Oskar Schindler
Oskar Schindler (b. 28 April 1908 in Zwittau, Moravia, Austria-Hungary; d. 9 October 1974 in Hildesheim, West Germany) was an Austrian German industrialist and a member of the NSDAP, who is stated to have saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. On 9 October 1974, Schindler died in the Bernward Hospital in Hildesheim due to liver failure. On 29 October 1974, after a Protestant and Catholic memorial service in Frankfurt am Main, Oskar Schindler was buried at his own request in the Franciscan Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem on Mount Zion.
Contents
Life
Oskar Schindler was born in April 1908 as the son of the agricultural machinery manufacturer Johann "Hans" Schindler and his wife Franziska "Fanny" (née Luser) in Zwittau in what was then Austria-Hungary. His parents married in 1907 and had a daughter named Elfriede (b. 1915), who was eight years younger than him. As Hans Schindler owned a factory for agricultural machinery, the family lived in relative prosperity until the Great Depression. The children of the Jewish families next door were among their playmates. Schindler attended elementary school in 1915, then secondary school and then Realgymnasium. He completed an apprenticeship in his father's company.
He was raised as a Roman Catholic, but as an adult he turned away from religious practice for a long time. His pious mother was upset because Oskar Schindler, like his father, increasingly stayed away from church services as an adult. From 1926 to 1929, he was an enthusiastic motorcyclist. At the age of 19 (1928), he married Emilie Pelzl, the daughter of a wealthy lord of the manor from Alt Moletein. She was also brought up very devoutly and was sent to a convent by her parents for a year. Her father, a landowner, disapproved of his daughter's early marriage to an "unfinished man". Shortly after the marriage, Schindler was drafted into military service in the army of the First Czechoslovak Republic.
After his father's agricultural machinery factory was closed due to the effects of the global economic crisis, Schindler worked as an agent for the German Foreign Office/Intelligence in Moravian Ostrava and Breslau from 1935 to 1939. His superior at the time was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. As a cover, Schindler was employed as commercial director of the Moravian Electrotechnical Company in Brünn. In 1935, he joined Konrad Henlein's pro-National Socialist party, the Sudeten German Home Front, later the Sudeten German Party (SdP). After the liberation of the Sudetenland on 1 October 1938, Schindler officially became a member of the NSDAP. After his espionage activities were uncovered, he was sentenced to death for high treason for betraying Czechoslovak railway secrets to Germany. Only Hitler's annexation of the "rest of Czechoslovakia" in 1939 prevented the execution of the death sentence.
Oskar Schindler ran an enamelware factory in Krakow during the Second World War. Under the pretext that he needed workers, he put more than 1,200 interned Jews on lists and employed them in his factory. On 8 May 1945, Schindler learns of the German surrender on the Volksempfänger in his Brünnlitz factory. After a failed attempt to escape to Switzerland, Oskar and Emilie Schindler live as refugees from Eastern Germany in Konstanz and Regensburg. A new economic start fails: they live on support from the Jewish aid organization "Joint".
Schindler emigrated to Argentina with his wife Emilie in 1949. He works as a technical consultant for the purchase of industrial equipment for poultry and nutria farming from Germany. After returning to the Federal Republic of Germany alone in 1957, he tried to build a new life using money from the equalization fund. A renewed career as an entrepreneur in various industries (beverage industry, leather goods factory, artificial and concrete block factory, etc.) failed. In 1961, Schindler made his first visit to Israel, followed by seven more. In 1963, the Jews saved by Schindler initiated the "Oskar Schindler Fund" to provide financial support to Schindler. In 1971, Schindler became honorary managing director of the Federal Association of Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Germany.
Commemoration
In 1962, Schindler was allowed to plant a carob tree bearing his name in the “Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations” at Yad Vashem. On 18 July 1967, Yad Vashem recognized Oskar Schindler as "Righteous Among the Nations." On 24 July 1993, Yad Vashem confirmed this original decision and extended the recognition to Schindler's wife, Emilie Schindler.[1] He is the only member of the NSDAP who is buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion.
Family
On 6 March 1928, Oskar Schindler married his fiancée Emilie Pelzl (1907–2001). They would never have children. They had met when tall, handsome Oskar Schindler came to the door of her father's estate selling electric motors. After a courtship of only six weeks, they married at an inn on the outskirts of Zwittau, Oskar's hometown.
