The man known to history as Oskar Schindler was born on
the 28th of April 1908 in the town of Zwittau in the Moravia region of what was then the Empire of
Austria-Hungary, but is today the Czech Republic. His father was Johann Schindler, who went by the
name of Hans and owned a farm machinery business. His mother was Franziska Schindler, née Luser,
a homemaker. She and Hans had one other child, a daughter named Elfriede who was born in
1915. The Schindlers lived in a region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire known as the Sudetenland.
Unlike most of the other parts of what would one day become the Czech Republic, this region was
primarily inhabited by ethnic Sudeten Germans, rather than Czechs. Thus, the Sudetenland was
culturally closer to Germany than the world of Prague which lay only a few hours away. Growing
up Schindler and all of his neighbours would have spoken German as their first language. Oskar had
a tumultuous childhood in his early years here. His father was a heavy drinker and womaniser
who engaged in extra-marital affairs and was emotionally unstable. It was claimed that
he had once raped his sister-in-law during a drunken episode, an incident which allegedly
resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child, Oskar’s half-sister, who appears to have
died in her youth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship between father and son was
antagonistic from early on. Oskar attended the local elementary and secondary schools.
He was not exactly a dedicated student, but there is otherwise a frustrating lack
of information about his childhood years, a gap which Schindler did not try to
fill when interviewed in later years. While Oskar was growing up events were occurring
across Europe which would have huge consequences for the continent and indeed Schindler’s own life
path. They would also make him a national of a different country before he reached his teenage
years. Ever since the 1870s the great powers of Europe, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and
Austria-Hungary had been on a collision course with each other, fuelled by colonial rivalry
in the Scramble for Africa and nationalism and competition between Austria-Hungary and
Russia to claim territory in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire collapsed there. Eventually in
the summer of 1914 these simmering tensions exploded into war after a crisis between the
Austro-Hungarian government and the Kingdom of Serbia in the Balkans ballooned out of control. In
the early days of August an alliance of Britain, France and Russia went to war with Austria-Hungary
and Germany, who were also allied with Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire. The conflict
would soon expand to become the First World War, as powers such as Japan and the United States
eventually became involved. As they did, Germany and Austria-Hungary faced
impossible odds and eventually in 1918 the war resulted in defeat for
the two Central European powers.
Even before the war ended the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was entering a crisis which would have profound implications for Schindler’s homeland
in the Sudetenland. As it became clear that the war effort was doomed in the late summer and
early autumn of 1918 the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was comprised of a wide array of different
nationalities such as the Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks and Serbs, began to fall apart.
In October 1918, weeks before the First World War actually ended, Czech and Slovak separatists
in the northern parts of the empire declared independence from Vienna, announcing the creation
of a new independent state of Czechoslovakia. This included Schindler’s native region, the
Sudetenland, a territory which admittedly was comprised much more of ethnically German families
like the Schindlers than either Czechs or Slovaks. The new Czechoslovak government was unclear
how to proceed in the aftermath of the war regarding predominantly German parts of their
new nation like the Sudetenland and asked the main victors in the war, Britain, France and the
US, to adjudicate on the matter during the peace negotiations at Versailles outside Paris in
1919. The general consensus here was that both Germany and Austria should be weakened as much
as possible in the aftermath of the war. Thus, the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which covered the
post-war settlement in the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, decreed that the
Sudetenland would remain a part of the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia. Consequently,
Schindler grew up from 1918 onwards as a citizen of this new state. The issue of the
Sudetenland, though, would emerge again soon. After just about making his way through secondary
school in the early 1920s Schindler went on to a technical school, however he was expelled
from here in 1924 shortly after his arrival for forging his grade report. Eventually he was
allowed back, though henceforth he was referred to by his classmates as ‘Schindler the Crook’.
This was not the only issue of criminality which he confronted around this time. In 1925 Hans
Schindler, who sold insurance premiums as a side job to make extra money, was accused by
some of his customers of embezzling money from them. Hans in turn blamed his son for the crime,
though many years later Oskar’s wife would claim that Hans had himself been responsible. Whoever
the culprit was, it resulted in further legal difficulties for Oskar when he was still
shy of his eighteenth birthday. However, he was soon allowed to return to the
technical college he had been expelled from, from which he managed to graduate.
Following this he headed to Brno, a larger Czech town where he took several courses
on machinery, chauffeuring and the repair and maintenance of heaters. He passed exams for these,
paving the way to work in the family business. Oskar met his future wife in the autumn
of 1927. Emilie ‘Milli’ Pelzl was seven months older than Oskar and from the village
of Staré Maletin about forty kilometres from Zwittau. Her father was a prosperous farmer
and the Pelzls had a harmonious family life, in contrast to that of the Schindlers. The
occasion of their first encounter was when Oskar, who had been working for his father’s business
on and off since 1924, had arrived to the Pelzl farm on business and tried to sell Emilie’s
father an electric generator for their house. Oskar was apparently infatuated with Emilie
upon first meeting her and continued to visit the Pelzl farm thereafter, inventing reasons
to do so about farm machinery and the like, but in reality in search of opportunities to
woo Emilie. It worked and after several weeks of this she accepted his marriage proposal.
They were wed on the 6th of March 1928, but from the offset it was a problematic union.
