Oskar Schindler

OSKAR SCHINDLER RETURNED TO SVITAVY IN EARLY OCTOBER 1938 as a hero. After the war, several of his acquaintances told Czechoslovak investigators that Hitler had rewarded him with an automobile and other valuables. In the opening of his historical novel Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally wrote that Oskar wore “a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika).” Steven Spielberg made great visual use of this Nazi badge in his film Schindler’s List. By using this important Nazi symbol, both artists were trying to imply that Oskar Schindler was a highly decorated Nazi Party member who later used this honor to help save “his Jews.” Yet which badge, if any, did he wear? Was it the standard party badge with the black swastika on a white background circled in red with Nationalsozialistische-D.A.P. (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; German Workers’ Party) in gold lettering, or was it one of the two forms of the distinctive Golden Party Badge (Goldenes Parteiabzeichen) and the Golden Honor Award of the NSDAP (Goldenes Ehrenzeichen der NSDAP)? Though none of the scores of survivors interviewed for this book remembers a Nazi badge on Oskar’s coat lapels, one Jewish survivor who knew Schindler during the war and later accused him of mistreatment claimed that Oskar always wore the Blood Order (Blutorden) medal, Nazism’s highest award. It is doubtful that Oskar received the Blood Order; this honor was reserved for the 2,000 Nazi “Old Fighters” who took part in Adolf Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch on November 9, 1923. Over the years, the Blood Order was also given to other Nazi heroes, particularly if they had served long prison terms or had been injured for the cause. The Golden Party Badge was Nazism’s next highest honor, though it had two forms. The standard, individually numbered Golden Party Badge was initially reserved for the party’s first 100,000 members, though later it was also given to party favorites or heroes. The Golden Party Badge bore a distinctive gold cluster surrounding the traditional party badge. According to John Weitz, who used Spielberg’s image of Oskar as an example of the power of this award, the wearer of the Golden Party Badge could expect special treatment at theaters and restaurants.¹

The much more prestigious Golden Honor Award of the NSDAP was awarded specifically by Adolf Hitler to individuals who had offered distinguished service to the Party and state. The Nazis’ semi-official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), called it “the supreme badge of honor of the Party.” Though both gold party badges were quite similar in appearance, the Golden Honor Award had Adolf Hitler’s initials stamped on the back as well as the date of the award. Hitler awarded only 650 of the Golden Honor Awards during his time as Germany’s dictator.²

If Oskar was a highly decorated hero, he said little about it. We do not know much about his life after his release from prison in the fall of 1938. He did consider himself a martyr and blamed his arrest and confinement on his own carelessness (Leitsinn, Leichtsinn). He claimed he was now unemployed because his old firm was in Brno, which was in what remained of Czechoslovakia after the Munich accord. On November 1, 1938, Oskar applied for Nazi Party (NSDAP; Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; National Socialist German Workers Party) membership. Sudeten Germans who had belonged to Konrad Henlein’s SdP were eligible for membership if they had been SdP continuous members since 1935. Though the Nazi Party accepted Oskar for provisional membership on February 2, 1939, the party’s district court raised questions about his numerous arrests in the 1930s, which Oskar had listed on his membership application. Using guidelines drawn up by Rudolf Hess in 1937, local party officials were to investigate each applicant to insure that their political attitudes were in line with those of the party. They also applied the 1935 Nuremberg Laws to each application, the Law to Protect German Blood and German Honor and the Reich Citizenship Law; this was to insure that the potential member had neither Jewish blood nor a Jewish spouse. Party functionaries also examined an applicant’s moral character. If an applicant’s qualifications for membership were in doubt, the matter was turned over to the local or district party courts (Parteigerichte), which would rule on the matter.³

Eight months after Oskar applied to Nazi Party membership, Dr. Gerlich, a Nazi Party official in the Reichsgau Sudetenland headquarters in Reichenberg, forwarded Oskar’s application to the party’s district court (Kreisgericht) in Zwittau (formerly Svitavy) for further investigation. Dr. Gerlich said that the court should examine two matters: Oskar’s claim that he had been a continuous member of the SdP since 1935, and his police record. Dr. Gerlich said that the party district court should obtain a copy of Oskar’s criminal files from the district attorney’s office in Zwittau. He added that if they found only the convictions that Schindler had listed on his party application, these would not be enough to keep him from becoming a party member in good standing “if he is otherwise of good character and politically acceptable.”⁴

Several days before the Czechoslovakians released Oskar from prison, German forces began to move into the Sudetenland. Initially, Svitavy was not included in the territory ceded to Nazi Germany, but that would change. The Munich Agreement stated that an international commission made up of Germany, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Italy, and France would decide on border disputes between Prague and Germany, Poland, and Hungary. One area of particular interest to Hitler was the Svitavy region, Schindler’s home district. An ethnic German island on the Bohemian-Moravian border, Svitavy rested at the center of the main rail links between eastern and western Czechoslovakia. Three days after the signing of the Munich accord, Hitler personally told the German negotiators to insist on this piece of territory in their border talks with Czechoslovak officials. By the time Oskar Schindler returned to Svitavy, it was about to become part of Germany.⁵

Hitler Moves to Dismember Rump Czechoslovakia (October 1938–March 1939)

