Hollywood made him a hero. “Schindler’s List” swept the box office, dominated the Academy Awards, and cemented his name in history. But the real Oskar Schindler was no saint. He was a hustler, a smooth-talking conman chasing the next high. Only one thing motivated him: money. He even joined the Nazi Party in a hopeless attempt to get rich quickly.
Yet the same man became one of the Holocaust’s greatest heroes. The charming trickery that had once served his greed became his sharpest weapon against the Nazis. He bribed SS officers, spent his fortune smuggling food and medicine, and gambled with his life again and again to rescue over 1,200 Jews from the gas chambers. His own wife despised him, but the Jews he saved hailed him as their hero. They stood by him long after the war when he was penniless.
This is how a crooked Nazi became one of history’s most unlikely heroes.
Schindler the Troublemaker
Oskar Schindler had always been a troublemaker. As a teenager, he earned the nickname “Schindler the Crook” for petty crimes like forging his report card and stealing from customers at his job. He married Emilie Pelzl at 19, blowing through her dowry on a flashy car and shacking up with multiple mistresses. The police knew him well. Public drunkenness landed him behind bars more than once.
But underneath the bravado, Schindler had one true obsession: cold, hard cash. The only problem was that he was terrible at keeping it. He bankrupted his family’s business, failed as a salesman, and stumbled from one dead-end job to the next.
Schindler was born into a wealthy family in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, and he grew up deeply loyal to his German roots. When the Sudetenland German Party started gaining popularity, he saw a golden opportunity. The party was pro-Nazi and fueled by antisemitic propaganda. But to Schindler, it was a path to making profitable connections, and those connections paid off.
In 1936, the Sudetenland German Party helped him land a gig with Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, selling secrets about Czech railways and troop movements. It was a good hustle, a solid way to make some side money. If it helped the Nazis annex the Sudetenland, that was just a perk. He considered himself German, anyway.
The gig lasted until the Czech authorities swooped in and arrested Schindler for espionage. That should have been the end of the story. But history bailed Schindler out. Just a few months after his arrest, the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland. Schindler was now a free man. Immediately, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party. Despite his arrests and shady record, he was accepted.
A Business Opportunity in Occupied Poland
When World War II broke out, Schindler arrived in Nazi-occupied Krakow, joining the flood of German businessmen eager to turn chaos into cash. By day, he traded illegal goods on the black market. By night, he downed shots with local SS officers, charming his way through Nazi social circles. It didn’t take long for him to earn a reputation as a smooth-talking opportunist who always had a beautiful woman on his arm.
At that time, the Nazis were stripping Poles of their property, seizing their businesses left and right. Schindler saw his chance. Taking advantage of his connections, he convinced the Nazis to let him take over an enamelware factory right outside the city, stolen from its Jewish owners.
Schindler hoped this would be his big break, but he had no idea how to run a successful factory, so he leaned on someone who did: Abraham Bankier, the Jewish manager who had run the plant before the Nazis had commandeered it.
With Bankier overseeing daily operations, Schindler kept the factory afloat. By 1941, business was booming. Schindler was finally building the kind of wealth he had always dreamed of.
But outside the factory walls, Krakow was changing fast. The Nazis had begun their campaign to destroy all Jewish life in Europe. The harsh laws and yellow Star of David armbands were just the start. Humiliation became part of daily life as SS officers dragged elderly men into the streets, shaved their beards, and forced them to scrub the sidewalks. But things could always get worse.
The Krakow Ghetto
In March 1941, the Nazis sealed off an area in southern Krakow and forced over 15,000 Jews inside. The Krakow Ghetto was a death trap. Disease spread rapidly, starvation was rampant, and deportations to concentration camps became routine. Schindler watched it all unfold from his factory windows.
At first, he didn’t care. The suffering of Jews was just background noise to his business dealings. But something shifted. Maybe it was the sheer brutality he witnessed, or maybe it was the relationships he formed with his Jewish workers. Whatever it was, Schindler began to see the Jews around him not as labor, but as people – people whose lives were in his hands.
The turning point came in March 1943 during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto. Schindler watched from a hill as SS troops stormed through the streets, shooting Jews indiscriminately. Families were torn apart, children were dragged from their hiding places, and the streets ran red with blood. It was carnage on an unimaginable scale. That day, Schindler made a decision: he would use his factory not just to make money, but to save lives.
The List
Schindler began bribing SS officers to allow him to keep more Jewish workers at his factory. He claimed they were “essential” to production, even when they clearly weren’t. He hired elderly people, children, and anyone who needed protection. The factory became a haven, a place where Jews could survive the war under the guise of being useful to the Nazi war machine.
But as the war dragged on, the Nazis intensified their efforts to exterminate the Jewish population. In 1944, they began liquidating labor camps across Poland, sending Jews to death camps like Auschwitz. Schindler knew that if his workers were deported, they would be murdered. He had to act fast.