The newlyweds moved into the Schindler house, occupying the upstairs, but Hans Schindler’s heavy
drinking and crude behaviour proved problematic. It was the beginning of a marriage that would have
many peaks and valleys over the next thirty years. The years that followed did not bring much
better. Oskar had received a considerable dowry from Emilie’s father when they married,
but he then spent much of this in a somewhat reckless fashion in 1928 indulging his desire
to become a race car driver. This enterprise faltered after just a few months, with the
loss of much of their savings. Thereafter he quit working for his father and took a job
with the Moravian Electric Company in Brno, but this soon fell through as well and
instead he opened a racing school. Again, this was interrupted by an eighteen months stint
in the Czechoslovak army, where he served in the Tenth Infantry Regiment, eventually rising
to the rank of lance-corporal. However, in the climate of the late 1920s and early 1930s
there was little prospect of Czechoslovakia ending up at war and Oskar later noted that his time
as a conscript was filled more with recreational activities than any real soldiering. When his
time of service was done he returned to working with the Moravian Electric Company, but hard
times were hitting Europe economically in the 1930s and the company soon shut down. In this
environment Emilie began to criticise Oskar for having squandered the money he had received
from her father when they married in 1928. There was, though, a growing problem of another
kind. Oskar had inherited his father’s liking for alcohol. This had been something of an issue
from the early days of his marriage to Emilie, but it became increasingly problematic during the
early 1930s once he found himself out of work and at a loose end. He was arrested twice in 1931 and
1932 for public drunkenness and was imprisoned on one of these occasions for 24 hours before being
fined and released. However, this early experience of detention did not deter him and Oskar was
arrested two more times before the end of 1932. Eventually he was sentenced to four days in prison
and fined 200 crowns, a not insignificant sum for a couple down on their luck financially and a man
who was out of work. Things improved moderately from that point on, but it would not be his last
brush with the law and his increasing alcoholism continued unabated, albeit with fewer run-ins with
the police. If it became more controlled over time it was because later in 1932 Oskar did find a
new job with the Jaroslav Simek Bank in Prague. He would work there for six years and he and
Emilie moved into a large house shortly after he acquired the job, one which she later described as
a mansion compared with the old Schindler house. There were further problems waiting during this
period. At some stage in the early 1930s Oskar, who had also acquired his father’s womanising
ways, began having an affair with a woman called Aurelie Schlegel, whom he had known since his
childhood and who had worked as a secretary for Hans Schindler. Two illegitimate children
were soon born, Edith and Oskar Jnr. Emilie, with whom Oskar never had any children, was
seemingly fully aware of the affair after a certain point and of the children born out
of wedlock. Oskar was a neglectful parent, in part perhaps because he may have doubted that
he was actually Edith and Oskar Junior’s father to begin with. One might ask at this point why
Emilie stayed with him in what were already rocky first years to their marriage. She later
stated that, “In spite of his flaws, Oskar had a big heart and was always ready to help whoever
was in need. He was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time, not
mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived me, and later returned feeling sorry, like a boy
caught in mischief, asking to be forgiven one more time—and then we would start all over again…”
Thus, the pattern of much of Schindler’s life, the drinking, the affairs and the shaky finances,
were all in evidence from the early 1930s onwards. While Schindler’s personal affairs were becoming
rockier in the early 1930s, events were occurring beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia which would
soon have a bearing on Oskar’s own life and that of his country, and then subsequently on global
affairs. In neighbouring Germany the country’s politics had descended into revolution and
instability in the period immediately after the end of the First World War. The ruler
of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had abdicated in the closing days of the war,
bringing the empire to an end. It was replaced by a new republic, but this encountered severe unrest
and revolutions in cities like Berlin and Munich, as socialists and communists attempted to claim
power in the same manner that the Bolsheviks had in Russia in 1917. A counter-revolution of
right-wing German nationalists rose up to meet this left-wing revolution. Many political
movements emerged out of this, one of the most extreme being the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party, or Nazis, headed by Adolf Hitler. Based on an ideology of seeking revenge for
Germany’s humiliation and loss of territory in the First World War, as well as a conspiracy theory
that Jews and communists were seeking to destroy Germany, the Nazis soon attempted a revolt in
their core base in Bavaria in November 1923. This insurrection had failed and the stabilisation of
Germany’s politics in the mid-1920s left the Nazis a peripheral, minor political force in southern
Germany for most of the remainder of the 1920s. All of this changed, though, in late 1929. That
autumn the economic boom which had benefited Europe and the Americas for years came to a
shuddering halt as the stock markets on Wall Street in New York City incurred huge losses.
