Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party whose 1939–1945 World War II employment of approximately 1,200 Jewish refugees as workers at his Krakow and Brünnlitz enamelware-and-munitions factories — preserving them from deportation to and execution at the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp — produced his 20th-century Holocaust-rescuer public profile. He was born Oskar Schindler on April 28, 1908, in Zwittau, Austria-Hungary (modern Svitavy, Czech Republic), into a Sudeten-German Catholic family. His father Hans Schindler was a Sudeten-German farm-machinery and factory-equipment salesman, and his mother Franziska Luser was a homemaker.

His 1936 Sudeten-German Abwehr (the German military intelligence service) recruitment — and his subsequent 1936–1939 Czechoslovakia-area Abwehr intelligence service — launched his early-career Nazi-Party career. His 1939 Nazi-Party membership (joining the Sudeten German Party in 1938 and the Nazi Party shortly thereafter) and his October 1939 relocation to occupied Krakow, Poland launched his 1939–1945 World War II Krakow-area career.

His late-1939 acquisition of the formerly-Jewish-owned Rekord Ltd. enamelware factory in Krakow — which he renamed Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik (DEF, or Emalia) — launched his 1939–1944 employment of approximately 1,200 Jewish refugees as factory workers. His 1942–1944 active intervention to protect his Jewish workers from deportation to Nazi extermination camps — produced through his series of bribes to Nazi SS officials in occupied Poland, his late-1944 transfer of the Emalia factory to Brünnlitz, Sudetenland (modern Brněnec, Czech Republic), and his late-1944 negotiation of the Schindler's List — produced his 20th-century Holocaust-rescuer biographical narrative.

His post-war 1945–1974 career across Argentina (1949–1957) and West Germany (1957–1974) — shaped by his 1945–1949 financial bankruptcy following the wartime expenditure of his factory-profit fortune on bribes-and-supplies for his Jewish workers — produced his later biographical narrative. He died on October 9, 1974, at age 66, in Hildesheim, West Germany. His 1962 listing as one of the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations and his posthumous 1993 portrayal by Liam Neeson in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture) produced his late-20th-century international cultural-memory recognition.

His name Oskar derives from the Old Germanic root meaning "god-spear." Oskar has been climbing in American naming since the early 21st century.