Oskar Schindler

• 1. Introduction

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  Oskar Schindler stood on a factory floor in Brünnlitz on the 7th of May 1945, surrounded by Jewish workers who owed him their lives, and listened to a radio. The voice was Winston Churchill's, announcing that Germany had surrendered and that the war in Europe was over. The scene looks strange on paper. At its center was a German industrialist who belonged to the Nazi Party and had once spied for his country's military intelligence service. Around him stood people whose survival he had bought with bribes, black market goods and nearly everything he owned. How did a heavy drinker and chronic debtor become the protector of so many strangers? What did that protection cost him? And why does the world remember a man whose final decades were spent in failure?

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• 2. Before Kraków

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  Oskar Schindler was born in Zwittau, a Moravian town then part of Austria-Hungary, on the 28th of April 1908. His Sudeten German family was headed by Johann, called Hans, who owned a farm machinery business. His mother was Franziska, known as Fanny, and his sister Elfriede arrived in 1915.

  In 1924 a technical school expelled Schindler for forging his report card. He did graduate later, but he never sat the abitur exams that would have qualified him for university. Instead he took courses in Brno in trades such as chauffeuring and machinery, and he worked three years for his father. A 250-cc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycle became his pride, and he entered mountain races for fun.

  On the 6th of March 1928 Schindler married Emilie Pelzl, whose father was a prosperous Sudeten German farmer from Maletein. The couple lived in the upstairs rooms of his parents' home for seven years. Steady work eluded him. He left his father's firm for a string of jobs, including a post at Moravian Electrotechnic and the management of a driving school. He served 18 months in the Czech army and rose to lance corporal in the Tenth Infantry Regiment of the 31st Army. Moravian Electrotechnic went bankrupt soon after he returned, and his father's business closed around the same time. A year of unemployment followed. In 1931 he took a job at Jaroslav Šimek Bank of Prague and stayed until 1938.

  Police arrested Schindler several times in 1931 and 1932 for public drunkenness. Around then he had an affair with Aurelie Schlegel, a school friend. A daughter, Emily, was born in 1933 and a son, Oskar Jr., in 1935, though Schindler later claimed the boy was not his. In 1935 his alcoholic father abandoned his wife, who died a few months later after a long illness.

  Schindler joined the separatist Sudeten German Party in 1935. In 1936, although he was a Czechoslovak citizen, he began spying for the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany. His unit was Abwehrstelle II Commando VIII, based in Breslau. Czech police later heard him explain that he needed the money. By then he was drinking heavily and was always in debt.

  His assignments covered railways, military installations and troop movements. He also recruited other spies inside Czechoslovakia ahead of the planned German invasion. On the 18th of July 1938 Czech authorities arrested him for espionage and jailed him at once. The Munich Agreement freed him as a political prisoner. Under that same agreement, Germany annexed the Czech Sudetenland on the 1st of October. Schindler applied to join the Nazi Party on the 1st of November, and it accepted him the following year.

  After a rest in Zwittau, Schindler became second in command of his unit. In January 1939 he moved with Emilie to Ostrava, on the Czech-Polish border. Emilie helped with paperwork and hid secret documents in the couple's apartment for the Abwehr office. Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, and Schindler's spying filled the months before it. He and his 25 agents traveled often to Poland, gathering facts about Polish military activity and railways for the planned invasion. One task was to watch the railway line and tunnel in the Jablunkov Pass, which the Germans judged critical for moving troops. He kept working for the Abwehr into the fall of 1940, when it sent him to Turkey to investigate corruption among its officers at the German embassy. By then he was already running a factory in Kraków.

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• 3. Emalia

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  In October 1939 Schindler reached Kraków on Abwehr business, and the following month he took an apartment there. To decorate it he hired an interior decorator named Mila Pfefferberg. Her son Leopold, called Poldek, soon became one of his black market contacts, and the two men grew into lifelong friends. Emilie kept the Ostrava apartment and visited Oskar at least once a week.

  That November an accountant named Itzhak Stern entered his life. Stern worked for Josef "Sepp" Aue, a fellow Abwehr agent who had taken over Stern's formerly Jewish-owned employer as a trustee. The Germans had started seizing the property of Polish Jews, from homes to businesses, immediately after the invasion, and they had stripped Jews of their civil rights. Schindler showed Stern the balance sheet of an enamelware factory called Rekord Ltd. A consortium of Jewish businessmen owned it, and it had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year. Stern advised him to buy or lease the firm rather than run it as a trusteeship under the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, the Main Trustee Office for the East. Ownership would give him more freedom from Nazi dictates, including the freedom to hire more Jews.