The Great Depression followed and Germany was hit particularly badly on account of its huge
national debt, the result of having enormous war reparations payments imposed on it by Britain
and France at the end of the First World War. As ordinary Germans lost their jobs and their
life savings, millions of Germans turned to more radical political groups. The Nazis suddenly
surged in support, becoming the second largest political party in the country in elections in
1930 and then the largest in 1932. Although the political establishment tried to prevent their
ascendancy for a time, eventually in January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the
Nazis soon acquired a dictatorial grip on power, following the passage of an Enabling Act which
allowed them to rule by decree in the spring of 1933. The rise of the Nazis heralded
a change in Europe’s political landscape, for their political ideology included the idea
of uniting all predominantly German-populated parts of Europe under the leadership of one
state, a new German Empire, the Third Reich. This necessarily included Austria, some parts of
western Poland and Schindler’s native Sudetenland. Schindler’s personal politics is a matter of
considerable dispute. Following a visit to Berlin in 1931 he expressed some sympathy for
the Communist Party there. It is strange then to learn that in 1935 he became a member of
the Sudeten German Party, a political party which was founded in Czechoslovakia shortly
after the Nazis seized power in Germany with the goal of fostering separatist sentiment and
activity in the Sudetenland. The ultimate goal of the party was to bring the Sudetenland under
German control. In assessing this and much of Schindler’s activities in the mid-to-late 1930s we
have to remember that Schindler, like many other supporters of the Nazis, cannot have predicted
the extent of the genocidal violence which they would unleash across Europe in years to come. He
joined the party as a German nationalist, who like a massive number of other ethnically German people
in the Sudetenland wanted to see the region united with Germany. Schindler also experienced
a profound personal tragedy at this time, when his mother, whom he had loved dearly, died
in 1935. Hans Schindler had abandoned her in her final illness and Oskar, whose relationship
with his father was always poor at best, never forgave him, although they made some
partial reconciliation years later in 1941. Meanwhile, in the mid-1930s Schindler’s alcohol
and money problems continued. He claimed in later years that these were the reason why he joined
the Abwehr in 1936, though his wife later asserted that his first contact with the agency was through
an affair with a woman who was also a member of the organisation whom he met on a business trip
to Krakow in Poland. The Abwehr was the German intelligence service which had been established
all the way back in 1920 during the period of the German Weimar Republic. As soon as the Nazis
seized power in Germany it was quickly turned into an instrument of foreign intelligence, used
to undermine Germany’s neighbours, particularly Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of which
held territory which the Nazis believed should be incorporated into a Greater Germany. Schindler’s
activities with the organisation primarily seem to have been in the shape of recruiting others,
notably people in positions of influence within business and finance, a task which he was well
suited to given his years working in various business roles and his acquisition of a position
with the Jaroslav Simek Bank in Prague in 1932. Recruitment was seemingly not the only task
Schindler undertook for the Abwehr in the mid-1930s. He was also involved in collecting
information about railways in Czechoslovakia, military installations and the Czechoslovak
army. These were all tasks which Schindler was well placed to perform. He had been in the
Czechoslovak army himself just a few years earlier and had extensive contacts within it, while he
travelled a lot for business, providing a cover for the collection of information and the meeting
of contacts. There is also little doubt as to what the information he was gathering was for. It was
for the purposes of planning a potential German invasion of the country, whether to seize the
Sudetenland or all of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, he was involved increasingly in the documenting of
internal conditions in Poland, a relationship with the country which would have consequences in years
to come. Years later Oskar attempted to downplay the extent of his involvement with the Abwehr,
claiming he was a small player who got in over his head at the time as he sought extra money
to pay off his growing debts, but others stated that Schindler was one of Germany’s most senior
intelligence agents in Czechoslovakia during these years. The latter assessment would seem to be
corroborated by the fact that he was arrested by the Czechoslovak government for espionage in the
summer of 1938 and was held for several months. As Schindler was becoming more involved with the
Nazis and the Abwehr within Czechoslovakia the Nazis in Germany were becoming more aggressive
on the international stage. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought
the First World War to an end and concluded the specific peace terms with Germany, the
country was prohibited from having an army of more than 100,000 men and completely barred
from establishing an air-force. But in 1935 the Nazi government had declared to the world its
intention to breach these restrictions and began building both a new air-force and recruiting
upwards of half a million soldiers. A year later the Rhineland region of western Germany,
which had been demilitarised under the terms of Versailles, was remilitarised. Then, as
the inexorable drift towards war continued, Hitler began making it known to the European
powers that he wished for Austria to unite with Germany into a Greater Germany. This had been
briefly proposed following the First World War, but Britain and others had prohibited such a
measure. Many within Austria were in favour of the idea, but the hard-line, right-wing
government tried its best to oppose it. That is until March 1938 when Vienna agreed to
hold a referendum on the matter. Before it could ever be held Hitler sent the new German
army into Austria. In the days that followed, the union of the two countries, referred to
as the Anschluss, was completed peacefully. This certainly did not end Nazi claims on foreign
territory. As soon as Nazi flags were flying above Vienna, Hitler turned his attentions to
Schindler’s native Sudetenland. This region, he began arguing to the governments in London,
Paris and Rome, should never have been allowed to form part of Czechoslovakia to begin with, as
it was primarily comprised of German-speaking, ethnically German people. Furthermore, the
Nazis soon established a new paramilitary unit known as the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps
within Czechoslovakia. It was clear that the intention was to launch a low-level internecine
war using this militia if the Sudetenland was not given to Germany. In mid-1938 when these
arguments were put forward aggressively, Britain and France were in no position to press back
