Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a Sudeten German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who saved the lives of more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them as protected workers in his factories in occupied Kraków and Brünnlitz. Born in Zwittau (now Svitavy, Czech Republic) to a Catholic family, Schindler had a pre-war history of petty crimes including bribery and theft, for which he served brief prison terms, and he joined the Nazi Party in 1939 primarily for business opportunities following the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, Schindler acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków using Jewish investor funds and capital from his German associates, exploiting Jewish labor as cheaper and more available under Nazi policies that confined Jews to ghettos and camps. Initially motivated by profit—producing goods for the German war effort while bribing officials to overlook irregularities—Schindler later expended his fortune on black-market supplies, bribes, and falsified lists to shield his workers from deportation to death camps like Auschwitz, even relocating some to a subcamp in Brünnlitz in 1944 despite producing no viable munitions. These actions, documented through survivor testimonies compiled by institutions like Yad Vashem, resulted in his recognition as Righteous Among the Nations in 1963, though accounts rely heavily on post-war recollections from beneficiaries whose credibility is shaped by gratitude and the absence of contemporaneous German records due to wartime destruction.