With the help of Itzhak Stern, his Jewish accountant and closest confidant, Schindler compiled a list of over 1,000 Jews he claimed were essential workers. He bribed SS officials, forged documents, and pulled every string he had to get those names approved. The list became legendary – a literal lifeline for those whose names appeared on it.
Moving the Factory
In October 1944, Schindler convinced the Nazis to let him move his factory to Brünnlitz, in the Sudetenland. It was a risky move, but it meant getting his workers out of Poland and away from the extermination camps. The relocation was chaotic. Transport trains were delayed, and at one point, a trainload of women was mistakenly sent to Auschwitz. Schindler spent a fortune bribing officials to get them released.
Once in Brünnlitz, Schindler’s factory produced almost nothing of value for the Nazi war effort. But that was the point. He spent his money buying goods on the black market to keep his workers alive, all while maintaining the façade that they were contributing to the regime. Every bribe, every lie, every act of deception was aimed at one goal: keeping his workers alive until the war ended.
The Cost of Saving Lives
By the end of the war, Schindler was broke. He had spent his entire fortune – millions of Reichsmarks – bribing officials, buying food and medicine, and keeping his factory running. He had risked his life countless times, knowing that if the Nazis discovered his true intentions, he would be executed as a traitor.
When the war finally ended in May 1945, Schindler faced a new danger. As a Nazi Party member and former industrialist, he could be arrested as a war criminal if the Soviets caught him. He and Emilie had to flee before it was too late.
Schindler called his workers together for one final speech, urging them to hold onto hope, stay humane, and maintain order. He warned them not to seek revenge on the Germans and reminded them about the ordinary people around the factory who had smuggled in food to help them survive. He also thanked the Jewish workers who had worked alongside him to save so many lives. “Do not thank me for your survival,” he said. “Thank your own people who work day and night to save you.”
The prisoners did not want to leave their savior without a parting gift. Piecing together the scant food they had left, they made him a birthday cake. One prisoner donated a gold tooth, which they shaped into a ring and inscribed with the Talmudic saying: “He who saves one life saves the entire world.” That was exactly what he had done — saved over 1,000 worlds.
Schindler often referred to the factory as his Noah’s Ark, preserving a cross-section of Jewish society amid the Nazi devastation so that a fraction of the Jewish people would survive.
After the War
Finally, the Schindlers made it back into the Allied-controlled part of Germany, broke, exhausted, and desperate. Schindler had spent every last mark trying to save his Jewish workers. Now he turned to Jewish groups for aid. He applied for reimbursement from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, claiming he had spent 2.64 million Reichsmarks, nearly $20 million today, to keep his workers alive.
Schindler and Emilie were prepared to leave Germany and all of its nightmares behind them to start a new life in Argentina. But Schindler’s next few businesses failed. In 1957, he returned to Germany alone. He spent the rest of his life between Germany and Israel, cared for by the Schindlerjuden, the very people whose lives he had saved.
In 1974, his lifetime of drinking finally caught up with him, and his liver failed. He was buried in Israel, where his grave reads: “The unforgettable rescuer of 1,200 persecuted Jews.”
Recognition and Legacy
The story of Schindler’s courage began to surface while he was alive, but fame didn’t find him until he was already gone. As early as 1949, survivors began to write about him in their testimonies. A journalist even tried to publish his story, but never could. With the wounds of the war so fresh, no one wanted to hear about a good German, especially one with such a crooked past.
In 1964, the BBC ran a segment about him while he was still alive and penniless. Yad Vashem considered adding him to the Righteous Among the Nations, but declined after two Jewish men from Krakow accused him of theft and abuse in the early years of the war.
Everything changed in 1982 when Australian author Thomas Keneally published his novel “Schindler’s List,” the product of months of research and detailed interviews with Schindlerjuden, Schindler’s wife, and post-war friends. Eleven years later, Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film of the same name catapulted Schindler’s story into the spotlight. The film brought the Holocaust into global consciousness, forever shaping the world’s understanding of this moment in history.
One survivor later said, “Oskar Schindler gave me life, but Steven Spielberg gave me a voice.”
That same year, Yad Vashem added both Oskar and Emilie Schindler to the Righteous Among the Nations.
A Complex Hero
Was Oskar Schindler a hero? He certainly wasn’t the typical, pure-hearted do-gooder we like to imagine. His motives were questionable, his methods crooked, and yet it was precisely his willingness to lie, bribe, and manipulate that made him a hero.
As Keneally wrote, “He negotiated the salvation of his 1,200 Jews by operating right at the heart of the system, using all the tools of the devil: bribery, black marketeering, lies.”
One of his survivors said it best: “I don’t know what his motives were. I asked him and never got a clear answer, but I don’t give a damn. What’s important is that he saved our lives.”
The 1,200 Jews he saved, and their thousands of descendants, stand as living proof of his transformation. Maybe that’s an important lesson too. Heroes come in all forms, and even the most deeply flawed among us can rise to the occasion when history demands it.
