Oskar Schindler had always been greedy, sly, and lecherous. He saw his Jewish workers as little more than slaves; a means of saving money at his enamel factory, as they worked cheaper than the Polish.
That all changed in 1943, when he saw firsthand the treatment of their people at the hands of Nazi soldiers. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system,” Schindler recalls.
And so goes the story of the factory owner and former Nazi spy who saved the lives of 1200 Jewish people during some of the darkest days in human history.
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Oskar Schindler was born in 1908 in Moravia, a historically German province located in Austria-Hungary. His father owned a farm machinery business in the industrial town the family called home, and his mother was a homemaker. The family was quite wealthy, and Schindler himself very popular at school, though his grades were mediocre at best. He had a close relationship with his sister, Elfriede, who was seven years his junior, but his two best friends were the sons of a local rabbi.
He went on to study at technical school, but was expelled when caught forging his report card. For a few years after, Schindler worked for his father, but tensions between the two rose when he married a woman named Emilie in 1928, and the two moved into the upstairs rooms of his parent’s house. Schindler left his father’s business, and was soon called upon for military duty. He spent 18 months in the Czech army, before returning home in the early 1930s to find the depression in full swing. His father’s once prosperous business went bankrupt, and with no other opportunities available to him, Schindler turned to alcohol.
Over the next few years, Schindler was arrested multiple times for public drunkenness, and bore two children as the result of an affair with a school friend. In 1935, his alcoholic father abandoned his mother, and a few months later she died from a prolonged illness.
It was around this time that Hitler’s Nazi Party called upon the people of Moravia, and surround German provinces, to fulfil their duties to their land in which they truly belonged. Like many other ethnic Germans in the area, Schindler joined the separatist Sudeten German Party, and in 1936 became a spy for the Nazi’s counter-intelligence division, Abwehr. His job was to collect information of infrastructure, and to develop a spy network in the leadup to Germany’s planned invasion of the country. He carried out these orders not in the name of national pride, Schindler would later tell the Czech police who arrested him in 1938, but because he needed the money to pay off his debts. He spent two-and-a-half months in prison, before his home province were annexed to Germany.
In November of that same year, he was made a member of the Nazi party, and promoted to second in command of his Abwehr unit. Over the next year, he helped prepare for Germany’s invasion into Poland, the event that would trigger the start of World War II.
In October 1939, he moved to Krakow, where he dabbled in black market trading. But as the Nazi war machine gathered pace, Schindler turned to legitimate business that could see him providing materials required for the war effort. He leased an enamelware factory with the backing of Jewish investors, all of whom had been stripped of their civil rights when Germany took control of the country.
Initially, he hired seven Jews and 250 non-Jewish Poles to work, but the former figure increased dramatically over the next year as Schindler came to realise that they would work for significantly less pay. He saw them not as humans, but as an investment. Schindler bribed his connections in the army to ensure his workers were not taken away to labour camps. Meanwhile, the savings meant he could enjoy a lavish lifestyle.
For the Jews, things only got worse. The German Governor-General issued a decree requiring all Jews without work in Krakow to leave the city during August 1940. Within six months, less than 20% of the Jewish population remained. They were forced to live in a walled ghetto.
It wasn’t long before the Nazis decided even that wasn’t enough pain to put them through. In the fall of 1941, they began transporting Jews from the ghetto to a nearby extermination camp, where they were killed.
On March 13, 1943, Nazi soldiers liquidated the ghetto. They took those who were fit to work in new concentration camps, while all others were sent to extermination camps or killed on the streets.
Schindler, having been made aware of the plan beforehand, had hidden his workers and their families in the factory overnight. As he watched the horrendous events unfold out the window, Schindler “changed his mind about the Nazis. He decided to get out and to save as many Jews as he could.”
Soon after, a new concentration camp was opened nearby, situated on the former site of two Jewish cemeteries. It was run by Amon Goth, labelled by Schindler’s wife as “the most despicable man I have ever met”.
Goth tried to force Schindler to relocate his business inside the camp walls. Not only did he fail, but Schindler convinced Goth to allow him to open a subicamp on the factory’s land, securing a location where almost 1500 Jews could live without fear of random execution. They were even allowed to partake in their faith.
Over the next year, Schindler’s business employed 1750 workers, most of whom were Jews. He expanded the factory grounds to include a kitchen, dining room, and outpatient clinic for employees and their families. As the Nazis continued to clamp down on the Jewish population, Schindler claimed exemptions for wives, women, and the disabled, claiming them as important members of his staff.
Schindler was contacted by members of the Jewish resistance movement, and later made several trips to Budapest to report on the Nazi mistreatment of the Jews, and to bring back funding for the Jewish underground provided by the Jewish Agency for Israel.
By July 1944, the Red Army was approaching. The concentration camps were being closed, with the remaining prisoners being sent west. Goth’s personal secretary warned Schindler of the plan, and through exorbitant bribes – and a fake offer to produce artillery shells for the army – Schindler managed to convince officials in Berlin to allow him to move his workers to the Czech Republic, saving them from certain death.
The secretary then compiled the famous list, featuring the names of 1200 Jews who were saved from the gas chambers by Schindler’s selfless act.
The move wasn’t easy. 700 men were accidentally sent to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp for a week, while 300 women ended up in Auschwitz. Schindler only procured their release through even more bribes, including fine foods and diamonds.
While procuring food and materials to cover his worker’s basic needs, and deflecting questions from Berlin over the factory’s low output of anti-tank grenades, Schindler arranged for an estimated 3000 Jewish women to be transferred from Auschwitz to textile plants in the vicinity of his own factory.
Another makeshift hospital was established on the grounds when a trainload of 250 Jews arrived in January 1945. The boxcar doors were frozen shut, 12 people lay dead inside, and the others were far too feeble to work. SS officials wished to exterminate them on the spot, but Schindler refused.
On the 7th of May, 1945, Schindler gathered his workers on the factory floor. The voice of British Prime Minster Winston Churchill came over the radio, announcing German surrender.
It was a time for celebration, but for Schindler’s involvement in the Nazi party he was in danger of being arrested as a war criminal. To ensure this would not happen, many of his workers prepared a statement attesting to his endeavours, and gave him a gold ring, inscribed with the words “Whoever saves one life saves the entire world”.
So began a long and frightful trip to the American lines. Schindler met with an American Jewish officer, who sent them to Switzerland, before an eventual return to Germany in late 1945.
Schindler’s efforts had left him destitute. His only means of survival was the assistance he received from Jewish organisations across the country.
In 1948, he lodged a claim for the reimbursement of his wartime expenses to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He estimated he had spent well over $1 million on the goods and services required to protect his workers. He received $15,000.
Afterwards, he travelled to Argentina, and started a small farm. It went bankrupt after nine years.
Schindler left his wife in 1958 – who had played a substantial part in ensuring Schindler’s plans during the war succeeded – and returned to Germany. He declared bankruptcy again in 1963, before suffering a heart attack.
He survived the next decade on donations sent across the world, before dying at the age of 66.
Oskar Schindler is buried upon Jerusalem’s Mt Zion, the only Nazi Party member to be honoured in such a fashion.
When Canadian writer Herbert Steinhouse interviewed Schindler in 1948, he wrote “Schindler’s exceptional deeds stemmed from just that elementary sense of decency and humanity that our sophisticated age seldom sincerely believes in. A repentant opportunist saw the light and rebelled against the sadism and vile criminality all around him”.
Perhaps that is why his legacy remains so strong. Here was a man, great in his faults, but greater still in his humanity. May we never forget him.