As Oskar recovered physically and psychologically from his jail term, Germany began its integration of the Sudetenland into the Third Reich. Konrad Henlein became Reichskommissar for the newly created Sudeten German territory (Reichskommissar für die sudetendeutschen Gebiete) and Karl Hermann Frank his deputy Kommissar. Reich officials began an immediate campaign of Gleichschaltung (reordering) to Nazify the Sudetenland. Almost 99 percent of the Sudeten German population approved this move during Reichstag elections on December 4, when they voted to support the Führer and the grossdeutsche Reich. An active policy to force non-Germans to leave the Sudetenland was connected with the campaign of Nazification. The SdP, which was integrated into the NSDAP on December 11, 1938, began a policy of intimidation against Czech and Jewish businesses. SdP members put signs reading Tschechisches Geschäft (Czech business or shop) and Jüdisches Geschäft on all Czech and Jewish stores and businesses in the Sudetenland. During the November 9–10, 1938, anti-Jewish Kristallnacht riots, the SdP led anti-Jewish demonstrations. The intimidation campaign worked. About 140,000 Czechs, including 12,000 Germans, fled the Sudetenland for Czechoslovakia in the months after the German takeover of this region.⁶

If the Sudeten Germans thought that Hitler would bring them a better life, they were sorely misled. Though Germany was able to deal firmly with the region’s unemployment, it did so with a heavy hand. Nazi Germany was a dictatorship; Czechoslovakia a democracy. These differences became readily apparent to most Sudeten Germans over time. Many Sudeten Germans came to resent the arrival of the Reich German carpetbaggers, who dominated government and business. At the instigation of Karl Hermann Frank, the Germans purged many of Konrad Henlein’s old SdP associates, including his closest ally, Walter Brand, who spent some time in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. After Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Sudeten Germans began to resent what they felt was Reich German favoritism towards Czechs in the new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, whom they wanted expelled from the region. Certainly Oskar Schindler was affected by Sudeten German resentment towards Reich officialdom during and after World War II.⁷

In the midst of the Reich German effort to Nazify the Sudetenland, Abwehr officials debriefed Oskar Schindler and gave him some leave to recover from his imprisonment. They soon promoted Oskar and made him second in command of a team of Abwehr agents in Mährisch Ostrau (formerly Moravská Ostrava, Moravian Ostrava; today Ostrava) on the Sudeten-Polish border. One Czech investigation of Oskar’s activities in Märisch Ostrau suggests, though, that his position was so high in the local Abwehr organization that some of its agents considered him the practical head of its operations in the former Czech city.⁸

During this interim, Hitler began to plan for the takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia. According to Gerhard Weinberg, Wehrmacht officers in the Sudetenland heard of these plans as early as October 3, 1938. Within a week, military planning for the invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia was well under way in Berlin. On October 21, Hitler issued his directive to the Wehrmacht for the takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia. It is now apparent that Schindler was involved in these efforts and was sent by Abwehr to Moravská Ostrava in early 1939 to help plan Germany’s takeover of the rest of Bohemia and Moravia. Schindler’s efforts, though, would be less significant than his later work in helping plan the invasion of Poland; Hitler was still suspicious of Admiral Canaris and Abwehr because they had not supplied the Wehrmacht with accurate information about Czechoslovakia in 1938. Instead, Hitler decided to force a political separation of Slovakia from the rest of Czechoslovakia by using SD terrorists in preparation for his takeover of the Czech lands.⁹

Yet even before German forces moved into the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia) on March 14, 1939, Germany’s allies, Hungary and Poland, further humiliated Czechoslovakia by using Prague’s fragile international situation to cash in on those parts of the Munich Accord that stipulated discussions about disputed territory. In little more than a month after the completion of the Munich Agreement, Poland was able to acquire Těšín and several small areas along the Polish-Slovak border, and Hungary gained more than 4,500 square miles of territory in eastern Slovakia in the German-Italian-sponsored First Vienna Award of November 2, 1938. By the end of the first week of November 1938, Czechoslovakia had been forced to cede almost 19,000 square miles of territory and more than 5 million people to Germany, Hungary, and Poland. The loss of a third of its population and territory devastated the Czechoslovak economy and denuded its defense system.¹⁰

Under a new president, Dr. Emil Hácha, the Czechoslovak government sought to repair its relations with Germany and seek Anglo-French guarantees of its remaining frontiers as provided in the Munich Agreement. The British and the French did not approach Germany and Italy about this until February 8, 1939, only weeks before Hitler planned to move against the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Once again, the major powers allowed Hitler to determine the course of international affairs in Europe. Five days later, Hitler told General Keitel, the head of OKW, and General Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief, that he planned to move against Czechoslovakia in mid-March.¹¹

Hitler needed only excuses to justify his move, and German plans were already underway to fabricate one in league with Slovak politicians. The unstable political climate in Slovakia after Munich had forced the recently appointed head of the Slovak government, General Jan Syrovü, to give in to the demands of Father Jozef Tiso, the head of the fascist Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSL’S; Hlinkova slovenská l’udová strana) to make Czechoslovakia a federal republic. On November 23, 1938, Czech and Slovak leaders agreed to create a federal Czecho-Slovak state. Six weeks earlier, Father Tiso had become Slovakia’s premier.¹² The federal union with the Czech lands did not satisfy radicals within the HSL’S, who demanded full independence for Slovakia. They looked to Germany for support and promoted their cause through anti-Semitic and anti-Czech movements such as the Hlinka Guards (HG; Hlinkova garda), an SA-like movement that blended Nazi and fascist ideals. Gradually, HSL’S extremists transformed Slovakia into a single party state and society.¹³

Talk of Slovak independence became widespread. Hitler thought the HSL’S leaders would be ready partners in the final eradication of Czecho-Slovakia. Slovakia’s drift into the German camp and rumors of Germany’s imminent takeover of Czecho-Slovakia prompted President Hácha to ask Slovak leaders on March 1, 1939, to reaffirm their loyalty to the Czecho-Slovak Republic and abandon talk of independence. When the Tiso government failed to make such pledges, Hácha fired Tiso and some of his cabinet. He appointed a Slovak interim government and moved some military units into Slovakia. Ferdinand Durčanský, one of Tiso’s dismissed ministers, fled to Vienna and asked Hitler to intervene.¹⁴

