Oskar Schindler

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Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – September 9, 1974) was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by including them in his enamelware and ammunition factories in occupied Poland and Moravia.

Schindler's List, a 1982 book that reflected his life as an entrepreneur initially motivated by profit, but later showed extraordinary initiative, tenacity, apprehension, and dedication to the lives of his Jewish employees. Schindler grew up in Svitavy, Moravia, and worked in various occupations before joining the Abwehr, Nazi Germany's military intelligence service, in 1936.

In 1939, he joined the Nazi Party.

He gathered statistics on railways and troop movements for the German government prior to 1938's occupation of Czechoslovakia.

He was arrested by the Czechoslovak government for espionage, but the Munich Agreement in 1938 had him released under the terms of the Munich Agreement.

Schindler continued to gather information for the Nazis who lived in Poland in 1939 until the onset of World War II.

Life

Schindler was born in Zwittau, Austria-Hungary, on April 28, 1908. Johann "Hans" Schindler, the owner of a farm machinery company, was his father, and Franziska "Fanny" Schindler (née Luser). Elfriede, his sister, was born in 1915. Schindler enrolled in a technical academy after being suspended in 1924 for forging his report card. He later graduated but not take the Abitur exams that would have qualified him to go to college or university. Rather, he took courses in Brno in various trades, including chauffeuring and machinery, and spent three years with his father. He owned a 250-cc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycle and competed in mountain races for the next two years as a motorcycle fan since his youth.

Schindler married Emilie Pelzl (1907–2001), the daughter of a wealthy Sudeten German farmer from Maletein, on March 6, 1928. They migrated in with Oskar's parents and occupied the upstairs rooms, where they lived for seven years.

Schindler left serving for his father and began a number of jobs, including a job at Moravian Electrotechnic and the administration of a driving school, shortly after his marriage. After an 18-month service in the Czech army, where he climbed to the rank of lance corporal in the 31st Army's Tenth Infantry Regiment, Moravian Electrotechnic was bankrupt immediately afterwards. The farm machinery company of his father died about the same time, leaving Schindler unemployed for a year. In 1931, he began working with Jaroslav imek Bank of Prague, where he worked until 1938.

Schindler was arrested several times in 1931 and 1932 for public inebriation. He also had an affair with Aureli Schlegel, a school friend, around this time. Emily was born in 1933 and Oskar Jr. was born in 1935. The child, not his son, was not his son, according to Schindler later. In 1935, Schindler's father, who was an alcoholic, divorced his wife. She died a few months later after a long illness.

In 1935, Schindler joined the German party in a radical break. Despite being a citizen of Czechoslovakia, Schindler became a spy for the Abwehr, Nazi Germany's military intelligence service, in 1936. He was sent to Abwehrstelle II Commando VIII, a Breslau company. He later told Czech police that he did it because he needed the money; by this time, Schindler had a drinking problem and was heavily in debt; by this time, he was also in debt.

His Abwehr duties included gathering data on railways, military installations, and troop movements, as well as recruiting other spies in Czechoslovakia ahead of the planned invasion by Nazi Germany. He was arrested by the Czech government for espionage on 18 July 1938 and immediately arrested, but the Czech Sudetenland was released as a political prisoner under the terms of the Munich Agreement, the document under which the Czech Sudetenland was annexed into Germany on October 1st. On November 1st, Schindler applied for Nazi membership and was accepted the following year.

Schindler had been promoted to second in command of his Abwehr unit in Zwittau and his wife and family were relocated with his wife and wife in Ostrava (Ostrau) on the Czech-Polish border in January 1939. In the months leading up to Hitler's capture of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, he was instrumental in espionage. Emilie's assistance with paperwork, processing, and hiding classified information in their apartment for the Abwehr department. Since Schindler frequently traveled to Poland on business, he and his 25 agents were able to find information about Polish military installations and railways for the planned invasion of Poland. One unit was sent by his commander to monitor and report information about the railway line and tunnel in the Jablunkov Pass, which has been identified as vital for German troops's mobility. Schindler continued to serve for the Abwehr until late 1940, when he was sent to Turkey to look at misconduct among the Abwehr troops posted to the German embassy.