against Hitler’s demands. They had drastically scaled back their own armed forces during the
interwar period and were now ill-equipped to confront Nazi aggression. Accordingly, when
a conference was convened in the city of Munich in southern Germany in September 1938 to
adjudicate on the issue of Schindler’s homeland, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,
and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier, capitulated to Hitler’s demands on the proviso
that the Nazis would not seek any more territories in Europe. Thus, the Sudetenland passed into
German control following the Munich Conference. The German annexation of the Sudetenland had
more implications for Oskar Schindler than for most other inhabitants of this region. In
the immediate term it won him his freedom, as he was still imprisoned for his
espionage activities at the time of the Munich Conference. He was released within
days. Evidently Schindler’s role in the Abwehr in the mid-1930s must have been greater than
he later claimed, for with the annexation of the Sudetenland in the autumn of 1938 and
his release from prison Oskar suddenly came into a significant amount of money. Just a few
weeks later he applied to join the Nazi Party, though curiously, for an individual who
had been an active Abwehr agent for years, his application was delayed for months on account
of his several arrests in the 1930s for public drunkenness. It was finally accepted in the
spring of 1939, by which time he and Emilie had relocated to Ostrava, a city in the north-east
of what is now Czechia near the Czech-Polish border. Here Schindler resumed his work with the
Abwehr, continuing to act as a spy to undermine Czechoslovakia and Poland, though the details
of his life at this time are again disputed, as Schindler was reticent about discussing his
espionage work prior to the war in later years. The annexation of the Sudetenland did not pacify
Hitler in the way that the British and French had hoped at Munich in 1938, an aspiration which
seems retrospectively naïve. No sooner had Nazi administrators moved into the Sudetenland than
Hitler and his ministers in Berlin began planning for the complete annexation of the remainder of
Czechoslovakia. This was duly undertaken in March 1939, yet still the British and French, who were
now scrambling to rearm, did not declare war. This was not to occur for several months yet. In the
meantime the Nazis also moved into parts of the Baltic States by annexing the city of Memel in
what had once been the Prussian part of Germany. In the weeks and months that followed the usual
set of demands began issuing forth from Berlin concerning Germany’s eastern neighbour, Poland.
On this occasion London and Paris made it clear that any breach of Polish sovereignty would
constitute an act of war on Germany’s part. Thus, when the Nazis invaded Poland on the 1st of
September 1939 after a false flag operation, Britain and France responded by declaring war on
Germany two days later. The Second World War had commenced. One of its most curious outcomes
would be that it would bring a businessman from the Sudetenland with a chequered
personal history to international renown. As we have seen, the details of what Schindler was
doing in 1939 are not entirely clear today. This is hardly surprising. As a spy he was trying to
disguise his activities. Yet, while much of the finer details are not known, there is no doubting
that he was involved in a significant way in gathering intelligence on Poland in the run up to
the German invasion of the country. Given this, it is also not surprising to find that he was heading
for Krakow by October 1939, the city which was established as the centre of the German occupation
government in Poland. The country had been quickly conquered by the German Wehrmacht in a campaign
which lasted little more than a month after the initial invasion. Thereafter a huge chunk of
the country was annexed to Germany, but the central and southern parts of Poland were formed
into a new entity named the General Government of Poland. This included the cities of Krakow
and Warsaw. The goal of the General Government was to prepare this region for a form of modern
colonisation, whereby the Polish population would be turned into an underclass who would serve
German newcomers who moved to the region. It was here in the General Government that Schindler
would spend most of the Second World War. Schindler did not arrive to Poland as a
Nazi official or in his capacity as an Abwehr agent. He remained a member of
the intelligence service until 1940, but after the invasion of Poland his role within
the organisation was largely in abeyance. Rather his purpose in travelling to Krakow in the
days after the completion of the conquest of the country was to use his position as someone
who had facilitated the German takeover of both Czechoslovakia and Poland and had influence
within the Nazi regime to develop business interests in occupied Poland. He also had
previous contacts and experience of Krakow, having visited the city on business in years
gone by. At first his actions in the late autumn of 1939 took the shape of operating as a black
marketer and smuggler. This was a period when, as in any war or its immediate aftermath,
government oversight and regulation was minimal and people who were able to wheel and deal could
acquire small fortunes during the rapid changeover of businesses and properties. Schindler was able
to use his contacts and some bribes to put himself into an advantageous position in this environment
and soon had accumulated a large amount of money. He was quickly able to put both his cash and his
influence to more sustained use. In January 1940 he acquired the ownership of a factory in Krakow,
using money provided to him by a number of Jewish financiers who were looking to disguise their
wealth as much as possible at this time before it was effectively robbed from them by the
Nazi regime. At the factory Schindler set up a business making enamelware, which he named
the German Enamelware Factory. It started small, with Schindler hiring just over a half a
dozen Jewish workers including a man called Abraham Bankier who had owned the factory before
Schindler purchased it. It should be noted though, that Schindler’s motive to hire Jewish
workers at this point may have been more motivated by economics than ethics, as the
laws which the German occupation government had put in place stipulated that Jews had to
be paid less than their Polish equivalents, and Krakow was a city with a very large Jewish
population. Before long Schindler was hiring more and more Jewish workers as his operation was
a major success, in large part because Schindler was able to use his influence and contacts within
the Nazi regime to acquire contracts to provide his enamelware to the German army. And as it
met with success Schindler, for the first time in his life, found himself not only out of debt
but acquiring considerable wealth very quickly. When Schindler went to Poland late in 1939 he
was arriving to the part of Europe which had the highest concentration of Jewish people anywhere
in the continent, approximately three and a half million altogether. This was very significant.