On March 13, Hitler called Tiso and Durčanský to Berlin, where the Führer gave them until the following day to declare Slovakia’s independence. If they refused or hesitated, Slovakia would be divided between Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Tiso acceded; on March 14, 1939, the Slovak parliament declared Slovak independence. In the meantime, German agents fabricated incidents in Bohemia and Moravia that the Reich press claimed were aimed at Sudeten Germans. Hitler now had the two excuses he needed to justify his move into Bohemia and Moravia: political instability and continued Czech mistreatment of Sudeten Germans in Bohemia and Moravia.¹⁵

While Tiso and Durčanský met with Hitler in Berlin, the Czech cabinet urged President Hácha to rush to Berlin to meet with Hitler. As their train sped north towards Berlin, German units marched into the strategically important Czech town of Moravská Ostrava. Though Hácha and his foreign minister, František Chvalkovskü, arrived in Berlin at 10:40 P.M., Hitler kept them waiting until the early hours of the morning to tell them that they had no choice but to agree to the forced takeover of Czecho-Slovakia. When Hácha hesitated, Hermann Göring, the powerful head of the Luftwaffe, threatened to destroy Prague if the president refused to agree to the passive acceptance of the German takeover of Czecho-Slovakia. Hácha, who conferred with his cabinet in Prague during the three-hour meeting, was also forced to sign a joint German-Czech statement that placed full control of Czecho-Slovakia in the “hands of the Führer of the German Reich.” Hácha, overwhelmed by the severity of the moment and the knowledge that his cabinet opposed his signature, fainted. At 4:00 A.M. on Wednesday, March 15, 1939, Czecho-Slovakia ceased to exist. Europe would never be the same again.¹⁶

As German forces marched into the Czech lands, Father Tiso, under pressure from Hitler, declared Slovak independence. The Wehrmacht quickly occupied Slovakia, which became a German protected state (Schutzstaat). Though Slovakia appeared to function as an independent country throughout the war, in reality it was a German puppet state run by staunch pro-Nazis around Father Tiso. Slovakia became the Third Reich’s propaganda showpiece in that part of Europe and Slovak troops fought alongside Germans during World War II. The Tiso government adopted German-style anti-Semitic laws and 75 percent of Slovak Jews (c. 135,000 in 1930) died during the Holocaust.¹⁷

According to the postwar testimony of Alois Polansky, who worked as a chauffeur for Abwehr and the SD in Mährisch Ostrau in 1939, Oskar Schindler was already working as an Abwehr agent in Moravská Ostrava when German forces moved into Bohemia and Moravia on March 14 and 15. Renamed Mährisch Ostrau after the German takeover, Moravská Ostrava was considered a strategically vital city because of its proximity to the Polish border. The SdP had staged incidents there in early September 1938 to derail its talks with Prague, and Hitler refused to let the Poles occupy it as part of their takeover of Těšín and other bits of Czechoslovak territory a month later because of its economic value to the Reich. It was fear of a Polish move into Moravská Ostrava in March 1939 that prompted Hitler to take the city over before the formal move of German troops into Bohemia and Moravia.¹⁸

Oskar Schindler in Moravská Ostrava/Mährisch Ostrau, 1939

In January 1939, Oskar and Emilie Schindler moved to Moravská Ostrava (Mährisch Ostrau), their home for most of 1939. Even after he moved to Kraków in September 1939 to explore new business opportunities, Oskar continued to list Mährisch Ostrau as his home. In the spring of 1940, Oskar applied for a driver’s license at the Police Directorate in Mährisch Ostrau and listed as his address 25 Parkstraße (Sadova Street), though later Gestapo reports on Schindler and the break-in at his apartment said that Oskar and Emilie lived at 27 Parkstraße. Perhaps they occupied two apartments, one an Abwehr office and their living quarters next door. Before the war, Germans and Jews lived side by side on Sadova Street. Once fighting began, its Jewish residents disappeared, though its German families kept their homes. Mährisch Ostrau’s mayor lived next door to Emilie and Oskar, and not far away was the city hall and the headquarters of the SD and the Gestapo. According to Emilie, Wehrmacht barracks stood across the street. Oskar kept the apartment at 25 Sadova throughout the war. Emilie lived there from 1939 to 1941, when she finally joined Oskar in Kraków. For the next four years, Oskar evidently maintained it for his girlfriend, Irena Dvorzakowa, who worked at the Vitkovice steel works. Irena stayed in the apartment in Mährisch Ostrau apartment until late 1945 or early 1946, when she moved to Vratislav. Oskar visited the apartment for the last time in April 1945, when he collected some of his belongings.¹⁹

Oskar and Emilie would hardly recognize Ostrava today. It is a major industrial center and the Czech Republic’s third largest city after Prague and Brno. By Czech standards, Ostrava is a relatively modern town that sprung up after the Austrian emperor, Joseph II, united what remained of Silesia with Moravia after Frederick the Great of Prussia conquered most of it four decades earlier. In the nineteenth century, Austrian Mährisch Ostrau became an important Austrian industrial center because of its coal mines and iron furnaces. Though there was a strong German presence in Ostrava, it was predominantly a Czech town. By the 1930s, less than 20 percent of Ostrava’s population was German.²⁰ Modern Ostrava does not look or feel like a gloomy industrial town and it retains much of its prewar charm. Trolleys still meander along tracks in the middle of the streets and the pace is slow and relaxed. In many ways, modern Ostrava is still the traditional entranceway to the beautiful rolling hills and rich farmland of Moravia.

