Oskar Schindler: From Opportunist to Humanitarian - A Journey of Education and Career
Oskar Schindler's life is a compelling narrative of transformation, marked by a complex blend of opportunism and altruism. His journey, characterized by various trades, espionage, and ultimately, the rescue of over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, offers a profound insight into the human capacity for change. This article explores Schindler's education, career, and the remarkable evolution that led him to become a figure of immense historical significance.
Early Life and Education
Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908, in Svitavy (Zwittau), Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. His family was of Sudeten German ethnicity, and he held Czech citizenship after Moravia became part of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Schindler's father, Johann "Hans" Schindler, owned a farm machinery business, while his mother, Franziska "Fanny" Schindler, contributed to his upbringing alongside his younger sister, Elfriede, born in 1915.
After attending primary and secondary school, Schindler enrolled in a technical school. However, his formal education was disrupted when he was expelled in 1924 for forging his report card. Despite this setback, he later graduated but chose not to take the Abitur exams, which would have allowed him to attend university. Instead, he pursued practical skills by taking courses in Brno in various trades, including chauffeuring and machinery. For three years, he worked for his father, gaining experience in the family business.
Schindler's early life also included a passion for motorcycles. He bought a 250-cc Moto Guzzi racing motorcycle and participated in mountain races recreationally for several years.
Early Career and Personal Life
On March 6, 1928, Schindler married Emilie Pelzl, the daughter of a prosperous Sudeten German farmer. The couple moved in with Oskar's parents and lived in the upstairs rooms for seven years. After his marriage, Schindler left his father's business and held a series of jobs, including a position at Moravian Electrotechnic and the management of a driving school.
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In 1931 and 1932, Schindler faced legal troubles, being arrested several times for public drunkenness. Around the same time, he had an affair with Aurelie Schlegel, a school friend, who bore him a daughter, Emily, in 1933, and a son, Oskar Jr., in 1935. Schindler later disputed his paternity of the boy.
The mid-1930s brought further changes in Schindler's life. His father, an alcoholic, abandoned his wife in 1935. She died a few months later after a lengthy illness.
Political Affiliations and Espionage
Schindler joined the separatist Sudeten German Party in 1935. The following year, he became involved with the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany. He was assigned to Abwehrstelle II Commando VIII, based in Breslau.
Prior to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler collected information on railways and troop movements for the German government. He was involved in espionage in the months leading up to Hitler's seizure of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March. Emilie assisted him with paperwork, processing, and hiding secret documents in their apartment for the Abwehr office.
Schindler's frequent business trips to Poland allowed him and his 25 agents to gather information about Polish military activities and railways for the planned invasion of Poland. One assignment required his unit to monitor and provide information about the railway line and tunnel in the Jablunkov Pass, critical for the movement of German troops.
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The Czechoslovak government arrested Schindler for espionage, and he told the Czech police that he did it because he needed the money. By this time, Schindler had a drinking problem and was chronically in debt. He was released as a political prisoner under the terms of the Munich Agreement that year and joined the Nazi Party in 1939.
Schindler continued to work for the Abwehr, collecting information for the Nazis, until as late as fall 1940, when he was sent to Turkey to investigate corruption among the Abwehr officers assigned to the German embassy there. After some time off to recover in Zwittau, Schindler was promoted to second in command of his Abwehr unit and relocated with his wife to Ostrava (Ostrau), on the Czech-Polish border, in January 1939.
Business Ventures in Krakow
Following the German invasion and occupation of Poland, Schindler moved to Krakow from Svitavy in October 1939. In November 1939, he contacted interior decorator Mila Pfefferberg to decorate his new apartment. Her son, Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, soon became one of his contacts for black market trading. His wife, Emilie, maintained the apartment in Ostrava and visited Oskar in Kraków at least once a week.