  Backed by several Jewish investors, among them one of the owners, Abraham Bankier, Schindler signed an informal lease on the 13th of November 1939. The arrangement became formal on the 15th of January 1940. He renamed the company Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, or DEF, but everyone knew it by the nickname Emalia. He started with seven Jewish workers, Bankier among them, and 250 non-Jewish Poles. By 1944 the payroll had grown to about 1,750 people, and a thousand of them were Jews. He also helped run a wholesaler, Schlomo Wiener Ltd, and he leased a glass factory, Prokosziner Glashütte.

  His Abwehr ties, and his links with the Wehrmacht and its Armaments Inspectorate, won him contracts to make enamel cookware for the military. Those same links later helped shield his Jewish workers from deportation and death. Keeping them safe grew more expensive over time, in bribes to Nazi officials and in luxury gifts available only on the black market. Bankier was a key source of such goods, and of extra materials for the factory. Schindler lived lavishly and had affairs with his secretary, Viktoria Klonowska, and with Eva Kisch Scheuer, a merchant who specialized in enamelware at DEF. Emilie visited for a few months in 1940 and moved to Kraków in 1941.

  Money was the point at first. Schindler hired Jews because they were cheaper than Poles, since the occupying regime set the wages. Later he shielded them whatever the cost. The factory's status as essential to the war effort became decisive. Whenever the Schindlerjuden, or Schindler Jews, faced deportation, he claimed exemptions for them. He described wives, children and even people with disabilities as necessary mechanics and metalworkers.

  On one occasion the Gestapo came to his office demanding a family that held forged identity papers. Schindler later described what followed: "Three hours after they walked in," Schindler said, "two drunk Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incriminating documents they had demanded."

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• 4. Ghetto and Camp

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  On the 1st of August 1940 Governor-General Hans Frank ordered every Jew in Kraków to leave the city within two weeks. Only those whose jobs bore directly on the German war effort could stay. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Jews lived in the city then, and by March 1941 only 15,000 remained. They were forced out of their traditional neighborhood, Kazimierz, and into the walled Kraków Ghetto in the industrial Podgórze district. Schindler's workers walked between the ghetto and the factory each day. During his four years in charge he added an outpatient clinic, a co-op, a kitchen and a dining room for them, and he expanded the factory and its offices.

  In the autumn of 1941 the Nazis began moving Jews out of the ghetto, and most were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp and murdered. The ghetto was liquidated on the 13th of March 1943. Those still fit for work went to the new Płaszów concentration camp. Several thousand judged unfit were sent to extermination camps and killed, and hundreds more were murdered in the streets during the clearance. Warned by his Wehrmacht contacts, Schindler had his workers stay at the factory overnight. He watched the liquidation and was appalled. The Schindlerjude Sol Urbach said that from then on Schindler "changed his mind about the Nazis. He decided to get out and to save as many Jews as he could."

  Płaszów opened in March 1943 on the former site of two Jewish cemeteries, on Jerozilimska Street, about 2.5 km from the DEF factory. SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth ran the camp. He was a sadist who shot inmates at random, and the prisoners lived in constant fear. Emilie Schindler called him "the most despicable man I have ever met."

  Göth planned to move every factory, Schindler's included, inside the camp gates. Through diplomacy, flattery and bribery, Schindler stopped that from happening. He even persuaded Göth to let him build, at his own expense, a subcamp at Emalia. It housed his workers and 450 Jews from other nearby factories. Inside, they were safe from random execution, well fed and housed, and allowed to observe their religion.

  Late in 1941 Schindler was arrested on suspicion of black market activity and held overnight. His secretary arranged his release through influential contacts in the Nazi Party. A second arrest came on the 29th of April 1942. The day before, at his birthday party at the factory, he had kissed a Jewish girl on the cheek. That act broke the Nuremberg Laws, under the Race and Resettlement Act. He sat in jail for five days while his Nazi contacts worked to free him.

  In 1943 Zionist leaders in Budapest reached Schindler through members of the Jewish resistance. He traveled to Budapest several times to report in person on Nazi mistreatment of the Jews. He carried back money provided by the Jewish Agency for Palestine and handed it to the Jewish underground.

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• 5. The List

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  By July 1944 the Red Army was drawing near, and the SS began closing the easternmost concentration camps and moving prisoners west to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen. Mietek Pemper, Göth's personal secretary, warned Schindler that the Nazis meant to shut every factory not directly serving the war, his own included. Pemper suggested switching production from cookware to anti-tank grenades. Through bribery and persuasion, Schindler won over Göth and officials in Berlin to the idea of moving the factory and its workers to Brünnlitz, known in Czech as Brněnec.