The Nazis were rabidly Anti-Semitic and Hitler’s political creed was based on the idea that a vast
Jewish conspiracy was afoot to destroy Germany and the Aryan races of Europe. Accordingly, from their
very first ascent to power in 1933 the regime had begun persecuting Germany’s roughly half a million
Jewish people. At the outset this had involved the introduction of a series of laws which effectively
robbed German Jews of their citizenship and persecuted them economically and socially. The
idea was to apply enough pressure that they would eventually decide to leave Germany altogether.
However, even before the war broke out there was a drift towards a more extreme approach to what
was deemed “the Jewish question” by the Nazis. In November 1938 a series of pogroms occurred in
co-ordinated attacks across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, whereby Jewish businesses,
synagogues and homes were attacked. Hundreds of Jews were killed and tens of thousands were
detained and sent to concentration camps which had been constructed across Germany to house political
prisoners and supposed enemies of the Nazi state. These attacks on Kristallnacht, or the Night
of the Broken Glass, as it has become known, presaged events from September 1939 onwards.
Once the Nazis arrived into Poland they could no longer look to simply pressure the Reich’s Jews
into leaving, not when millions of Jews lived in Poland. As such more aggressive measures were
deployed from late 1939 onwards. These involved the severe disenfranchisement of the country’s
Jews, but also a policy of forcing Poland’s Jewish people to move into ghettoes in certain cities,
the most notorious of which was the Warsaw Ghetto. This was effectively turned into a vast open-air
prison in 1940 and 1941, one which housed nearly 400,000 Polish Jews in an area of land measuring
under four square kilometres. At its peak there were eight or nine people living on average in
every room in the ghetto. Beyond these cramped conditions, life in the Warsaw Ghetto had some
surface veneer of normality in the early part of the war, but in reality the Nazis began
starving the Jewish people within to death, severely restricting the food supply into this
part of the city in the months that followed so that the average Jew here was surviving on just a
few hundred calories of food per day. Other plans were afoot to forcibly deport millions of Jews
beyond Europe’s boundaries to the Levant or, in a particularly dystopian plan, to the
East African island of Madagascar. However, these would soon give way to even more insidious
plans in ways which would shape Schindler’s life. In these early days of the persecution of
Poland’s Jews Schindler’s activities were a balance between his business activities and also
humane treatment of his workers. For instance, unlike the conditions which prevailed for Jews
elsewhere, Schindler invested money setting up proper kitchens and dining areas for his workers
in his factories, as well as a small doctor’s clinic to see to their medical needs. Despite his
work for and close ties to the Nazis, Schindler was seemingly never possessed of Anti-Semitic
feelings of any kind. He joined the Nazis despite their racial ideology, not because of it. This
favourable treatment of his Jewish workers was probably tolerated by the Nazi authorities
in Krakow because they viewed Schindler as a largely harmless figure. In this respect his
heavy drinking, carousing and womanising behaviour actually became beneficial during the war. Many
Nazis who might otherwise have scrutinised his conduct more closely overlooked his activities.
Indeed on one occasion when some members of the secret police, the Gestapo, called to Schindler’s
factory to question him about some of his workers, he appears to have gotten them drunk before
sending them on their way a few hours later. Schindler’s efforts to shelter Jewish workers
would dramatically increase in scale from 1942 onwards. This was owing to a new development in
the Nazi state’s approach to the Jewish people within its borders. In the course of 1941 Hitler
and his senior ministers had become increasingly confident that they would not have to answer for
anything they did within their borders to any foreign power. By that time they had conquered
virtually all of Western Europe. Only Britain remained unbowed and across the Atlantic Ocean
public opinion in the United States was against entry into the war, despite the personal desire
to do so of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In this environment, when an invasion of the Soviet
Union was commenced with in the summer of 1941, SS death squads were sent in behind the army to
massacre hundreds of thousands of Jews in Ukraine and other regions. Back within the borders of
the Third Reich a new strategy was decided upon, this was a policy of identifying and detaining
all of the Jewish people and sending them to a number of death camps in Poland such as
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, where they would be gassed to death.