Schindler acquired a staff of seven Jewish workers, including Abraham Bankier, who helped him manage the company, and 250 non-Jewish Poles. Bankier, a key black market connection, obtained goods for bribes as well as extra materials for use in the factory. Schindler's initial interest was to make money and hired Jews because they were cheaper than Poles, with wages set by the occupying Nazi regime.
On August 1, 1940, Governor-General Hans Frank issued a decree requiring all Kraków Jews to leave the city within two weeks. Only those who had jobs directly related to the German war effort would be allowed to stay. Of the 60,000 to 80,000 Jews then living in the city, only 15,000 remained by March 1941. These Jews were then forced to leave their traditional neighborhood of Kazimierz and relocate to the walled Kraków Ghetto, established in the industrial Podgórze district.
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Schindler's connections with the Abwehr, Wehrmacht, and its Armaments Inspectorate helped him obtain contracts to produce enamel cookware for the military and later helped protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. As time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.
In Fall 1941, the Nazis began transporting Jews out of the ghetto. Most of them were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp and murdered.
Transformation and Rescue Efforts
As the brutality of the Holocaust escalated, Schindler's protection of his Jewish workers became increasingly active. In the summer of 1942, he witnessed a German raid on the Jewish ghetto. Watching innocent people being packed onto trains bound for certain death awakened something in him. "Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” he said later. “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system."
Schindler's workers traveled on foot to and from the ghetto each day to their jobs at the factory. He used bribes and personal diplomacy both for the well-being of Jews threatened on an individual basis and to ensure, until late 1944, that the SS did not deport his Jewish workers. In order to claim the Jewish workers to be essential to the war effort, he added an armaments manufacturing division to Emalia. During the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943, Schindler, aware of the plans because of his Wehrmacht contacts, had his workers stay at the factory overnight to prevent them from coming to harm.
Initially, Göth's plan was that all the factories, including Schindler's, should be moved inside the camp gates. However, Schindler, with a combination of diplomacy, flattery, and bribery, not only prevented his factory from being moved but convinced Göth to allow him to build (at Schindler's own expense) a subcamp at Emalia to house his workers plus 450 Jews from other nearby factories. There, they were safe from the threat of random execution, were well fed and housed, and were permitted to undertake religious observances.
After the SS re-designated Plaszow as a concentration camp in August 1943, Schindler persuaded the SS to convert Emalia into a subcamp of Plaszow. In addition to the approximately 1,000 Jewish forced laborers registered as factory workers, Schindler permitted 450 Jews working in other nearby factories to live at Emalia as well. This saved them from the systematic brutality and arbitrary murder that was part of daily life in Plaszow.
Schindler did not act here without risk or cost. His protection of his Jewish workers and some of his shady business dealings led SS and police authorities to suspect him of corruption and of giving unauthorized aid to Jews. German SS and police officials arrested him three times while he owned Emalia but were unable to charge him.
Schindler was arrested twice on suspicion of black market activities and once for breaking the Nuremberg Laws by kissing a Jewish girl, an action forbidden by the Race and Resettlement Act. The first arrest, in late 1941, led to him being kept overnight. His secretary arranged for his release through Schindler's influential contacts in the Nazi Party. His second arrest, on April 29, 1942, was the result of his kissing a Jewish girl on the cheek at his birthday party at the factory the previous day. He remained in jail five days before his influential Nazi contacts were able to obtain his release.
In 1943, Schindler was contacted via members of the Jewish resistance movement by Zionist leaders in Budapest. Schindler traveled there several times to report in person on Nazi mistreatment of the Jews.
On March 13, 1943, the ghetto was liquidated, and those still fit for work were sent to the new concentration camp at Płaszów, under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, a sadist who would shoot inmates of the camp at random. Emilie Schindler called Göth "the most despicable man I have ever met."
In October 1944, Schindler was arrested again, accused of black marketeering and bribing Göth and others to improve the conditions of the Jewish workers.