  Marcel Goldberg, an officer of the Jewish Ghetto Police, supplied the names. Pemper then compiled and typed the list of 1,200 Jews. Of these, 1,000 were Schindler's own workers and 200 came from Julius Madritsch's textiles factory. All of them were sent to Brünnlitz in October 1944.

  On the 15th of October 1944 a train carrying 700 men from the list went first to the Gross-Rosen camp. About a week later it was rerouted to Brünnlitz. Three hundred women from the list were sent to Auschwitz instead, where the gas chambers threatened them. Schindler's usual connections and bribes failed to free them. At last his secretary, Hilde Albrecht, went with black market goods, food and diamonds. After several harrowing weeks, the women reached Brünnlitz.

  Schindler's own freedom was in doubt that same month. In October 1944 he was arrested on accusations of black marketeering and of bribing Göth and others to improve the workers' conditions. He was held for nearly a week and released. Göth had been arrested on the 13th of September 1944 for corruption and abuses of power, and Schindler's arrest belonged to that investigation. Göth was never convicted on those charges.

  Schindler also moved 250 wagonloads of machinery and raw materials to the new site. Few if any useful artillery shells came out of the plant. When officials from the Armaments Ministry questioned the low output, he bought finished goods on the black market and resold them as his own. The rations supplied by the SS fell short of what the workers needed. Schindler therefore spent most of his time in Kraków, hunting for food, armaments and other supplies. Emilie stayed in Brünnlitz, quietly obtaining extra rations and caring for the workers' health and basic needs.

  He arranged for as many as 3,000 Jewish women to leave Auschwitz for small textiles plants in the Sudetenland, hoping to improve their chances of surviving. In January 1945 a trainload of 250 Jews arrived from a German mine in Goleschau, in occupied Poland, which had rejected them as workers. The boxcars were frozen shut. Emilie waited while an engineer from the factory opened them with a soldering iron. Twelve people were dead inside, and the rest were too ill and weak to work. She took the survivors into the factory and nursed them in a makeshift hospital until the war ended. Schindler, meanwhile, kept bribing SS officials to prevent a massacre of his workers as the Red Army closed in.

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• 6. Ruin and Honor

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  Danger followed the Allied victory, because Schindler had belonged to both the Nazi Party and the Abwehr, and the Allies could have charged him as a war criminal. Bankier, Stern and several others drafted a statement for him to show the Americans, attesting to his role in saving Jewish lives.

  To avoid capture by the Soviets, Schindler and Emilie drove west in a two-seater Horch, at first with fleeing German soldiers riding on the running boards. A truck followed, carrying his mistress Marta, several Jewish workers and a load of black market goods. At the city of České Budějovice, already in Soviet hands, troops confiscated the Horch. A diamond Schindler had hidden under the seat was lost with it. The couple went on by train and on foot to the American lines at Lenora, and then to Passau. There an American Jewish officer arranged train travel to Switzerland. They settled in Bavaria in late 1945.

  By the war's end Schindler had spent his entire fortune on bribes and on black market supplies for his workers. Virtually destitute, he lived briefly in Regensburg and then Munich, and he relied on assistance from Jewish organizations. In 1948 he claimed repayment of his wartime expenses from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and received US$15,000. His own estimate of his spending was over $1,056,000, covering camp construction, bribes and black market food.

  In 1949 Schindler emigrated to Argentina, where he raised chickens and then nutria, small animals bred for their fur. The business went bankrupt in 1958, and he left Emilie and returned to Germany. His ventures there, including a cement factory, failed. He declared bankruptcy in 1963, and a heart attack the next year put him in the hospital for a month. He stayed in touch with many people from the war years, among them Stern and Pfefferberg, and he lived on donations sent by Schindlerjuden from around the world.

  On the 8th of May 1962 Yad Vashem invited Schindler to a ceremony in which a carob tree was planted in his honor on the Avenue of the Righteous. He received the German Order of Merit in 1966. He died of liver failure on the 9th of October 1974 and was buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, possibly the only member of the Nazi Party honored in that way. On the 24th of June 1993 he and Emilie were named Righteous Among the Nations, the award the State of Israel gives to non-Jews who took an active part in rescuing Jews. Only a few Nazi Party members have received it, among them Karl Plagge, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, Helmut Kleinicke and Hans Walz.