It is about three hours by car from Kraków to Ostrava on surprisingly modern roads. The several important roads and railways that converge through the city make it an important terminus for train, truck, and car traffic. Oskar said little about his assignment in Mährisch Ostrau after the war. He told Fritz Lang that he took the assignment to protect himself from charges that he continued to maintain relations with Jewish friends and acquaintances after the Germans moved into the Sudetenland. Though there is no evidence to discount Oskar’s claim, he probably took the Abwehr assignment in Moravská Ostrava because it meant a promotion and better pay. After the war, he told Fritz Lang that he joined Abwehr because it was “the most realistic option amidst the bustle of the grouping formations” and because of the influence of his father, who was loyal to the “traditions of the KK [kaiserliche und königliche, imperial and royal] army.”²¹

Whatever his motivation, Oskar Schindler was actively engaged in espionage for Abwehr well before the German takeover of the remnant of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Alois Polanski says that he drove his boss, Leutnant Görgey, an Abwehr officer, three times to meet with Schindler in Moravská Ostrava before the German move into Czechoslovakia. Their last meeting was probably on March 12, 1939, three days before Hitler absorbed Bohemia and Moravia. Though Moravská Ostrava was still part of Czechoslovakia, Abwehr used it as a prime listening post for developments within the country. As Hitler planned his second move against Czecho-Slovakia, though, Canaris was determined not to be excluded from planning for Hitler’s next moves. Abwehr looked constantly for collaborators within Czechoslovakia and carefully watched the activities of Czechoslovak intelligent agents. To strengthen his intelligence-gathering operations in Czechoslovakia, Canaris even approached General František Moravec, head of Czech military intelligence, about collaboration between the two agencies. General Moravec never responded to Canaris’s offer.²²

The move to Moravská Ostrava upset Emilie because she had to leave their large, comfortable home in Zwittau. The serenity of Zwittau was replaced by the hustle and bustle of their new apartment on 25 Sadova, in the center of Moravská Ostrava. Emilie said that the apartment was just across the street from a Wehrmacht base, though this would not have been possible until the spring of 1939. According to Emilie, the Schindler home became an Abwehr office with four workers, including Irena Dvorzakowa, Oskar’s newest lover. Dr. MeOislav Borak, a Czech expert on Schindler’s activities in Ostrava, doubts that Oskar had a full-fledged office in his home. This was the same conclusion reached by Gestapo investigators in 1940. Certainly Oskar kept some Abwehr materials in the apartment, but he later told Gestapo officials who were investigating the Polish break-in that he had never kept important Abwehr materials at 25–27 Parkstraße.²³

Emilie served as Oskar’s office manager and handled his routine Abwehr office work in addition to her housekeeping chores. Emilie had some sort of security clearance to do this work because she was also responsible for receiving, processing, and hiding the numerous secret files they received. Her only protection was a German Luger that they hid in a closet. The work she did for Oskar was the extent of her operational duties.²⁴

Although their work was deadly serious, there were a few moments of comic relief. Soon after they moved to Moravská Ostrava, Oskar bought forty carrier pigeons so that he could send messages to other Abwehr operatives. In addition to her office duties, Emilie had to feed the pigeons and clean their cages. According to Emilie, Oskar soon lost interest in the pigeons and never used them to carry messages. After a few months of pigeon duty, Emilie decided to set them free without telling Oskar. She chose a beautiful day, but, at first, they hesitated to leave their cages. Once free, they circled the Schindler home once, then flew away. Later, they returned to Ostrava to the frustration of Oskar’s superiors, who complained that the Schindlers had not taken good care of these valuable servants of the Third Reich.²⁵

Abwehr, Oskar Schindler, and German Plans for the Invasion of Poland

Though Hitler had allowed Admiral Canaris and Abwehr to play a secondary role in helping plan the takeover of rump Czechoslovakia, they were considered too vital to German military planning to be kept in the background for long. Moreover, Canaris was determined not to let Abwehr commit the same mistakes that had so hurt the organization in the fall of 1938. He approached planning for the attack against Poland with renewed vigor and ingenuity. Oskar Schindler would be important to Abwehr’s plans.²⁶

According to one Abwehr report, in the months before the invasion of Poland Oskar and his twenty-five agents were actively engaged smuggling arms and men into the Těšín area where they trained for secret combat operations. Schindler was involved in similar Abwehr activities in the Sillein (Žilinia) region. Two Abwehr agents with whom Oskar worked closely during this period were Herbert Hipfinger, who used the cover name Forster, and a second agent known only by a letter designation.²⁷

In the days after the German dismemberment of what remained of Czechoslovakia, European leaders searched for clues to Hitler’s next moves. Romania and Poland seemed to be next in line for a German takeover. Romania was dropped from the potential victim’s list when, on March 23, it signed an economic agreement with Germany giving Hitler control over most of its oil and farm products. Fearful of an imminent German move against Poland after Warsaw rejected Hitler’s demand for Danzig and transit rights across the Polish Corridor in return for Germany’s guarantees of Poland’s western borders, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the British Parliament on March 31 that his government would come to the aid of Poland if its independence was threatened. Hitler, who wanted Poland in the German camp before the Reich dealt with Britain and France, decided that war was the only way to resolve the Polish question. On April 3, 1939, the Wehrmacht was ordered to begin initial planning for an invasion of Poland.²⁸

Moravská Ostrava had been an important Abwehr listening post into Poland before Hitler dismembered Czecho-Slovakia in the spring of 1939. Now known as Mährisch Ostrau in the new German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Böhren und Mähren), it became an important staging and information gathering point for Abwehr, the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo as they prepared for the invasion of Poland. Canaris was one of a handful of Wehrmacht officers who received a copy of the Hitler-OKW initial April 3 directive for Fall Weiss (Case White) for the future destruction of Poland. Updated on April 11 and then periodically during the spring and summer, it was predicated on the political isolation of Poland before German units destroyed Polish military forces in the field. It anticipated an action date on or after September 1, 1939.²⁹

