Oskar Schindler Research Paper
He miraculously managed to do it and pulled it off by using the very name talents that made him a war profiteer – his flair for presentation, bribery, and grand gestures. -In those years, millions Of Jews died in the Nazi HYPERLINK “http:// www. Deathwatch. Info/” In _ blanket camps like Auschwitz, but HYPERLINK ‘http://www. Oscar;Schneider. Variance. Dc/index. HTML” In _ philanderer’s Jews miraculously survived. DC]-To more than 1 200 Jews Oscar Schneider was all that stood between them and death at the hands of the HYPERLINK “http://womb. Inconsiderable. Com/Goethe/” in _biennials. A man full of flaws like the rest of us the unlikeliest of all role models who started by earning millions as a war profiteer and ended by spending his last pfennig and risking his life to save his Jews. An ordinary man who even in the worst of circumstances did extraordinary things, matched by no one. He remained true to his Jews, the workers he referred to as my children. In the shadow of HYPERLINK “http:// www. Grandchildren. Com/hallucinations/” In _ blacksmithing he kept the AS out and everyone alive. C]Oscar Schneider and his wife Emilie Schneider were inspiring evidence of courage and human decency during the Holocaust.
Emilie was not only a strong woman working alongside her husband but a heroine in her right. She worked indefatigably to save the Schneider-]sews – a story to bear witness to goodness, love and compassion. C]C]Today there are more than 7,000 descendants of the Schneider-Jews living in US and Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3. 5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left. Oscar Schneider spent millions to protect and save his Jews, everything he possessed. He died penniless.
But he earned the everlasting gratitude of the Schneider-Jews. Today his name is known as a household word for courage in a world of brutality – a hero who saved hundreds of Jews from Hitter’s gas chambers . 0 HYPERLINK ‘http://www. Grandchildren. Com/’http:// www. Grandchildren. Com/ Jews during HYPERLINK “http://en. Wisped. Org/wick/The_Holocaust”the Holocaust by employing them in his HYPERLINK “http://en Wisped. Org/wick/ Enamelware”enamelware and ammunitions factories, which were located in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic respectively. HYPERLINK “http:// en. Kipped. Org/wick/Oscar_Schneider” II He is the subject of the 1 982 novel HYPERLINK “http://en. Kipped. Org/wick/ Chandler’s Ark”Chandler’s Ark, and the 1993 film based on it, HYPERLINK “http://en. Wisped. Org/wick/Chandler’s_List”Echinoderm’s List HYPERLINK “http://en. Wisped. Org/wick/Oscar_Schneider” which highlights the contradictory trajectory of an opportunistic and amoral man initially motivated by profit, who came to show extraordinary initiative, tenacity and dedication in order to save the lives of his Jewish employees, ending his life in poverty.
HYPERLINK “http://en. Wisped. Org/wick/Oscar_Schneider”http:// en. Wisped. Org/wick/Oscar_Schneider In December 1939, as occupied HYPERLINK ‘http www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/Housecoats/Poland. HTML”Poinciana being torn apart by the savagery of the HYPERLINK ‘http:// www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/halo. HTML”Holocaust, Oscar Schneider, the unlikeliest of role models, took his first faltering steps from the darkness of Nazism towards the light of heroism. If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car,” he said later of his wartime actions, “wouldn’t you help him? ” Before the outbreak of war, Poland had been a relative haven for European Jews; HYPERLINK “http://womb. Substitutability. Org/source/vs../ Craw. HTML” Karaoke’s Jewish population numbered over 50,000. But when Germany invaded, destruction began immediately and it was merciless. Jews were herded into crowded HYPERLINK ‘http://BMW. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/ source/Holocaust/ghetto. HTML”ghettos, randomly beaten and humiliated, capriciously killed.
Jewish property and businesses were summarily destroyed, or appropriated by the AS and ‘sold’ to Nazi ‘investors’, one of whom was the fast talking, womankind, money hungry Oscar Schneider. Schneider grew up with all the privileges money could buy. He was born Catholic, but from an early age he inhabited a world of sin. His exploits with women are the stuff of barroom legend. He married HYPERLINK “http:// www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/biography/milliseconds. HTML”Emilie Schneider at nineteen, but was never without a mistress or two.
Hard drinking and feckless, he had the soul of a gambler, winning big and losing bigger. He had presided over the demise of his family business and become a salesman when opportunity came knocking in the guise of the war. Never one to miss a chance to make money, he marched into Poland on the heels of the AS. He dived headfirst into the black-market and the underworld and soon made friends with the local Gestapo bigwigs, softening them up with women, money and illicit booze. His newfound connections helped him acquire a factory which he ran with the cheapest labor around: Jewish.
