OSKAR SCHINDLER
Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974)
was a German industrialist, spy, and member of the Nazi Party who is credited
with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in
his enamelware and ammunitions factories, which were located in occupied Poland
and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He is the subject of the 1982
novel Schindler's Ark and its 1993 film adaptation, Schindler's List, which
reflected his life as an opportunist initially motivated by profit, who came to
show extraordinary initiative, tenacity, and dedication to save the lives of
his Jewish employees.
Schindler grew up in Zwittau, Moravia,
and worked in several trades until he joined the Abwehr, the intelligence
service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939. Prior to
the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he collected information on
railways and troop movements for the German government. He was arrested for
espionage by the Czech government but was released under the terms of the
Munich Agreement in 1938. Schindler continued to collect information for the
Nazis, working in Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of
World War II. In 1939, Schindler acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków,
Poland, which employed at the factory's peak in 1944 about 1,750 workers, of
whom 1,000 were Jews. His Abwehr connections helped Schindler protect his
Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. As
time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts
of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.
By July 1944, Germany was losing the
war; the SS began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and
deporting the remaining prisoners westward. Many were killed in Auschwitz and
Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Schindler convinced SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon
Göth, commandant of the nearby Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, to allow him
to move his factory to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland, thus sparing his workers
from almost certain death in the gas chambers. Using names provided by Jewish
Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg, Göth's secretary Mietek Pemper compiled
and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled to Brünnlitz in October 1944.
Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the execution of his
workers until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, by which time he
had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black market purchases of supplies
for his workers.
Schindler moved to West Germany after
the war, where he was supported by assistance payments from Jewish relief
organisations. After receiving a partial reimbursement for his wartime
expenses, he moved with his wife, Emilie, to Argentina, where they took up
farming. When he went bankrupt in 1958, Schindler left his wife and returned to
Germany, where he failed at several business ventures and relied on financial
support from Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews") – the people whose
lives he had saved during the war. He was named Righteous Among the Nations by
the Israeli government in 1963. He died on 9 October 1974 in Hildesheim,
Germany, and was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the only member of the Nazi
Party to be honoured in this way.
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