Canaris briefed the commanders of Abwehr I, which was responsible for gathering information about the military strength and armaments of foreign nations and Abwehr II, Schindler’s group, which dealt with sabotage, countersabotage, and commando operations. Abwehr II was now under the command of Oberst Erwin Lahousen, a former officer in the Austrian intelligence service. Initially, Abwehr I, under Oberst Hans Piekenbrock, was to carry the burden of Abwehr plans against Poland. This involved intelligence flights over Polish military positions and the use of intelligence agents within Poland to gather information on military installations and arms. When OKW complained about the failure of Abwehr I’s efforts to supply them with adequate information about the Polish military, Canaris turned to Lahousen and Abwehr II to supply him with the information so vitally needed by the Wehrmacht for planning the invasion of Poland.³⁰

As plans evolved throughout the late spring and early summer of 1939, it became evident that the commando squads of Abwehr II were to play a first-strike role in the German attack on Poland that fall. Abwehr II units were to sneak into Poland in civilian clothing and be ready to move just before the German military assault. From the German perspective, Polish military planners had committed a serious error when they decided to move two thirds of their forces along the border with Germany instead of keeping them east of the Vistula and San Rivers, where they might have been able to mount a more successful rearguard action. Polish military authorities made this decision to protect the country’s major industrial areas. Unfortunately, this action aided the Germany military because it allowed the Wehrmacht to destroy the Polish armed forces early in its assault. Abwehr II’s responsibility in all of this was to sneak into Poland and try to disarm the explosives set by the Poles to destroy industrial and communication sites as the Wehrmacht moved in Poland.³¹

Of particular concern to Abwehr II in the Mährisch Ostrau area were the railroad tunnel and twin tracks in the Jablunkov Pass forty miles to the southeast. This important rail line was the principal rail connection between Vienna, Warsaw, and the Balkans. If not captured, it could seriously affect Wehrmacht moves into southern Poland. Abwehr II commando squads operating out of nearby Mosty u Jablunkova just north of Jablunkov Pass and Žilinia (Sillein) in Slovakia were to attack Polish defenders guarding the tunnel and seize it in the early hours of the invasion before the Poles could blow it up. Leutnant Hans-Albrecht Herzner was to recruit, train, and lead the Abwehr II-Breslau team of twenty-four men drawn from the SA and the Grenzpolizei to seize the Jablunkov tunnel. Oskar’s unit, Abwehr II-Breslau, Aktion Kommando Unit VIII under the command of Major Plathe, was to monitor Herzner’s operation and provide Abwehr headquarters information about its success or failure.³²

Other Abwehr II-Breslau commando squads were to prepare to seize and destroy bridges and railroad tracks inside Poland once the attack began. Some teams wore Polish uniforms as disguises. As plans for Operation Weiss intensified during the summer of 1939, the head of the SD’s foreign intelligence service, SS-Standartenführer Heinz Jost, approached Canaris about a special operation approved by Hitler that would require 150 Polish uniforms as well as Polish military documents and arms for the Germans who would wear them. Jost also wanted Canaris to supply him with 364 men to work with the SD on this top secret operation. Because of the nature of the operation, Jost told Canaris that he could not divulge its function. Canaris concluded that Jost wanted the Polish uniforms for a provocative action against Poland.³³

The idea of disguising German forces as Polish soldiers to create an incident that would enable Hitler to justify his invasion of Poland came from Generalleutnant Erich von Manstein, the Chief of Staff of Army Group South, who was responsible for attacking the heavily industrialized area of Upper Silesia just to the northwest of Mährisch Ostrau. Manstein wanted to dress three battalions of German shock troops in Polish uniforms to seize Upper Silesia in the early hours of the invasion. Although Hitler rejected the plan, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Security Police and the SD, took Manstein’s ideas and revised the plan.³⁴

Heydrich’s plan, given the code name “Tannenberg,” called for dressing SD operatives in Polish uniforms; they would attack other SD men dressed as German Grenzpolizei on the Polish-German border. The phony Polish troops would then seize the German radio station at Gleiwitz (now Polish Gliwice), about forty miles north of Mährisch Ostrau. The phony Polish soldiers would also attack a nearby German forestry station and a border post. When the Germans in Polish uniforms had finished their attacks, they would bring in dead bodies from concentration camps to ensure that everything looked authentic. The SS gave the dead inmates the code name Konserven (canned goods).³⁵

What did all this have to do with Oskar Schindler? According to Emilie Schindler, it was Oskar who obtained and stored the Polish uniforms in their Mährisch Ostrau apartment before they were sent to Heydrich’s operatives for the attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz. Emilie adds that they bought their first Polish uniform from a Polish soldier and then sent it to Berlin, where it was reproduced in large quantities.³⁶ It is possible that a random Polish uniform was obtained this way, but most were obtained from Polish ethnic Germans who had deserted the Polish army and fled to Germany. They gladly turned over their uniforms to the Wehrmacht. This was Oskar’s only involvement in this aspect of the attack on Poland. According to historian Dr. Jaroslav Valenta, a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences, even if Schindler had stored large quantities of Polish uniforms, weapons, and cigarettes in his apartment, it was doubtful he had much to do with the Gleiwitz attack because his operational area was around Polish Těšín near the Slovak border. Because of this, most of his time was spent planning for the German attack on the railway tunnel at Jablunkov Pass.³⁷