At first he seemed like every other usurping German industrialist, driven by profit and unmoved by the means of his profiteering. But somewhere along the line, something changed. He succeeded in his quest for riches, but by the end of the war he had spent everything he made on keeping 1,300 Jewish men and women alive. He negotiated the salvation of his 1,300 Jews by operating right at the heart of the system using all the tools of the devil;bribery, black marketing and lies,” said Thomas Generally, whose book about this paradoxical man was the basis of the movie Chandler’s List.
Not long after acquiring his “Amelia” factory;which produced enamel goods and munitions to supply the German front;the removal of Jews to death camps began in earnest. Chandler’s Jewish accountant put him in touch with the few Jews with any remaining wealth. They invested in his factory, and in return they loud be able to work there and perhaps be spared. He was persuaded to hire more Jewish workers, designating their skills as “essential,” paying off the Nazis so they would allow them to stay in Krakow. Schneider was making money, but everyone in his factory was fed, no-one was beaten, no-one was killed.
It became an oasis of humanity in a desert of moral torpor. As the brutality of the holocaust escalated, Chandler’s protection of his Jewish workers became increasingly active. In the summer of 1942, he witnessed a German raid on the Jewish HYPERLINK “http://www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Rug/ source/Holocaust/ghetto. HTML”ghetto. Watching innocent people being packed onto trains bound for certain death, something awakened in him. “Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen,” he said later. “l was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system. By the autumn of 1944, Germany’s hold on Poland had weakened. As the Russian army approached, the Nazi’s tried desperately to complete their program of liquidation and sent all remaining Jews to die. But Schneider remained true to the “Echinoderms,” the workers he referred to as “my hillier. ” After the liquidation of the Krakow HYPERLINK “http:// wwujewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/Holocaust/ghetto. HTML”ghetto and the transfer of many Jews to the HYPERLINK “http://www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/ source/Holocaust/Palazzos. HTML”Palazzos concentration camp, Schneider used his influence to set up a branch of the camp for 900 Jewish workers in his factory compound in Caboodle and made his now HYPERLINK “http:// www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/Housecoats/Centralists. HTML”famous list of the workers he would need for its operation. The factory operated in its ewe location a year, making defective bullets for German guns. Conditions were grim, for the Chandlers as well as the workers. But Schneider saved most of these workers when he transferred his factory to Brutality (Sutherland) in October 1944.
When the war ended, Cinderella to Argentina with his wife and a handful of his workers and bought a farm. In 1958, he abandoned his land, his wife and his mistress to return to Germany. He spent the remaining years of his life dividing his time between Germany and Israel, where he was honored and taken care of by his “Echinoderms. ” He died in Hillside’s in 1974. His extraordinary story might have died with him but for their gratitude. In trying to answer the inevitable question, why did he do it, one of the survivors said: “l don’t know what his motives were…
But I don’t give a damn. What’s important is that he saved our lives. ” Perhaps the question is not why he did it, but rather how could he not. And perhaps the answer is unimportant. It is his actions that matter now, testimony that even in the worst of circumstances, the most ordinary of us can act courageously. If Oscar Schneider, flawed as he was, did it, then so might we, and that is reason enough to hope. HYPERLINK “http://w. Www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/ biography/Schneider. HTML” http://www. jewishvirtuallibrary. Org/source/ biography/Schneider. HTML Oscar Schneider (1908-1974) was born on April 28, 1 908 in Suavity (Kuwaiti), Moravia, at that time a province of the Status-Hungarian Monarchy. An ethnic German and a Catholic, he remained in Suavity during the interwar period and held Czech citizenship after Moravia was incorporated into the newly established Czechoslovakia Republic in 1918. After attending a series of trade schools in Born and marrying Emilie People in 1928, Schneider held a variety of bobs, including working in his father’s farm machinery business in Suavity, opening a driving school in Summers, and selling government property in Born.
He also served in the Czechoslovakia army and in 1938 attained the rank of lance corporal in the reserves. Schneider began working with the Mat Islands/Barber (Office of the Military Foreign Intelligence) of the German Armed Forces in 1936. In February 1939, five months after the German annexation of the Sutherland, he joined the Nazi Party. An opportunist businessman with a taste for the finer things in life, he seemed an unlikely candidate to become a wartime rescuer.
