Home > Oskar Schindler

His efforts were retold in the Thomas Keneally novel Schindler's Ark, and a subsequent film Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Schindler was born in Zwittau , then Austria-Hungary (now Svitavy, Czech Republic), into a wealthy business family. The family suffered in the Great Depression of the 1930s and Schindler joined the Nazi party. He was a dilettante and an opportunistic businessman. Following the German invasion of PolandThe Republic of Poland a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) t he was one of many Germans who sought a profit in the new territory. Schindler cheaply acquired a factory in Krakow, which he named Deutsche Emailwaren-Fabrik, producing enamelware and later munitions. He also obtained around 1300 Jewish slave labourers to work the plant. Some say that he was, at least initially, motivated by money—hiding wealthy Jewish investors, for instance—but later he began shielding his workers more actively. He would, for instance, claim that unskilled workers were in fact essential to the working of the factory, and that any harm to them would result in him raising complaints and demanding compensation from the government.

The key horror he witnessed was a 1942Events January January 1 World War II: The word " United Nations" is first officially used to describe the Allied pact. January 2 World War II: Manila is captured by Japanese forces. January 5 Amy Johnson disappears in flight over River Thames estuary ass raid on a Jewish ghettoThe name ghetto refers to an area where people from a given ethnic background or united in a given culture or religion live as a group, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. The word historically referred to restricted housing zon in Krakow. The soldiers were transferring them to the concentration camp at Plaszow, but savagely killed the many Jews who tried to hide in their homes. He was a brilliantly diplomatic individual, and after the raid was increasingly prepared to use all his skills to save his Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews). He arranged with Amon Goeth, the commander of Plaszow, for 900 Jews to be transferred to an adjacent factory compound where they would be relatively safer from the depredations of the German guards. When the advancing Red ArmyThis article is about the armed forces of the Soviet Union. See Red Army Faction for the German militant group; Japanese Red Army for the Japanese militant group; and People's Liberation Army for the Chinese Red Army. Red Army and RKKA are abbreviations f threatened the camps they were destroyed, with their inmates mostly executed. Schindler managed to move 1200 "workers" to a factory at Brunnlitz (Brnenec) in Czechoslovakia in October 1944. When a shipment of his workforce was misrouted to Auschwitz, he managed to have them returned to him. Brunnlitz was liberated in May 1945.

At the end of the war Schindler emigrated to Argentina. He went bankrupt and returned to Germany in 1958 to a series of unsuccessful business ventures. He died in Hildesheim. He is honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the " Righteous Among the Nations" and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.