Emilie made their work in Mährisch Ostrau seem ordinary, though it really was not. The several break-ins to their apartment were initially thought to be the work of Polish intelligence agents. The first took place on July 12, 1939, when Eugen Sliwa, a petty criminal recently released from a Czech forced labor camp, broke into Schindler’s Parkstraße apartment. The Czech police arrested Sliwa five days later for several break-ins in the area. Though Sliwa seemed to have stolen nothing of importance, Oskar was concerned about involving the Gestapo in the investigation. Instead, at least according to the detailed Gestapo reports, Schindler dealt directly with the Czech police on the robbery. Schindler, like the Gestapo, thought that Sliwa was working for Polish intelligence. Oskar was so upset by the robbery that he questioned Sliwa in jail about his contacts with Polish agents; he also took Sliwa to the Polish border to identify the Polish agent who, Sliwa claimed, had paid him to break into Schindler’s apartment. Sliwa was also taken to Mährisch Ostrau to look for the Polish spy.³⁸

The Gestapo did not hear of the robbery until some time later. The investigating agents were furious because neither Schindler nor the commander of the local Czech uniformed police, Niemetz, had informed them of the burglary. From the perspective of the Gestapo, the “affair Sliwa” had been bungled. A May 8, 1940, Gestapo report from its Mährisch Ostrau office noted that Otto “Zeiler” (Oskar Schindler) was quite well known to them. The Gestapo did not consider him to be a true Abwehr agent. Instead, the report called Schindler a confidant of Major Plathe who commanded Abwehr operations in Gleiwitz. The Gestapo knew Schindler “because of his arbitrary actions and sometimes senseless doings.” The Gestapo did not consider him a German official, merely a confidant. This distinction was going to be important in the Gestapo’s determination about whether to pursue its investigation of Sliwa and Schindler.³⁹

Once local police officials completed their investigation, they sent a report of their findings to the Gestapo in Brno. The Gestapo then summoned “Otto Zeiler” (Oskar Schindler) to discuss the case. Schindler, however, failed to appear and, with the invasion of Poland, “went to Poland with the advancing troops and has not been seen in Mährisch Ostrau again.” Schindler, the May 8, 1940, Gestapo report concluded, was still working for Abwehr in Poland or the Balkans. Sliwa remained in Czech police custody until the spring of 1940, when he was handed over to the German police. According to local Gestapo officials, it was now time for the “affair to be brought to a close.” Schindler’s unwillingness to help the Gestapo in its investigation hindered its ability to determine whether Sliwa’s break-in was an act of counterespionage or a common robbery. The Gestapo had no idea at this time what had been stolen from Schindler’s apartment because Oskar refused to talk with them.⁴⁰

This report, though, did not end the matter. A second report two days later from Gestapo headquarters in Brno suggested that “Zeiler” be located and that Sliwa, whom a later Gestapo report called an “utterly degenerate, work-shy, irresolute person” (a crime in Nazi Germany), be re-interrogated by the Gestapo.⁴¹ After the Gestapo again questioned Sliwa, it sent the matter to the German District Court (deutsches Amtsgericht) for final deliberation. The court ruled that it was difficult to determine whether Schindler’s office was an official Abwehr office or simply a message center office because “Zeiler [Schindler] was only an Abwehr ‘confidant.’” The only way to find out whether “Zeiler’s” office was an office of the Reich would be to contact Major Plathe in Gleiwitz. Until this could be done, Sliwa would remain in German custody. The court noted that the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei; criminal police) had located Schindler, who now resided in Kraków at Lipova No. 4, and suggested that “further action regarding Schindler be initiated from there.”⁴²

This matter passed through judicial channels until it reached the Supreme Judge of the Reich at the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) in Berlin. On July 23, 1940, the Supreme Judge’s office requested “what is known about the personality and official duties of engineer Zeiler” from Gestapo officials in Mährisch Ostrau.⁴³ Local court officials responded on August 10 that Sliwa’s break-in was “not of a political nature” and that his claim that he had been recruited by a Polish agent was “merely an excuse.” Sliwa had broken into five homes between June 21 and July 14, 1939, and was now being questioned about each of them. The house on Parkstraße 25–27 “was not occupied by the Gestapo or any other military or civilian service office” but by an Abwehr confidant. As far as the court could tell, “Zeiler” or Schindler, who now lived in Kraków, still worked for Abwehr under Oberstleutnant Plathe. Further investigation indicated that “Schindler alias Zeiler had not stored any important papers in his apartment.” All Sliwa stole were a “few love letters,” five handkerchiefs, a purse containing 170 Czech crowns ($5.80), a lady’s gold wrist watch worth 400 crowns ($13.68), and a piggy bank.⁴⁴

The Gestapo, though, disagreed with the People’s Court. The Gestapo office in Brno wrote to its suboffice in Mährisch Ostrau on August 23, 1940, that the “facts of the case unquestionably seem to indicate high treason to the detriment of the Reich.” The documents Sliwa stole from “Engineer Zeiler’s” Abwehr office were of “extraordinary importance to the Polish authorities.” The Gestapo in Brno requested that agents in Mährisch Ostrau question Sliwa again and “present him to the investigative attorney for high treason.” However, it was suggested that the agents not question Schindler because he was “outside the country.” They also urged a “speedy settlement” of the Sliwa matter.⁴⁵

The attorney general of the People’s Court in Mährisch Ostrau disagreed with the Gestapo’s conclusion and noted in his final report that Sliwa, a “completely depraved and unprincipled person,” was telling a lie when he claimed that he had been hired by a Polish agent to break into “Zeiler’s” office. When he was dealing with Czech officials, Sliwa admitted to the thefts because “the punishment will not be very severe due to the Czech mentality.” But when he confesses to a German, he hides behind “the assertion that he was induced to do this” because he knew that “German courts proceed harshly, without ceremony, in such matters.” In other words, Sliwa wanted “to shift the guilt for this whole affair into someone else’s shoes.” The attorney general concluded that there was no high treason here and that only “a case of breaking and entering theft” was involved. It ordered that Sliwa be turned over to local Protectorate authorities.⁴⁶ On October 22, 1940, the District Court in Mährisch Ostrau sentenced Sliwa to eleven months of hard labor. The Gestapo, though, seemed unwilling to accept this decision, and on November 13 requested the transfer of all of the files on Sliwa and the Polish consulate in Mährisch Ostrau to its headquarters in Brno.⁴⁷ This might explain why Schindler had so much trouble with the Gestapo during his years in Kraków. Certainly the Gestapo in Kraków knew of his unwillingness to cooperate with Gestapo officials in Mährisch Ostrau. This, in turn, probably led to the increased surveillance of a man some in Gestapo headquarters in Brno thought was associated with a robbery involving high treason. Oskar would be arrested by the Gestapo three times in Kraków and Brünnlitz. A few of the arrests were undoubtedly meant to teach a lesson to the man who had earlier proved so uncooperative.

