Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908 in the then Austro-Hungarian town of Zwittau, Moravia (modern-day Svitavy in the Czech Republic), located near the German border in the foothills of the Sudetes. After the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the area was incorporated into the Third Reich as an administrative division called Reichsgau Sudetenland.

 

His father, Hans, ran a farm equipment company, and his mother, Franziska, was a stay-at-home mom. After graduating from school and completing an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer, Oskar worked at his father’s company until the age of 21. In 1936, he took a job in the sales department of the Moravian Electrical AG in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Three years later, he became responsible for the management of an enamelware factory in the German-occupied city of Krakow, Poland after its Jewish owners had been dispossessed, extending it from 85,000 to 450,000 square feet. In 1942, he bought the factory at an auction conducted by the Commercial Court of Poland. His workforce, which was mainly made up of Jews, numbered only 700 in 1940, but it increased rapidly and stood at 1,750 by 1943.  

Oskar Schindler was a vain person. In his own words, he was “far from being a saint,” as he himself wrote in 1956. Those words were addressed to the director of the scientific department at Yad Vashem, Dr. Ball-Kanduri, who asked Schindler to record his story for the documentation center and memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

 

Oskar Schindler attached great importance to his appearance. He loved fast cars, women and cognac. A smart businessman, he accumulated a considerable fortune with the help of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern. He wore the blood-red badge of the Nazi party, given only to the most loyal of its members. He wined and dined with SS officers, including Amon Göth, the notorious commandant and butcher of the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp.

 

By early 1940, however, this once-ardent follower of Nazi ideology had come to realize that he had surrounded himself with a group of sadistic murderers and hypocritical swindlers. “Thank God, I was brave enough at that time to take the necessary action as a result of what had become so painfully clear, bail out and save what was left to be saved,” he wrote.*

 

When the Jews in the General Governorate were first prohibited from working and then deported to extermination camps, most employers in Krakow laid off their Jewish workers. Oskar Schindler, however, took action on behalf of his workers and built a company camp within a few days. Moreover, he provided 450 workers from three nearby companies with shelter in the camp on company ground, thus saving them from what the Nazis euphemistically called “resettlement.”

 

Oskar Schindler financed the company camp with his own money, because no state subsidies were granted. Over the years, he spent millions of Reichsmarks to save his Jewish workers from certain death. Food was rationed and none was allocated to Jews, so he had to buy large quantities on the black market. He had the camp fenced in and built many essential facilities, including accommodation, sewers, bathrooms and medical and dental clinics. At the request of his Jewish workers, he took in their parents and other relatives unfit for work in order to save them from extermination. In his memoir, he recounts having to provide a steady supply of gifts, loans and bribes to party and SS officials to protect his company. The firm’s Jew-friendliness brought it into disrepute.

Amon Göth was the recipient of the bulk of bribes, which consisted mainly of diamonds. Freeing one Jewish woman from Krakow after she was imprisoned for a minor breach of exchange control regulations cost 50,000 zloty in bribes for the SS-appointed medic Dr. Sopp, who then provided a medical report that required her to stay at a health resort. Vital surgery for another Jewish woman cost 14,000 zloty for black market medical equipment. Schindler abandoned his luxurious apartment and moved into a small room next to his factory. Here, he spent nine months watching over his staff. It was his declared intention to “either survive with these people or perish together in the fight for this goal.”

 

With the rapid advance of the Red Army in 1944, Oskar Schindler was ordered to evacuate his factory. The 20,000 Jews trapped in Krakow were to be sent to extermination camps. Despite fierce opposition and huge obstacles, Oskar Schindler fought tooth and nail to obtain permission from the Army’s High Command to move his Jews to a spinning mill owned by the Hoffmann brothers in Brünnlitz, Bohemia (present-day Brněnec). 

“Chaos and bureaucracy, envy and malevolence were obstacles that made the re-location of my Jews often seem illusory and brought me to the edge of despair,” he wrote.

After approximately four weeks, he was lucky enough to rejoin all of his Jewish workers in Brünnlitz. The bribery, however, had to continue. “High-ranking government officials and economic bosses, the SS leaders of Krakow-Plaszow and Auschwitz, the many junior clerks of the Prussian Eastern Railway, the armaments department, the High Command of the Army, the members of the resettlement and special committees, they all wanted their share.” Oskar Schindler spent vast sums to plunder the black market for goods in short supply: foreign cigarettes, schnapps, real coffee, ham. The Brünnlitz work camp, too, had to be extended. The financial cost of protecting 1,200 Jews came to a total of almost 2.7 million Reichsmark.

 

Oskar Schindler’s biographer, Erika Rosenberg, thinks he drew up these accounts in 1945 at the request of Joint, a relief organization for escaped Jews in Europe and Palestine which was founded in 1914. In recognition of saving so many Jews, Joint saw to it that Oskar Schindler was paid a little compensation.

 

During the rescue operation, Schindler kept up his strength with the support of his Jewish friends. He owed a deep debt of gratitude to his accountant, Itzhak Stern, with whom he stayed in close contact until his death. His wife, Emilie, also helped him save another 107 Jewish men who had been transported from Goleschau, a subcamp of Auschwitz, to Zwittau in cattle wagons in January 1945. While Oskar Schindler welcomed the emaciated men into his camp, his wife drove two hundred miles to exchange two suitcases filled with vodka for the medicine the new arrivals desperately needed.

 

Thanks to his loyal Jewish friends, Oskar Schindler was able to flee west when the Soviets marched into Zwittau, passing himself off as one of them. One of the Jews drove him to the Bavarian city of Regensburg, where he and his wife spent four years.

 

Accepting the invitation of some Jewish friends, Oskar Schindler and his wife moved to Argentina in 1949. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to earn a livelihood in the new country, he left an indebted poultry farm to his wife and moved back to West Germany in 1957 in order to support her financially from there. He reckoned that the government would pay him an equalization of burdens, a form of financial compensation for Germans who had sustained property damage as a result of World War II and its aftermath. Between 1962 and 1968, Schindler got equalization payments worth 177,651 Deutschmarks. Two-thirds of the payments cleared his debts and taxes; with the rest he took over a stonework and concrete factory in Hochstadt, southwestern Germany. But he lacked the solid financial basis necessary to make the factory a success and was forced into bankruptcy within a year.  

 

Fifteen years after the end of the war, he came to the sad realization that denazification had failed miserably when a wave of neo-Nazism swept across the country.

In the following years, Oskar Schindler’s health deteriorated quickly. His annual trips to Jerusalem, where he was celebrated enthusiastically by Jews, may have lifted his spirits, but his overall determination to regain his foothold in society gradually subsided, giving way to severe depression. A series of awards did little to lighten his somber mood.

 

In 1962, he planted a tree on the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem and was honored by the State of Israel as a Righteous Among the Nations. In 1966, he was awarded the Order of Merit First Class of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1967, Leopold Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor, launched the Schindler Survivors’ Fund. Later that same year, Oskar Schindler was awarded the Martin Buber Peace Prize. 

 

In 1972 he suffered a stroke. He died of cardiac failure two years later on October 9, 1974. At his own request, Oskar Schindler was interred at the Franciscan Cemetery in Jerusalem. It wasn’t until several years after his death that this man, who saved more than 1,000 lives, rose to international prominence thanks to Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed movie “Schindler’s List,” released in 1993.