Schindler first arrived in Kraków (Krakau) in October 1939, on Abwehr service, and then moved to Abwehr's apartment the next month. Emilie lived in Ostrava and went to Oskar, Kraków, at least once a week. Mila Pfefferberg, an interior decorator, hired interior decorator Mila Pfefferberg to decorate his new apartment in November 1939. Leopold Pfefferberg, Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg's son, became one of his first black market traders. They became lifelong friends.

Schindler was introduced to Itzhak Stern, an accountant for Schindler's fellow Abwehr agent Josef "Sepp" Aue, who had taken over Stern's former Jewish-owned office as a Treuhänder in the same month (trustee). The Germans confiscated property belonging to Polish Jews, including their possessions, places of employment, and homes right after the invasion, and Jewish citizens were deprived of their civil rights. Schindler presented Stern the balance sheet of a company he was considering buying, Rekord Ltd, owned by a group of Jewish businessmen that had filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Stern advised him that rather than operating the firm as a trustee under the auspices of the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office for the East), he should buy or lease the company as a trusteeship under the Nazi's auspices, which includes the right to hire more Jews.

Schindler, one of the founders, and several Jewish investors, including Abraham Bankier, signed an informal lease deal on the factory on November 13, 1939, which formalized the deal on January 15, 1940. He renamed it Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (German Enamelware Factory) or DEF, and it was soon identified by the term "Emalia" in honor of the company's name. He started with seven Jewish employees (including Abraham Bankier, who helped him with the company's management) and 250 non-Jewish Poles. The company employed 1,750 workers, a thousand of whom were Jews, at its peak in 1944. Schindler also assisted Schlomo Wiener Ltd, a wholesale company that sold his enamelware, and was a leaseholder of Prokosziner Glashütte, a glass factory.

Schindler's links with the Abwehr and his links in the Wehrmacht and its Armament Inspectorate enabled him to gain contracts to produce enamel cookware for the military. Later, these relationships saved his Jewish employees from deportation and suicide. Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and luxury items that could only be obtained on the black market to keep his staff safe. Bankier, a major black market company, has bribes as well as additional materials for use in the factory. Schindler himself enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle and pursued extramarital affairs with his secretary, Viktoria Klonowska, and Eva Kisch Scheuer, a DEF enamelware manufacturer specialising in enamelware. Emilie Schindler lived in Kraków for a few months in 1940 and 1941 with Oskar.

Schindler was initially concerned with the company's cash-making capabilities and recruiting Jews because they were cheaper than Poles—the wages were set by the occupying Nazi regime. He began shielding his employees without regard for cost later on. The credibility of his factory as a vital to the war effort was a determining factor in his ability to shield his Jewish workers. If Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) were threatened with removal, he obtained exemptions for them. He claimed that wives, children, and even people with disabilities were all necessary mechanics and metalworkers. On one occasion, the Gestapo appeared in Schindler demanding that he hand over a family who had stolen identification documents. "Twee hours after they walked in," Schindler said, "two inebriated Gestapo men stumbled out of my office unaccompanied and without the incriminating evidence they had requested."

Governor-General Hans Frank issued a decree on August 1st, 1940, requiring all Kraków Jews to leave the city within two weeks. Only those who had directly related to the German war effort would be allowed to continue. About 15,000 Jews who lived in the city then survived by March 1941. These Jews were then compelled to leave Kazimierz's traditional neighborhood and migrate to Kraków Ghetto, which is located in the industrial Podgórze district. Workers at Schindler's traveled from the ghetto to their factory jobs on foot each day. In comparison to the factory's expansion and its neighboring office space, Schindler's four-year tenure as boss included the construction of an outpatient clinic, co-op, kitchen, and dining room.