This was not the only attempt by Polish agents to break into the Schindler apartment. On another occasion, a prowler woke Emilie up when he shined his flashlight into the apartment. She was sleeping in the apartment’s office, a converted bedroom, because she and Oskar had just had a fight about his love affair with Irena Dvorzakowa. While Oskar slept blissfully in their bedroom, Emilie took the Luger to the office window and fired two shots into the air inside the office. She saw a shadow disappear outside, and the shots startled the guard, who was sleeping on duty. Again, the suspicion was that a Polish agent had tried to break into the apartment.⁴⁸

Our information about Oskar’s activities as an Abwehr agent in Mährisch Ostrau in 1939 comes from various sources: Emilie’s memoirs; the Gestapo reports on the Sliwa robbery; the post-World War II Czechoslovak investigations of Oskar’s activities, which included the testimony of fellow agents; and an Abwehr report on the activities of combat and other Abwehr units in the Těšín area in the months before the invasion of Poland. Oskar also briefly discussed his Abwehr activities with Martin Gosch in an interview in Paris in 1964. As will be seen in more detail in a later chapter, immediately after World War II the Czechoslovakian government began intensive investigations of Sudeten Germans and others who had collaborated with the Third Reich to determine who should be punished for their crimes. Oskar Schindler’s name came up frequently in these investigations. The principal testimony against Oskar came from two Sudeten Germans, Alois Polansky, who worked for Abwehr in Oppa (Czech Opava) and the SD in Mährisch Ostrau, and Joseph “Sepp” Aue, who later worked for Oskar in Kraków. The Abwehr report does not mention Schindler specifically, though that was not all that uncommon because some agents were only mentioned by letters or numbers to disguise their identity.

According to these interrogation reports, Polansky was born in Těšín in 1894. He saw action on the Russian and Italian fronts in the Austrian-Hungarian army during World War I. After the war, he managed a garage until 1938 and joined Abwehr in early 1939. He continued to work for Abwehr throughout the war and held positions in Bratislava (German Pressburg) and Mährisch Ostrau. After the war, the Czechoslovaks sentenced Polansky to fifteen years in prison for his collaboration with the Germans. Polansky’s testimony gives us the most complete picture we have of Oskar’s Abwehr work in the months before the outbreak of World War II. As mentioned earlier, Polansky drove Leutnant György to meet with Oskar on three occasions before Hitler took over Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Oskar, who now used the code name OSI, or Zeiler, would meet with György at the Hotel Palace in Moravská Ostrava. On one occasion, which Polansky identifies as possibly March 12, 1939, he drove the two agents to Visolaje in Slovakia, where Oskar and György met with two Abwehr operatives who spoke Czech and Slovak. Schindler translated for Leutnant György. After half an hour, Leutnant György asked Polansky whether he felt it was safe to drive to Bily Kriz (White Cross) in the nearby Beskydy (Beskid) mountains. Polansky thought it was too dangerous because of the snow. The four Abwehr agents told Polansky to stay behind while they took a sleigh to Bily Kriz. Three hours later, György and Oskar returned alone. Polansky later learned that one of the two strangers was from Žilinia, the Slovak staging area for one of the two teams responsible for taking the Jablunkov Pass.⁴⁹

After they left Visolaje, Polansky drove Oskar and György to Raškovice, which was equidistant between Moravská Ostrava and the Jablunkov Pass. Once there, they met with a farmer, Julius Fischer, who took them to meet with another agent, Vilém Moschkorsch (Moschkorz), who was from nearby Staříč. Oskar and Moschkorsch went off by themselves to talk for half an hour. After they returned to the car, Polansky drove Moschkorsch to Starříč and then took Oskar back to Moravská Ostrava.⁵⁰

When they were back in Moravská Ostrava, Polansky drove Oskar to the Podrum wine cellar. Sitting at another table were two Abwehr agents who had been waiting for Oskar. One of the two strangers was Kobierskü, an Abwehr agent who worked closely with Schindler and György. Oskar left Polansky and György alone while he went to talk with Kobierskü and the other agent. When Oskar returned, he told Leutnant György of their conversation and then left the wine bar. Afterwards, Polansky drove György to the Café Palace, where he met Oskar again. The two agents talked for two hours and then were driven back to the Podrum, where they had dinner. Afterwards, Kobierskü and another agent sat at a nearby table, where Oskar soon joined them. After a lengthy conversation with the two Abwehr agents, Oskar returned to give Leutnant György a letter and some documents that Polansky thought were plans of some sort. Polansky later identified the strangers that Oskar met on March 12, 1939, during his two visits to the Podrum as František Unger, an Abwehr operative who also worked with the SD, and Bedřich Schestag, also an Abwehr agent.⁵¹