Emilie Schindler
Emilie was born on 22 October 1907 at the Sudeten German estate of her father, Gut Alt Moletein. She was the second child of Josef Pelzl (1875–1939) and his wife (∞ 21 November 1899) Maria, née Pieschl (1874–1939). The father was a wealthy landowner from Alt Moletein. In Brünn she attended various schools, including an agricultural school. In 1928, she married the Sudeten German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who was one year younger than her, and with whom she moved to her in-laws' house in Zwittau. Her father disapproved of his daughter's early marriage to an "unfinished man." Due to the global economic crisis, her husband's factory had to be closed. In 1936 the couple moved to Moravian Ostrava, where she actively supported her husband in his work for German counterintelligence.
In October 1939, Oskar Schindler went to Krakow and founded the Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (DEF). From Ostrava she visited her husband twice a week until she moved to Krakow herself in 1941. Emilie Schindler began supporting her husband in caring for Jewish workers in the factory. She herself cared for the sick and wounded, soldiers and Jews alike, in a military hospital set up in the factory. She even sold her jewelry to buy food and medicine. After the surrender on 8 May 1945, she fled to Regensburg (Bavaria) with her husband until they emigrated to Argentina in 1949. There, Emilie Schindler and her husband grew apart until Oskar finally returned to Germany in 1957 and she stayed behind in Buenos Aires, but they never divorced.
Emilie Schindler first appeared in public when Steven Spielberg made the film Schindler's List in 1993. In the final scene, she places one of the stones on her husband's grave. She met, among others, Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II and German Federal President Roman Herzog. Never returning to her adopted home in South America, Emilie Schindler died on 5 October 2001 after a stroke in a clinic in Strausberg (Brandenburg) near Berlin. In the summer of 2001 she was supposed to come to a retirement and nursing home run by the Sudeten German Foundation in Waldkraiburg to spend the rest of her life there. However, the doctors considered transporting the sick woman to Upper Bavaria to be too risky. She was buried in Waldkraiburg (Landkreis Mühldorf am Inn, Bavaria) on 19 October 2001; the wealthy Munich publisher Herbert Fleissner had taken care of the grave in Waldkraiburg. Politicians, diplomats and friends attended the funeral.
Media
Politically-correct fiction based on this includes the fictional 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and its 1993 fictional film adaptation, Schindler's List, in which Schindler is played by Liam Neeson.
Awards, decorations and honours
Oskar Schindler
- "Whoever saves just one life saves the whole world" – this saying from the Talmud is engraved on the ring that the Jews he saved gave to Oskar Schindler as a gift. Made of real dental gold, the ring was the only thing they had at the end of the war to thank Schindler.
- Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Cross of Merit 1st Class on 5 November 1965
- The award was a result of the failed efforts of the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to film Oskar Schindler's story under the title Until The Last Hour.
- Martin Buber Peace Prize on 18 October 1967
- Order of St. Sylvester on 18 october 1968 by Pope Paul VI (presented by Auxiliary Bishop Walther Kampe)
- Namesake for the asteroid (11572) Schindler, 2000
- In 2008, the Federal Republic of Germany honored Oskar Schindler on the occasion of his 100th birthday by issuing a 145-cent special postage stamp.
- Streets were named after him in Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Hildesheim, Cologne, Nuremberg and Sendenhorst.
- A school and a street in Hildesheim bear his name, and in 2013 a memorial was inaugurated near his last place of residence.
- Memorial plaque on the house, Watmarkt 5, in Regensburg, where the couple once lived after the war
- In September 2022, it was announced that the forecourt of Frankfurt Central Station would be named after Oskar and Emilie Schindler.
Emilie Schindler
All awards, medals and orders are in the House of History in Bonn.
- 1993 (another source states May 1994) Righteous Among the Nations award at Yad Vashem at the same time as Miep Gies
- 1994 Justice Louis D. Brandeis Prize from the Zionist Organization of America
- 1995 Audience with Pope John Paul II.
- 1995 Awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the then German Federal President Roman Herzog
- 1995 Awarded an Israeli medal
- 1995 Awarded a French medal
- 1995 Order of Major of the Argentine Army
- 1995 Awarded honorary Argentine citizenship
- 1998 The medal “Le Grand Orient” (awarded in Argentina)
- 1998 Argentine President's Order of Merit
- 1999 Argentine Golden Medal with certificate
- 2001 Human Rights Prize of the Sudeten Germans (posthumous)
- The American composer Thomas Morse and the librettist Kenneth Cazan released the opera Frau Schindler in Munich's Gärtnerplatztheater in 2017.
- Under the direction of Annette Baumeister, Bayerischer Rundfunk produced the television documentary Emilie Schindler – The Forgotten Heroine about Schindler. It was first broadcast on Arte on 20 May 2024.