"Schindler's List" and Brünnlitz
During the last two years of the war, Schindler underwent a dramatic moral transformation, and, in many ways, he came more and more to associate himself with his Jews than with other Germans.In October 1944, after the SS transferred the Emalia Jews to Plaszow, Schindler sought and obtained authorization to relocate his plant to Brünnlitz in Moravia, and reopen it exclusively as an armaments factory. One of his assistants drew several versions of a list of up to 1,200 Jewish prisoners needed to work in the new factory. Schindler's usual connections and bribes failed to obtain their release. Finally after he sent his secretary, Hilde Albrecht, with bribes of black market goods, food and diamonds, the women were sent to Brünnlitz after several harrowing weeks in Auschwitz.
In addition to workers, Schindler moved 250 wagon loads of machinery and raw materials to the new factory. Few if any useful artillery shells were produced at the plant. When officials from the Armaments Ministry questioned the factory's low output, Schindler bought finished goods on the black market and resold them as his own.
The rations provided by the SS were insufficient to meet the needs of the workers, so Schindler spent most of his time in Kraków, obtaining food, armaments, and other materials. His wife Emilie remained in Brünnlitz, surreptitiously obtaining additional rations and caring for the workers' health and other basic needs.
Schindler also arranged for the transfer of as many as 3,000 Jewish women out of Auschwitz to small textiles plants in the Sudetenland in an effort to increase their chances of surviving the war. In January 1945, a trainload of 250 Jews who had been rejected as workers at a mine in Goleschau in Poland arrived at Brünnlitz. The boxcars were frozen shut when they arrived, and Emilie Schindler waited while an engineer from the factory opened the cars using a soldering iron. Twelve people were dead in the cars, and the remainder were too ill and feeble to work. Emilie took the survivors into the factory and cared for them in a makeshift hospital until the end of the war.
Though classified as an armaments factory, the Brünnlitz plant produced just one wagonload of live ammunition in just under eight months of operation. By presenting bogus production figures, Schindler justified the existence of the subcamp as an armaments factory. This facilitated the survival of over 1,000 Jews from being deported to Auschwitz, Nazi Germany's largest camp complex-sparing them the horrors and brutality of conventional camp life.
As the Red Army drew nearer in July 1944, the SS began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the remaining prisoners westward to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Göth's personal secretary, Mietek Pemper, alerted Schindler to the Nazis' plans to close all factories not directly involved in the war effort, including Schindler's enamelware facility. Pemper suggested to Schindler that production should be switched from cookware to anti-tank grenades in an effort to save the lives of the Jewish workers. Using bribery and his powers of persuasion, Schindler convinced Göth and the officials in Berlin to allow him to move his factory and his workers to Brünnlitz, in the Sudetenland, thus sparing them from certain death in the gas chambers..
Post-War Life and Legacy
As a member of the Nazi Party and the Abwehr intelligence service, Schindler was in danger of being arrested by the Allied powers and charged as a war criminal. To escape capture by the Soviets, Schindler and his wife departed westward in their vehicle, a two-seater Horch, initially with several fleeing German soldiers riding on the running boards. A truck containing Schindler's mistress Marta, several Jewish workers, and a load of black market trade goods followed.
By the end of the war, Schindler had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black market purchases of supplies for his workers. Virtually destitute, he moved briefly to Regensburg and later Munich but did not prosper in post-war Germany. In 1949, Schindler emigrated to Argentina, where he tried raising chickens and then nutria (coypu), a small animal raised for its fur.
In 1962, Schindler was named a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. He died on October 9, 1974, in Hildesheim, Germany, and was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the only former member of the Nazi Party to be honored in this way.
Schindler's story remained largely the province of Holocaust scholars until the publication in 1982 of Schindler’s Ark, a Booker Prize-winning novelization by Thomas Keneally. The novel was adapted as the 1993 movie Schindler's List by the American film director Steven Spielberg. The film brought Schindler's story to a global audience, solidifying his place as a symbol of courage and compassion in the face of unimaginable horror.
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