The Bundesarchiv commemorates the 50th anniversary of the death of the man who saved more than 1,200 of his Jewish workers from extermination
KOBLENZ (GERMANY), 6 (DPA/EP)
More than a thousand names appear on 19 closely typed pages, more than a thousand Jews who escaped the German Nazis’ murder machine during World War II because businessman Oskar Schindler declared them essential war workers in his factory, in an act of salvation.
‘Schindler’s List’ gained worldwide fame in 1993 thanks to the film of the same name by American director Steven Spielberg. But the story of the factory owner had not yet been 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 the north-central German city of Hildesheim. Now, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Schindler’s death, the Federal Archive of Germany presents online part of this discovery and the saga of this contradictory hero.
Schindler, then a 31-year-old National Socialist, was drawn to German-occupied Poland shortly after the start of World War II in 1939 in hopes of profit. He rented 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 Jewish workers began as pressure grew from the Nazi occupiers to exterminate them. At first, Schindler built accommodation at his Deutschen Emailwarenfabrik (German Enamel Factory) so as not to send them to a labor camp. Over time, he employed more and more Jews, arguing that they were necessary for essential war production.
In some cases, Schindler invented professions for them to retain employees. “They would all have died if Schindler had not taken care of them in this way,” department head of the Federal Archive, Tobias Herrmann, told DPA.
When Schindler moved his factory to the Sudetenland region (now the Czech Republic) at the end of the war due to the advancing Soviet Army, he took his “Schindler Jews” with him.
800 men and 300 women were on their lists. In 1945, Oskar and Emilie Schindler also welcomed the so-called Golleschau Jews, a group of people doing forced labor from a subcamp of the Auschwitz extermination camp and who had been transported aimlessly in cattle cars.
After the German capitulation, the Schindlers fled to southern Germany. They lost their possessions. Oskar Schindler never had much financial success again. He received financial support from Jewish organizations and from some of his former employees whom he had rescued. He lived for a time in Argentina and returned to Germany in 1958.
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 during his stay in Argentina, received this title in 1994.
The publicist Michel Friedman, son of one of the rescued Jews, met Oskar Schindler during his childhood in the city of Frankfurt. “I met a German who was so surprising and convincing in his simplicity,” Friedman once said. “He was not an intellectual, he was not a cultured man, he was not a man who had studied anything,” he recalled.
Friedman said that Schindler was “not particularly well-regarded morally,” was a “drunk, had many, many wives.” But unlike all “moralists,” Schindler helped people by risking his life, the publicist noted. In doing so, he maintained, he demonstrated that this was also possible under the Nazi regime.
Schindler had a room in Hildesheim at a friend’s house. His son found the documents 25 years after the death of Schindler, who had died there on October 9, 1974. The Federal Archives preserved the documents on microfilm and transmitted them to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. From there, the Federal Archive received an original carbon copy of ‘Schindler’s List’, which is now kept in Koblenz.
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