With several versions of the list known, it is difficult to determine how many people were ultimately selected.) Though those chosen were diverted for a time to other concentration camps, Schindler intervened, ensuring that 700 men and 300 women eventually arrived at Brnĕnec. They were later joined by 100 more Jews who had been transported from another concentration camp by the Nazis and abandoned in train cars in Brnĕnec. Those who reached the camp spent the remaining months of the war manufacturing munitions that were rigged to fail. A final head count compiled at this time listed 1,098 Jews at the camp.

On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe ended, and the next day Schindler and his wife fled the country with the help of several of the Schindlerjuden, as the Jews he saved came to be known. Schindler was wanted for war crimes in Czechoslovakia due to his earlier espionage activities. In 1949 they settled in Argentina with several of the Jewish families they had saved. Having spent the bulk of his profiteering fortune on bribes, Schindler unsuccessfully attempted to farm. He went bankrupt in 1957 and the next year traveled alone to West Germany, where he made an abortive entry into the cement business. Schindler spent the rest of his life supported by donations from the Schindlerjuden. He was named a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in 1962 and was interred in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.

Schindler’s story remained largely the province of Holocaust scholars until the publication in 1982 of Schindler’s Ark, a Booker Prize-winning novelization by Thomas Keneally. The novel, which became a canonical text of Holocaust literature, was later used as the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), which starred Liam Neeson as Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as Göth.