  The writer Herbert Steinhouse interviewed Schindler in 1948 and 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." In a 1983 television documentary, Schindler is quoted as saying: "I felt that the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them; there was no choice." In the former Czechoslovakia his reputation remains mixed, because people there recall his Abwehr service and his support for German separatism in the Sudetenland.

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• 7. From Page to Screen

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  Poldek Pfefferberg approached the Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang in 1951 and asked him to consider making a film about Schindler. In 1964, again at Pfefferberg's urging, MGM gave Schindler a US$20,000 advance for a proposed film treatment titled To the Last Hour. No film resulted, and Schindler quickly spent the money. MCA of Germany and Walt Disney Productions in Vienna also approached him in the 1960s, with the same outcome.

  In 1980 the Australian author Thomas Keneally happened to walk into Pfefferberg's luggage store in Beverly Hills, California, on his way home from a film festival in Europe. Pfefferberg told him Schindler's story and handed over copies of the papers he kept on file. After extensive research and interviews with surviving Schindlerjuden, Keneally wrote the historical novel Schindler's Ark. It appeared in 1982 and was published in the United States as Schindler's List.

  Steven Spielberg had acquired the film rights ten years before the movie came out, but he did not feel emotionally or professionally ready to make it. He offered the project to several directors. Then he read a script by Steven Zaillian that had been prepared for Martin Scorsese. Spielberg traded Scorsese the film Cape Fear for the chance to make the Schindler picture himself. The result was the 1993 film Schindler's List. Liam Neeson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Schindler. Ben Kingsley played Itzhak Stern, a character combined from Stern, Bankier and Pemper. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

  Jon Blair produced a British television documentary for Thames Television in 1983, titled Schindler: His Story as Told by the Actual People He Saved. It reached the United States in 1994 as Schindler: The Real Story. A&E followed in 1998 with a Biography special, Oskar Schindler: The Man Behind the List.

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• 8. Relics and Memory

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  Simon Yeret, once a prosperous timber merchant, offered a gold bridge from his own mouth when the Schindlerjuden decided to give their rescuer a keepsake. After the liquidation of Płaszów, the original investors in the enamel factory had canvassed the workers for ideas, knowing several jewellers were among them. The bridge was removed, and its metal was melted together with a few scavenged silver coins. A jeweller named Jozef Gross cut a section of lead pipe to make a master signet ring. He shaved two cuttlebones flat and squeezed the lead master between them until an impression was pressed into the mould. The gold was poured into that impression, and Gross filed and polished the result. He engraved a paraphrase from the Talmud in Hebrew: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Gross had mixed feelings about Schindler's character, yet he kept the cuttlebone mould and lead master for the rest of his life. They are now housed at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum. Nobody knows where the gold ring went, or what Schindler did with it after the war.

  In 1997 a suitcase belonging to Schindler, full of historic photographs and documents, turned up in the attic of the apartment of Ami and Heinrich Staehr in Hildesheim. Schindler had stayed with the couple for a few days shortly before his death in 1974. Their son Chris took the suitcase to Stuttgart. There, in 1999, Wolfgang Borgmann, science editor of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, examined the papers in detail. He wrote seven articles that ran from the 16th to the 26th of October 1999, later published as the book Schindlers Koffer. The suitcase and its documents went to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in December 1999.

  In early April 2009, workers combing through boxes of Keneally's materials at the State Library of New South Wales found a carbon copy of one version of the list. The 13-page document, yellow and fragile, had been filed among research notes and original newspaper clippings. Pfefferberg had given it to Keneally in 1980 while persuading him to write the story. This version holds 801 names and is dated the 18th of April 1945, with Pfefferberg listed as worker number 173. Several authentic versions exist, because the names were retyped repeatedly as conditions changed in the hectic last days of the war. One of the four existing copies was offered at a ten-day auction on eBay starting on the 19th of July 2013, with a reserve price of US$3 million. It received no bids.

  In August 2013 a one-page letter signed by Schindler on the 22nd of August 1944 sold at an online auction for US$59,135. It gave a factory supervisor permission to move machinery to Czechoslovakia. The same unknown buyer had earlier paid $63,426 for construction documents dated the 2nd of February 1943 for Schindler's Kraków munitions factory. They included architectural drawings and cost calculations for the large, hangar-like building.

  Efforts to turn the factory site in Brněnec into a museum at first failed for lack of money, though it was proclaimed a protected memorial site in November 2016. Additional funds from the regional government and the European Union changed that. The site opened as a museum in May 2025, on the 80th anniversary of VE day.

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