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Oskar Schindler

Schindler, Oskar (1908-1974), German industrialist, who protected Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II (1939-1945).

Oskar Schindler was an unlikely savior. He was a heavy drinker and a womanizer; he was an opportunist and a crook; he was a profiteer and an egotist. He was also a member of the Nazi Party. But in the end, to roughly 1,300 Jewish people none of that mattered. To these survivors, Oskar Schindler was simply yet miraculously, a savior.

Schindler was born into a Catholic family in Zwittau, now Svitavy in the Czech Republic. He studied engineering, raced motorcycles, and served in the Czech army before becoming a sales manager for a manufacturer of electrical goods. In the late 1930s he was recruited by the German government to spy against Poland during his business trips there.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Schindler moved to Kraków to run an enamelware factory that employed mainly inexpensive Jewish laborers. Schindler’s factory became a haven for the Jewish workforce because Schindler was able to use his connections in the German government to prevent his workers from being deported to labor or concentration camps. Schindler was irritated because Nazi brutalities interfered with production in his factories, but he was also sympathetic to the difficulty of the Jews.

By 1940 the Nazis had forced all the Jews in Kraków to live in a ghetto. In 1943 the Nazis decided to destroy the Kraków ghetto and ordered all the Jews there to be moved to a concentration camp at nearby Płaszów. Schindler built a camp for his workers on his factory grounds and convinced the German authorities to let his employees stay there.

When the Russian army began closing in on Kraków in 1944, the Germans issued orders to transport all the Jews in both the Płaszów camp and Schindler’s camp to Auschwitz to be exterminated. Schindler, by bluff and bribery, convinced the Nazis to let him move his factory to Czechoslovakia instead. He had a register...