The ‘Final Solution’, as it was termed, was decided on by the late summer of 1941 and
was to be put into effect from the start of 1942. Schindler’s experience of the Holocaust which
would follow from the Final Solution was not through direct experience of the death camps,
but rather through a smaller concentration camp called Kraków-Płaszów. Kraków-Płaszów was
largely a labour camp and a holding centre where large numbers of Jews from Krakow and other
locations were interred for weeks or months before being sent by train to Auschwitz or one of the
other death camps. Although originally a small detention centre where just over a thousand
prisoners were held, it was expanded in the course of 1942 and 1943 to hold in excess of
10,000 people at any given time and would hold nearly 20,000 prisoners at its peak. While they
were kept here people were effectively used as slave labour and here was where Schindler came
into the equation. As the war dragged on he found it increasingly difficult to find workers for his
factories and the regime began offering him labour from Kraków-Płaszów. Schindler accepted and would
spend the next few years trying to save as many people as he could. It was a constant struggle,
in large part because Kraków-Płaszów was overseen by Amon Goth as commandant, an Austrian member
of the Waffen-SS. Goth was a drunken sadist, who often shot prisoners indiscriminately for
little or no reason. It was this individual that Schindler would have to contend
with during the years of the Holocaust. If there was a moment in Schindler’s life
when he moved from being a partial member of the Nazi regime who treated his workers slightly
better than most others to being somebody who was committed to saving the lives of the Jews who
worked for him, then it surely occurred in the months between the summer of 1942 and the spring
of 1943 as the Krakow Ghetto was liquidated. The Krakow Ghetto was much smaller than its equivalent
in Warsaw, but it nevertheless had housed over 15,000 Jews at its height in 1941. Early in 1942,
following the initiation of the Final Solution, orders had been sent into Poland for the
liquidation of the ghettos in the months to come. That summer the sinister process of forcibly
removing thousands of Jews from the ghettoes and sending them on trains to the concentration camps
began. In Krakow this was overseen from the end of May by SS-Oberfuhrer Julian Scherner. Most of
it was completed within the space of a few weeks, after which only a few thousand Jews were left
here as labourers. The final liquidation of the ghetto consequently did not occur until March
1943. It was carried out under the command of Amon Goth. During this time several thousand of those
who were left here were sent to Kraków-Płaszów, but upwards of 2,000 Jews who were deemed
unfit for work were killed in the streets of the ghetto. Schindler witnessed these
events and was appalled. From that point onwards his sole objective in Poland was to
protect the lives of as many Jews as possible. In the months that followed Schindler began
using his privileged status as a supplier of goods to the German army to undertake
his work of saving those who would later become known as Schindlerjude or Schindler
Jews. Because his factories were deemed necessary for the war effort he was able to
continue hiring Jews from Kraków-Płaszów, even after the Final Solution was commenced
with, and to have them brought to his factories, removing the danger of either being sent to
the death camps or falling mercy to Amon Goth’s sadistic urges. The commandant of the camp was
known to wander about Kraków-Płaszów, drunk, shooting Jewish detainees on the merest pretext,
so any Jew who was sent to Schindler’s factories to work, was removed from the danger of possible
sudden death. When these workers were threatened with being sent to Auschwitz as the Holocaust
intensified Schindler would often falsify paperwork in order to make it seem that they were
an essential part of his operations. For instance, housewives and lawyers were certified
by Oskar as having invaluable skills as metalworkers or mechanics. When others became
sick or incapacitated so that they could not work he did his best to disguise this fact
as well, as a revelation of illness and an inability to work meant almost certain
death for any Jew in wartime Poland.
These actions created great personal danger
for Schindler. Between 1942 and 1944 he was arrested and questioned by the Gestapo on several
occasions on charges of irregularities in the paperwork he was filing and of showing excessive
favour to his Jewish workers. Despite this, Oskar did not desist. He even undertook a highly
risky trip to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in 1943 to meet two senior members of the huge
750,000 strong Hungarian Jewish community. There he provided them with extensive details about
what was occurring in Poland, information which no doubt helped to save many lives when the
Nazis took over direct control of Hungary in the spring of 1944 and extended the Holocaust
into the country. Schindler visited Budapest on several occasions and brought back money to
help finance the Jewish resistance movement within Poland. Ironically his earlier activities
with the Abwehr in the 1930s had acted as a kind of training for his later work supporting
the Jewish underground in Central Europe. As well as endangering himself, Schindler’s
activities by 1943 were also impoverishing him once again. The extensive contracts which
Schindler had acquired in 1940 to supply the German army with enamelware had briefly made him a
rich man in the early 1940s, particularly once the German invasion of the Soviet Union was entered
into in 1941 and millions of German soldiers and auxiliary staff needed to be supplied with
his goods. However, from 1942 onwards Schindler began spending huge amounts of money on obtaining
foodstuffs and other supplies such as medicines for the Jews who worked in his factories. The Nazi
regime itself provided only a tiny amount of food to each Jewish labourer. Schindler made up the
deficit. This was no mean task for a man who at the height of his operations in 1942 and 1943
was employing over 1,500 Jewish workers in his factories in and around Krakow. Furthermore, the
scale of the goods which he was obtaining could not be brought in without attracting attention and
Schindler also had to spend considerable amounts of money on bribes. He would later state that he
spent a sum in excess of one million dollars on these activities. This would equate to upwards
of twenty million dollars in today’s money. By the time the war ended in 1945 Schindler
was as broke as he had been when it started. Schindler’s efforts to shield hundreds of
Jewish people from the Polish camps would ultimately have been in vain if the war had
continued to go in Germany’s favour. Had it done so eventually nearly all of Europe’s
Jews would have been killed. However, that was not the case. Initially the war
had proceeded extremely well for the Nazis, with Poland being conquered swiftly in the
autumn of 1939, followed by quick invasions and occupations of Denmark and Norway in the spring
of 1940. That summer a remarkably swift campaign westwards had resulted in the Low Countries and
France being brought under Nazi rule. Britain, though, was another matter. Its navy and its
position as an island ensured it was the one state in Europe other than the Soviet Union
which could resist Nazi aggression. Thus, after a brief bombing campaign and efforts to force the
British to surrender in late 1940 and early 1941, Hitler turned his attentions eastwards towards the
Soviet Union, initiating an enormous land invasion of Ukraine, eastern Poland and the Baltic States
in the summer of 1941. At first this met with major success and the German armies were nearing
Leningrad and Moscow by the autumn, but then as the Russians began to pump enormous manpower into
their war machine the German advance stalled. The winter of 1941 was significant in more ways
than one. That December the United States also entered the war and a new alliance of Britain,
the US and the Soviet Union now emerged. As a consequence 1942 saw the gradual turning of the
tide, as the German and Italian campaign was stymied in North Africa and then the Russians
won a major victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in south-western Russia. The
following year the Allies went on the offensive, with the Russians beginning to push the Germans
back eastwards and the Western Allies initiating an invasion of southern Italy that summer after
the victorious conclusion of the North Africa campaign came earlier that year. By that time it
was clear that the war would end in German defeat, barring the development of a weapon
such as a nuclear bomb by the Germans, or a major falling out amongst the Allies.
