Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews By: Fadel Sukoco, Emilio Biggs, Roy Wang and Elliot Hohman

Oskar Schindler: 1908-1974 Born April 28, 1908, in Svitavy (Zwittau), Moravia, at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Attended several trade schools, worked in a car business, was a government contractor and worked on farm machinery and automation industries. Also served the Czechoslovakian army, and in 1938 earned the rank of Lance Corporal in the reserves. In February 1939, five months after the German annexation of the Sudetenland, he joined the Nazi party. He is most known for saving 1,200 Jews during the war from deportation to Auschwitz. Moved to Krakow in October after German conquest of Poland.

Oskar Schindler: 1908-1974 Schindler as a Nazi camp Kommandant Image of Schindler and his father in Czechoslovakia, 1929.

Schindler’s WWII Contributions He saved about 1200 Jews during the war from deportation to the death camp of Auschwitz. He moved to Krakow in Oct. 1939 after the German conquest of Poland and bought a Jewish-ran enamelware manufacturer and renamed it Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik Oskar Schindler (German Enamelware Factory Oskar Schindler), also known as Emalia, in November 1939, under the Aryanization of Jewish Businesses initiatives of the Nazi Regime. Plaszow Concentration Camp, Poland 1944

Overseeing the Camps He only employed Jews in Emalia, from the nearby Krakow ghetto. At its 1944 height, the facility employed 1700 workers, at least 1000 who were Jewish forced laborers. Schindler regularly intervened for the Jews via bribes and personal diplomacy to prevent their deportation by the SS, which worked until late-1944. In order to prove his worker’s necessity of existence, he added an armaments manufacturing division to Emalia. During the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943, Schindler allowed his Jewish workers to stay at the factory overnight.

Overseeing the Camps Cont. Schindler met the specifications required by the SS to classify Brünnlitz as a subcamp of Gross-Rosen and thereby saved around 800 Jewish men from Plaszow and between 300 and 400 Jewish women from Plaszow via Auschwitz. He left Brünnlitz only on May 9, 1945, the day that Soviet troops liberated the camp. The entrance to Schindler’s Enamelware plant, One of the buildings in Which he used to save Jews from extermination the Brunnlitz area compound.

Continued Saving of The Jews After the SS re-designated Plaszow as a concentration camp in August 1943, Schindler persuaded them to convert Emalia into a subcamp of it. 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. The SS got suspicious and arrested him on 3 occasions, but were unable to find incriminating evidence. Schindler got permission to move his plant to Brünnlitz in Moravia, and reopen it exclusively as an armaments factory. One aid drew up lists of up to 1200 Jews that would be known as the Schindler list. He put up fake lists and manifests to fool the SS into thinking that the Jews he was protecting were actually producing adequate amounts of munitions.

Legacy Schindler died in Germany, penniless and almost unknown, in October 1974. Many whom he saved and their descendents lobbied to move his burial to Israel. In 1993, Yad Vashem awarded Oskar and Emilie Schindler the title "Righteous Among the Nations" in recognition of their efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust at great personal risk. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council posthumously presented the Museum's Medal of Remembrance to Schindler. Today there are 7,000 descendants of Schindler’s Jews living in US and Europe, and many in Israel. Photo of Schindler, dated 1973

Works Cited Page Crowe, David M. “Oskar Schindler.” Www.ushmm.org, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId. “Oskar Schindler.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 May 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler.