Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (German: [ˈɔskaʁ ˈʃɪndlɐ] ; 28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist and humanitarian who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in German-occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He is the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and its 1993 film adaptation, Schindler's List.

Schindler grew up in Zwittau, Moravia, and worked in several trades until he joined the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. Before the beginning of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he collected information on railways and troop movements for the German government. He was arrested for espionage by the Czechoslovak government but was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement that year. He continued to collect information for the Nazis, working in Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of the Second World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939. That same year, he acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, which employed at its peak in 1944 about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. His Abwehr connections helped him protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. As time went on, he had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.

By July 1944, Germany was losing the war; the Schutzstaffel (SS) began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and deporting the remaining prisoners westward. Many were murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Schindler convinced Amon Göth, SS-Hauptsturmführer commandant of the nearby Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brněnec (German: Brünnlitz, Czech: Brněnec) in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, thus sparing his workers from almost certain death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Using names provided by a Jewish Ghetto Police officer named Marcel Goldberg, Göth's secretary Mietek Pemper compiled and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled to Brünnlitz in October 1944. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent his workers' execution until the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945, by which time he had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black market purchases of supplies for his workers.