Neither of these eventualities came close to occurring and in the summer of 1944 a
new Western Front was opened by the US and Britain in France. Paris and other key cities
in Western Europe such as the port of Antwerp were soon liberated by the Allies. The Third
Reich’s days were now numbered and with it the possibility increased that the Russian
advance would reach into Poland before the many Jews whom Schindler was protecting
were ultimately killed by the Nazi regime. As the Russians advanced westwards into Ukraine
and Poland in the summer and autumn of 1944 the Nazis began the process of evacuating much of
eastern and central Poland and dismantling the concentration camps there. Ultimately
Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp would not be liberated until January 1945, but by the
summer of 1944 plans were underway to remove the factories from the area. Schindler was in danger
of having his right to retain Jewish labour for his businesses removed altogether, as in the
desperate military situation which the Nazi state found itself in by this time enamelware
was no longer considered vital to the war cause. He was advised by Mietek Pemper, a secretary
of Amon Goth’s who was himself a Polish Jew, to consider switching his business to begin
making anti-tank weapons in order to be allowed continue to shield his Jewish workers,
but instead Schindler used his contacts, his powers of persuasion and a healthy amount of
bribes to convince Goth and many other officials in the General Government, many of whom were
immensely corrupt, to allow him to move his factory operations to Brunnlitz in his native
Czech region and to allow him to move hundreds of his workers from Poland in the process. This
was duly sanctioned in the early autumn of 1944. The move from Krakow to Brunnlitz occasioned
the development of Schindler’s famed list, a roll of the names of approximately 1,200
Jews who were to be sent to Brunnlitz to work at Schindler’s new factories and thus
would be spared the fate of most of those at Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the great
majority of whom were sent to Auschwitz and near certain death in the autumn and winter
of 1944. The list was drawn up by Oskar, his wife Emilie, who had joined him in Poland
back in 1941, Pemper, and several others such as Abraham Bankier and Marcel Goldberg. On it were
included the names of all of Schindler’s workers at his factory in Krakow and scores more from
amongst those held at Kraków-Płaszów. However, they very nearly all perished. When most of these
Jews were deported from Kraków-Płaszów in the late autumn of 1944 they were mistakenly
sent on different trains to Gross-Rosen concentration camp and Auschwitz. When he learned
what had occurred, Schindler quickly managed to have the bulk of them, who had been sent to
Gross-Rosen, released. However, it was more difficult to secure the discharge of 300 female
Jews who had been sent to Auschwitz. Schindler dispatched his secretary there where they were
only discharged when he agreed to pay a bribe of seven Reichsmarks for every worker. This is the
only case that we know of where hundreds of Jews were allowed to leave Auschwitz alive to be sent
somewhere other than another concentration camp. Once the Schindlerjude had been brought to
Brunnlitz the main task for Oskar and Emilie was to ensure that they were not removed from
there again before the war ended. Its conclusion was now looming nearer and nearer. The Western
Allies crossed into western Germany in the first weeks of 1945 and began a rapid advanced into
central and southern Germany in the spring. More significantly, the Soviets had begun their
final drive into eastern Germany in January 1945 and by early April had surrounded Berlin,
signalling the final stages of the war. Oskar and Emilie Schindler continued their humanitarian
efforts throughout this time. In January 1945, 120 Jewish prisoners were removed from Goleszow,
a sub-camp of Auschwitz, to supply workers to Schindler’s factory at Brunnlitz. These 120
men were sent westwards in a cattle wagon, with no heating in the depths of winter
and without any food. When they arrived to Brunnlitz 13 of them were dead and another
107 were starving and frostbitten. Schindler refused to allow the Nazi commander in
charge of the train to burn the bodies of the deceased and instead had them buried with
full Jewish rites near the Catholic cemetery. The 107 survivors were nursed back to health at
Brunnlitz in the days and weeks that followed. The Second World War came to an end in the first
days of the summer of 1945. Hitler killed himself in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin
on the 30th of April and when his designated successor Joseph Goebbels did the same a day
later the other heads of the government began negotiating Germany’s formal surrender even as
the Russians closed on the centre of Berlin. As an individual who had been high up in the Abwehr
in the 1930s and who had profited extensively from the occupation of Poland from the autumn of
1939 onwards Schindler might have now been facing arrest and trial like so many others involved
in the regime. However, he had been supplied with several letters from some of the Jews who had
been with him for extensive periods of time which attested to his having saved their lives. He was
also gifted a gold ring inscribed with the words, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,”
which had been fashioned using gold supplied by another Schindlerjude Simon Jeret. With these
Oskar and Emilie set off west as the war ended, hoping to avoid falling into the hands of the
Soviet authorities. This they successfully did and by the autumn of 1945 they were settled in
the US zone of occupation in Bavaria in southern Germany. There their evidence was presented to the
authorities. Schindler was not to be prosecuted. The end of the war left Schindler back
where he had been before it started: broke. Though he had briefly become a millionaire
in relative terms in Poland in the early 1940s he had lost everything in paying bribes and acquiring
black market goods to keep the hundreds of Jews at his factories alive in the final years of the war.
