Contradictory hero
The saving list: On the 50th anniversary of Oskar Schindler’s death
Updated on October 9, 2024Reading time: 3 min.
The manufacturer Oskar Schindler was first a National Socialist. But then he saved hundreds of Jews from murder during the Nazi era. The Federal Archives now remembers his legacy in a suitcase.
Krischer, Hirsch, car mechanic. Vogel, Gedalo, master butcher. Riedermann, Hirsch, journeyman stove fitter. Weinberger, Nachan, carpenter. More than 1,000 names appear on the 19 tightly typed pages. More than 1,000 Jews who escaped the German National Socialists’ murder machine during the Second World War because the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler declared them to be important to the war effort in his factory and thus saved them.
“Schindler’s List” became world famous in 1993 thanks to the film of the same name by US director Steven Spielberg. But the story of the Sudeten German manufacturer was not yet fully told. In 1999, a suitcase containing 7,000 documents from Schindler’s estate, including a version of the famous list, was found in an attic in Hildesheim. On the 50th anniversary of Schindler’s death this Wednesday, the Federal Archives is presenting in an online focus a part of this find and the saga of this contradictory hero.
Shortly after the start of the Second World War in 1939, the then 31-year-old National Socialist Schindler moved to German-occupied Poland in the hope of making a profit. He leased a factory near Krakow and produced enameled pots, plates and bowls for the Wehrmacht. He employed disenfranchised Polish Jews from the region as cheap labor.
Schindler and his wife Emilie’s commitment to the Jewish workers began as the Nazi occupiers’ pressure to exterminate them grew. First, Schindler built accommodation at his “German Enamelware Factory” so that people would not be sent to a labor camp. Eventually he employed more and more Jews on the grounds that they were necessary for production that was important to the war effort.
Schindler sometimes gave them jobs in order to be able to keep the employees. “The people would all have been killed if Schindler hadn’t taken care of them in this way,” said department head Tobias Herrmann from the Federal Archives of the German Press Agency.
When Schindler moved his factory to the Sudetenland at the end of the war due to the advance of the Soviet Army, he took his “Schindler Jews” with him – after considerable wrangling with the Nazi authorities, who increasingly targeted him themselves. There were 800 men and 300 women on his lists. In 1945, Oskar and Emilie Schindler also took in the so-called Golleschau Jews, a group of Jewish forced laborers from a subcamp of the Auschwitz extermination camp who had been carted around aimlessly in cattle wagons.
After the German surrender, the Schindlers fled to southern Germany. They lost their possessions. After that, Oskar Schindler never had much economic success again. He received financial support from Jewish organizations and some rescued former employees.
In Israel he was awarded the honorary title of “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1962. His wife Emilie, from whom he separated after the war, received this title in 1994. Some painted children’s pictures that were found in the suitcase with his estate also come from Israel. Underneath is a heart with a sentence in beautiful handwriting: “To Mr. Schindler, with love, Debbie.”
The publicist Michel Friedman, son of rescued “Schindler Jews”, knew Oskar Schindler in his childhood in Frankfurt am Main. “So I met a German who was so surprising and convincing in his simplicity,” Friedman once said. “It wasn’t an intellectual, it wasn’t an educated man, it wasn’t a man who studied anything.”
Schindler was “not particularly morally respected,” he was a “drunkard, he had many, many women.” But unlike all “moralists,” Schindler helped people at the risk of his life. In doing so, he showed that exactly that was possible under the Nazi regime, said Friedman.