MuseumSCHINDLER
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USHMM SPECIAL FOCUS “OSKAR SCHINDLER: AN UNLIKELY HERO.” »
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BACKGROUND
Oskar Schindler (1908-1974) was an ethnic German living in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, when he joined the Nazi party in 1939. A businessman with a taste for the finer things in life, he seemed an unlikely wartime hero. But by the end of World War II this German Catholic rescued more than 1,000 Jews from Hitler’s genocide.
Following the German conquest of Poland, Schindler moved to Kraków and took over responsibility for the operation of a formerly Jewish-owned factory that produced enamel kitchenware. He later received an enamel works factory, the Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (German Enamelware Factory), in Zablocie, a small town outside of the city. The facility was awarded to him through the Court of Commercial Claims, a German court that oversaw the confiscation and redistribution of Polish property to German citizens. That factory would become a haven for about 900 Jewish workers during the Holocaust. Through army contracts and the exploitation of cheap labor from Kraków’s Jewish ghetto, he amassed a fortune. He also dealt on the black market.
In 1942 and early 1943, the Germans decimated the Kraków ghetto’s population of 20,000 Jews through shootings and deportations. Several thousand Jews who survived the liquidation were taken to near-by Plaszów, a forced labor camp run by the barbaric SS commandant Amon Leopold Göth. Described as a pathological sadist, Göth shot prisoners from the balcony of his villa and randomly killed and tortured them as well.
Appalled by the cruelties he witnessed there, Schindler contrived to transfer his Jewish workers from the camp to barracks at his Zablocie factory. In late summer 1944, Schindler secured permission from the German Army and SS officers to again move the workers to a new munitions factory he would run at Brünnlitz, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, near his hometown of Zwittau, Czechoslovakia. Each of these Jews was placed on “Schindler’s List.” Workers appearing on the list were afforded a degree of safety during the remainder of the war, as they were classified as necessary to the German war effort.
He successfully transferred approximately 800 Jewish men and 300 Jewish women to the factory from Zablocie and Plaszów, but not without a harrowing incident. The men and women arrived on separate transports, and the women were mistakenly routed to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Schindler personally intervened to secure their release from the death camp and have them brought to Brunnlitz.
The new factory was a deceit. It produced no properly calibrated shells or rocket casings, a deliberate act of sabotage by Schindler. The workers remained at the factory in relative safety until the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
In 1962, Yad Vashem awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” to Schindler in recognition of his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council posthumously presented to him the Museum’s Medal of Remembrance. This rarely presented medal is intended to honor deserving recipients for extraordinary deeds during the Holocaust and in the cause of Remembrance. Oskar Schindler died in Germany in October 1974 and was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem.
