More On: Nuremberg Trials
How Hollywood transformed a Nazi into a hero
The Nuremberg Trials were modern history's biggest farce
Oskar Schindler was the polar opposite of a hero.
To begin with, Schindler was a self-professed Nazi who spent years spying for his Fuhrer. He began spying for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, when he was 26 years old. In July 1938, the Czechs captured him and imprisoned him for two months, but the intelligence he gathered helped the Germans demolish the country following the Munich Agreement. Schindler spied for the Abwehr near the Polish border until the onset of the war. Schindler aided Germany in laying the basis for its 80-year-old invasion of Poland. On the eve of the blitzkrieg invasion on September 1, 1939. Schindler oversaw a network of 25 spies that planned the notorious "Gleiwitz Incident," a false-flag incident that Nazi Germany used as a reason to invade Poland.
He kidnapped an enamelware plant in Kraków and other assets in Poland from their Jewish owners during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and exploited slave labour to produce weapons for the German war machine. This is how he got Jews to labor for him as slaves making Nazi bombs.
When Schindler chose to exploit Jews as slave labor in his factory, he had no other motive but to generate money. In truth, it was a Jewish Polish former factory co-owner called Abraham Bankier who offered the real Schindler the idea of putting Jewish people to work as effectively slave workers in his factory, thereby sparing them – a crucial role that is not depicted in the film. As the Red Army of the Soviet Union approached in the summer of 1944, industry owners who built munitions for the German Wehrmacht shifted their plants westward. From Krakow, Schindler relocated his activities to Brünnlitz, in what is now the Czech Republic.
That's when the famous list arrived: those on it would be sent to work in Brünnlitz and so rescued. That list was never prepared by Schindler, and the concept for it was not even his. When the list was compiled, Schindler was in jail, having been held during an inquiry into whether he had bribed a commandant. Mietek Pemper, a clerk working for the Nazi authorities, prepared and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who traveled to Brünnlitz in October 1944. Like many other parts in the film, the scene depicting Schindler being personally involved in its creation is completely false.
Indeed, many Jewish survivors believe Hitler merely assisted Jews to furnish himself with insurance after the war, which would whitewash his Nazi history and atrocities. While many survivors were thankful for his assistance, others considered him as a scam artist and a cynical Nazi who would do everything to preserve his own life, even if it meant assisting Jews.
The fact that none of this is stated in the film is due to the fact that Schindler's List was largely based on a work of historical fiction. An Australian work of fiction is responsible for Oskar Schindler's fame. In 1982, Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's Ark" won the Booker Prize, despite literary criticism that it was not a true novel, but rather a dramatized and historically inaccurate recounting of Schindler's tragedy. The book was renamed "Schindler's List" in America, which was a poor choice. Steven Spielberg adapted it into a film ten years later, which culminated (after three-and-a-half hours) with a cathartic reunion of actors, elderly survivors, and Schindler's estranged and resentful wife, Emilie, at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. By the typical way of crushing facts into mush, Hollywood had manufactured a mythology.
Many critics criticized the film as "Spielberg's Holocaust park," while it was regarded as "the fancies of a young guy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before," even in Germany. Others speculated that Spielberg went on the movie just to establish himself as a "serious" filmmaker and earn him his first Academy Award, which it did.
The fact that the film, which is for many people around the world the most influential source when it comes to the Holocaust, is based on a pack of historical distortions, half truths, and lies that portrays a Nazi criminal as a hero, is abhorrent and spits in the face of millions of Jewish victims of Nazi German crimes, as well as the many silent and unknown real heroes who did everything they could to save Jews during WW2, is abhorrent and spits in the face