The Nazis began carrying Jews out of the ghetto in fall 1941. The bulk of them were taken to the Bex extermination camp and murdered. The ghetto was liquidated on March 13, 1943, and those that were still fit for work were sent to Parma's new concentration camp. Hundreds of thousands of people who were unfit for work were sent to extermination centers and killed; hundreds of others were killed by the Nazis as they demolished the ghetto. Schindler, who was aware of the Wehrmacht contacts, had his employees stay overnight to shield them from harm. The ghetto was liquidated by Schindler, who was appalled. Schindlerjude Sol Urbach "changed his mind about the Nazis," Schindler says. He wanted to get out and save as many Jews as he could."

On Jerozilimska Street, about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 mi) from the DEF factory, the Pászów concentration camp opened in March 1943 on the former site of two Jewish cemeteries. Amon Göth, a sadist who shot prisoners of the camp at random, was in charge of the camp. Prisoners in Parma's prison were surrounded by constant fear of their bodies. Göth was "the most despicable man I've ever met," Emilie Schindler called him.

Initially, Göth's proposal was that all of the factories, including Schindler's, be relocated within the camp gates. Schindler, on the other hand, stopped his factory from being relocated, but convinced Göth to build (at Schindler's own expense) a subcamp at Emalia to house his employees plus 450 Jews from other nearby factories. They were safe from random execution, well-fed and housed, and they were allowed to attend religious services.

Schindler was arrested twice on suspicion of black market activity and twice on suspicion of breaching Nuremberg Laws by kissing a Jewish child, a crime that was not permitted under the Race and Resettlement Act. In late 1941, the first arrest resulted in him being kept overnight. His secretary arranged his freedom through Schindler's influential contacts in the Nazi Party. His second arrest, which occurred on the 29th of April 1942, was the result of his kissing a Jewish girl on the cheek at his birthday party at the factory the previous day. He remained in prison five days before his influential Nazi friends were able to free him. He was arrested again in October 1944, suspected of black marketeering and bribing Göth and others to improve the Jewish workers''s living conditions. He was detained for the majority of a week and then released. Göth was arrested on September 13th for misconduct and other crimes of authority, and Schindler's arrest was part of Göth's ongoing inquiry into the company. Göth was never found guilty of these charges.

Schindler was contacted by Zionist leaders in Budapest in 1943 by Jews from members of the Jewish resistance movement. Schindler travelled to Budapest several times to cover the Jews' mistreatment in Nazi terms. He took back funds for Israel from the Jewish Agency for Israel and turned it over to the Jewish underground.

The SS began closing the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the remaining prisoners westward to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camp as the Red Army drew nearer in July 1944. Mietek Pemper, Göth's personal secretary, alerted Schindler's enamelware factory that was not directly involved in the war effort, as well as Schindler's enamelware factory. In an attempt to save the lives of the Jewish workers, Pemper suggested to Schindler that cookware be converted from cookware to anti-tank grenades. Schindler persuaded Göth and his employees in Berlin to move their factory and their workers to Brünnlitz (Czech: Brnec), thus saving them from certain death in the gas chambers. Pemper compiled and sorted the list of 1,200 Jews from Julius Madritsch's textile factory, which were sent to Brünnlitz in October 1944 using names given by Jewish Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg.

A train carrying 700 men on Schindler's list was first delivered to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen, where the men spent about a week before being rerouted to Brünnlitz. Three hundred female Schindlerjuden were sent to Auschwitz, where they were in imminent danger of being sent to the gas chambers. Schindler's normal contacts and bribes were unable to gain their freedom. After several weeks in Auschwitz, the women were eventually admitted to Brünnlitz after he sent his secretary, Hilde Albrecht, with bribes of black market products, food, and diamonds.