He once again tried his hand at various business ventures in the post-war period, but in the highly
unstable economic climate of post-war Germany these did not prosper. Much of this was owing to
his old habits. Schindler never quit his excessive drinking and his health began to deteriorate
from it as he entered his forties. Nevertheless, he was kept afloat during these years by
many of the Jewish people whose lives he had saved. Many of these had left Europe to head
to the nascent state of Israel in the Holy Land following the war, but they kept in touch with
the Schindlers and often he would receive some financial support either from there or from
those who remained in Europe. Despite this, he and Emilie decided in the late 1940s
to head for Argentina in South America, a country with a large ethnically German
community and also one of the largest concentrations of the Jewish Diaspora in the
world. Here they hoped to make a fresh start. In Argentina Schindler learned that he was
not a farmer. He tried his hand at raising chickens first and then diversified into otters
for their fur. Oskar assured Emilie they would soon be millionaires as the fur industry was
booming. Trouble arose immediately though when Oskar soon realised that the ‘otters’
he was raising were in fact nutrias, a similar looking creature, but effectively
a species of South American rodent. Problems mounted and by the mid-1950s Schindler was
facing growing debts which he could not repay in Argentina. The Schindlers only survived thanks
to the continuing generosity of those whom he had saved during the war and their relatives.
However, Oskar and Emilie’s marriage did not last in Argentina. She was burned out from
years of dealing with his drinking, laziness, failed business ventures and infidelities. She
possibly considered it a blessing in 1957 when he effectively abandoned her and headed back to
Germany. Back in Europe Schindler struggled on. Business ventures came and went and in 1963 he
was forced to declare bankruptcy. An initiative to have a movie of his life made, one which would
be directed by the acclaimed Austrian director, Fritz Lang, fell through, though true to
form Schindler quickly spent the advance he was given on the rights to his story.
In 1964 he suffered a heart attack. It was the beginning of a period of ill health which
plagued him until his death in 1974 at 66 years of age. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly,
he succumbed to liver failure in the end. Schindler has been rightly celebrated and
memorialised since his death. Indeed this had begun long before he died. The Schindlerjude
or Schindler Jews, those Jews who effectively survived the Holocaust as a result of his actions,
supported him in his troubles after the war. Most strikingly, in 1962 a carob tree was planted in
recognition of Schindler’s actions at Yad Vashem, the memorial site established to the victims of
the Holocaust on the Mountain of Remembrance in Jerusalem. This was placed in the Garden of
the Righteous Among the Nations. Four years later he was granted the Order of Merit by the
government of West Germany and as we have seen there were plans during his own life, albeit
abortive, to produce a motion picture detailing his actions in Poland during the Second World
War. A film, as nearly all of us are aware, did eventually appear in the form of Steven
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993, which won the academy award for the best
motion picture. That same year Oskar and Emilie Schindler were named ‘Righteous Among the
Nations’, a title given to non-Jews or Gentiles who risked their lives during the Second World
War to save the lives of Jewish people. He was one of the few active members of the Nazi
Party to have been accorded this honour. Oskar Schindler was an enigmatic character. If we
were to examine his life up to the early 1940s it doesn’t read very well. By the time he was in
his early twenties he was developing a drinking problem and was arrested on numerous occasions
for public disorder offences. His marriage was troubled and he engaged in a string of affairs,
one of which resulted in the birth of two children out of wedlock, neither of which he is reported
to have looked after particularly well. Then, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, he
began acting as a spy for them in Czechoslovakia, undermining the sovereignty of his own country
and helping to gather information in the late 1930s for the invasion of Poland. Although
the details of his espionage activities are necessarily shadowy there seems little doubt that
he was one of the Nazi regime’s most senior spies in Czechoslovakia in the mid-to-late 1930s. He
then used his influence with the regime following the invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939
to acquire property in the occupied part of the country and set up his business interests there.
Much of this was effectively asset stripping from a conquered people, whose nation he had helped
to gather intelligence on prior to the invasion. However, from the early 1940s onwards the Oskar
Schindler who is celebrated by the world emerged. As the Nazis’ Anti-Jewish policies became more and
more severe in Poland and he was confronted with the reality of what the regime was doing a seed
change occurred and Schindler began trying to shield his Jewish workers from the possibility of
death, rather than viewing them simply as a means to enrich himself. Such was Schindler’s moral
awakening that in the next few years he spent virtually every penny of the considerable fortune
he had accumulated in his first years in Poland, trying to save as many Jews as possible from
being killed at Amon Goth’s concentration camp at Plaszow or being deported to one of
the death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. As the Holocaust and the
Second World War entered its last stages Schindler was directly responsible for saving the lives
of hundreds of Jews by insisting that they were needed to run his factory at Brunnlitz. Otherwise
they would surely have been sent to their deaths. His life after the war was as chaotic as it was
prior to the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s. In a sense this symmetry perhaps reflected
in some way who Schindler was: a troubled man who was capable of doing great good and who
left his mark on the world through the latter. What do you think of Oskar Schindler? Do his
early dealings with the Nazis in some way tarnish his legacy or were they simply due to
his naivety about what the Nazis were capable of? Please let us know in the comment section, and
in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