Schindler moved 250 wagon loads of machinery and raw materials to the new plant in lieu of staff. At the plant, there were only few useful artillery shells. Schindler purchased finished products on the black market and resold them as his own when Armaments Ministry officials doubted the factory's poor output. Since the SS's rations were insufficient to satisfy the workers's needs, Schindler spent the majority of his time in Kraków, procuring food, armaments, and other items. Emilie's wife stayed in Brünnlitz, secretly procuring more rations and caring for the employees' health and other essential requirements. In an attempt to increase the likelihood of surviving the war, Schindler arranged for the transfer of up to 3,000 Jewish women out of Auschwitz to small textile plants in Sudetenland.

A trainload of 250 Jews who had been refused as workers at a German mine in Goleschau, Poland, landed in Brünnlitz in January 1945. When they arrived, the boxcars were frozen shut, and Emilie Schindler waited while an engineer from the factory opened the cars using a soldering iron. Twelve people were killed in the cars, and the rest were too ill and weak to work. Emilie took the refugees into the factory and cared for them in a makeshift hospital until the war ended. As the Red Army approached, Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the murder of his troops. He and his staff gathered on the factory floor on May 7 to listen to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who announced on the radio that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe had ended.

Schindler, as a member of the Nazi Party and the Abwehr intelligence service, was in danger of being arrested as a war criminal. Bankier, Stern, and several others made a letter announcing their help with Jewish lives. He was also given a ring made from gold extracted from dental work. "Whoever saves one life saves the world saves the world." Schindler and his wife escorted westward in their car, a two-seater Horch, first with several fledging German troops riding on the running boards, escaping being captured by the Soviets. Marta, Schindler's mistress, was ladening a truck carrying several Jewish employees and then a load of black market trade items. The Horch was confiscated by Soviet troops at Budweis, which had already been taken by Soviet forces. The Schindlers were unable to retrieve a diamond that Oskar had hidden under the seat. They travelled by train and on foot until they finally reached the American lines at Lenora's town of Lenora, and then continued by rail and on foot to Passau, where an American Jewish officer arranged for them to travel by train. In the fall of 1945, they migrated to Bavaria, Germany.

Schindler had invested his entire fortune on bribes and black market imports for his employees by the end of the war. He went to Regensburg and later Munich briefly, but not so successful in postwar Germany. He had been turned down from Jewish organisations, and he was unable to get support from Jewish organizations. He submitted a request for reimbursement of his wartime expenditures to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1948, receiving $15,000. He estimated his expenditures at over $1,056,000, which includes the costs of camp development, bribes, and expenditures on black market products, including food.

Schindler immigrated to Argentina in 1949, where he first tried raising chickens and then nutria (coypu), a small animal raised for its fur. After the company went bankrupt in 1958, he left his wife and returned to Germany, where he had a string of failed business ventures, including a cement factory. He declared bankruptcy in 1963 and suffered a heart attack the next year, which culminated in a month-long stay in hospital. Schindler survived on donations from around the world, remaining in touch with many of the Jews he had encountered during the war, including Stern and Pfefferberg.

On October 9, 1974, Schindler died of liver disease. He is buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, becoming the first member of the Nazi Party to be honoured in this manner.

On May 8, 1962, Yad Vashem welcomed Schindler to a reception in which a carob tree was planted in his honor on the Avenue of the Righteous. On June 24, 1993, he and his wife Emilie were named Righteous Among the Nations, an award bestowed by Israel on non-Jews who played a vital role in saving Jews during the Holocaust. Schindler, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, Helmut Kleinicke, and Hans Walz are among the few Nazi Party members to receive this award. In 1966, Schindler received several awards, including the German Order of Merit.

"Schindler's extraordinary deeds arose from just the fundamental sense of decency and humanity that our modern age seldom fully believes in." A repentant opportunist saw the light and revolted against the sadism and vile criminality that surrounded him. "I felt that the Jews were being killed," Schindler said in 1983 television film "I" felt. I had to assist them because there was no other option."

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