Other agents who worked with Schindler during this period were Waltraud Vorster, Ervin (Evžen) and Ladislav Kobiela, Dr. Walter Titzel, Hildegard Hoheitova, and Josef Urbánek. Kobiela’s real name was Oskar Schmidt. All these local Czechoslovak operatives were on the Czech most-wanted list after World War II. Charges were filed against all these agents and collaborators after the war; Vorster, the only one who could be found, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The Abwehr and postwar Czech reports also mention two other agents who worked with Oskar, a Herr Zimmermann from Česky Těšín who also worked closely with Lts. Lang and György, and František Cienciala (Činčala/Czincala) from Svibiče.⁵² Yet the most interesting of all the operatives and collaborators that Oskar worked with during his time in Moravská Ostrava/Mährisch Ostrau was Josef “Sepp” Aue. During the war, Aue worked for Oskar in Kraków, where Schindler helped him to obtain a factory. Aue turned on his friend after the war and gave damaging testimony about Oskar’s Abwehr activities to the Czech secret police. On the other hand, Aue had no compunction about trying to reestablish contact with prominent Schindlerjuden after his meetings with Czech authorities.⁵³

Sepp Aue was an illegitimate Jew whose mother, Emilie Goldberg, raised her son as a Roman Catholic in Bruntál, about fifty miles northwest of Moravská Ostrava. Aue was his mother’s maiden name. According to a letter that Aue wrote to Itzhak Stern in 1948, his father was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. Aue’s mother married Karl Lederer, who died in 1937. After World War II, she emigrated to Israel. Aue was able to hide his Jewish background by becoming a staunch Sudeten German nationalist. In late 1938, Aue applied for membership in the Nazi Party. Aue first met Oskar through his contacts as a money trader. After the German takeover of the Sudetenland, Aue made a living exchanging currency from Czech Jews fleeing the Greater Reich. He met Schindler through his principal moneylending contact, Helena Bohdanova, a fur trader in Cieszyn. According to Aue, Oskar, who initially introduced himself only as “Zeiler,” forced Aue to work for him by threatening to charge him with violating German currency laws. Oskar “Zeiler” did show Aue identification that indicated he was a member of Kripo, the German criminal police. “Zeiler” warned Aue that he could be sent to prison for his illegal activities. There was, according to “Zeiler,” an alternative. Sepp Aue could work for him gathering military intelligence along and inside the Polish border. He added that it was Aue’s duty as a good German to work for the Reich.⁵⁴

Oskar “Zeiler” Schindler was initially interested in military activities and movements at the Polish railway station at Bohumín. This was an important rail center that Hitler, against the advice of German military leaders and diplomats, had permitted Poland to seize as German troops marched into Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Aue was not a very good agent. Oskar told Aue to go to the Bohumín area in the spring of 1939 and gather as much information as he could on Polish military installations and important troop movements. Aue became so confused with the maps that he decided to lie to Oskar. According to Aue, he gave Oskar false information when he met with him at the Hotel Palace after he returned to Mährisch Ostrau. Oskar quickly saw through Aue’s lies and concluded that he was not fit for intelligence work. He promised Aue that he would try to find other work for him. For some reason, Oskar liked Sepp Aue and took him to Kraków after the outset of World War II. After the war, Aue returned Oskar’s friendship by testifying against him in Czechoslovakia. Czech authorities considered Aue’s testimony against Oskar so significant that they thought Aue should be turned over to Polish authorities for further investigation. There is no evidence, though, that the Czechs did this. Moreover, Aue was never charged with anti-German activity and continued to live in Ostrava after the war. He later told Itzhak Stern that his experiences after the war were “indescribable.”⁵⁵

Two other important Sudeten German Abwehr operatives were Karel Gassner and František Turek. According to Robin O’Neil, Gassner was Schindler’s boss in Ostrava. Czech postwar investigative reports indicate that Gassner operated under the pseudonym “Princ.” He was listed first on the Czech “most wanted” list for local Abwehr operatives in the Moravská Ostrava area after the war, followed by Oskar Schindler. Gassner, who was born in 1885 in Plzew (Pilsen), was much older than Oskar and probably lacked his energy and charm, which might explain why some Abwehr operatives considered Schindler the effective head of the unit in Mährisch Ostrau. The Czech secret police report describes Gassner as elderly, grey, and slim with a slight hunchback. This was in striking contrast to his tall, blond second in command, Oskar Schindler.⁵⁶

According to Josef Aue, Frantisek Turek was Oskar’s right-hand man in Mährisch Ostrau. Turek was a Czech theater painter who had worked for Abwehr in Opava during the First Czech Republic (1918–1938). The Germans valued Turek because he spoke fluent Czech, Polish, and Russian. As an Abwehr agent, Turek was actively engaged in smuggling German arms into Slovakia and Poland. According to Aue, Turek, who also worked with Oskar Schindler in Kraków, bragged one night in Kraków, after a few too many drinks, that he had discovered a Czechoslovak arms depot in Slovakia after the German takeover of the Sudetenland. He reported this to his Abwehr superiors, who rewarded him with 10,000 Czech crowns ($294). He also told Aue that he killed a Polish border guard in the early hours of the German move into Těšín on September 1, 1939. Like Oskar, Frantisek Turek moved to Kraków after the war began, where he became Treuhänder (trustee) for the Laudon Company, which manufactured crockery.⁵⁷

Yet more important to Oskar than his Sudeten German contacts were the German Abwehr officers whom he worked with in Mährisch Ostrau and Kraków. According to Czech investigative records after the war, six German officers oversaw Abwehr activities in the Opava-Moravská Ostrava/Mährisch Ostrau area of the former Czechoslovak Republic before World War II: Major (later Oberstleutnant) Plathe, Hauptmann Kristiany, Leutnant Görgey, Leutnant Decker, and Leutnant Rudolf (or Karel) Lang. After the war, Oskar praised some of these officers, particularly Plathe and Major (later Oberstleutnant) Franz von Korab, for their efforts in securing Oskar’s release from Gestapo detention and helping Oskar protect his Jewish workers. We have to rely on these sources for our information about their efforts because most Abwehr records were destroyed during World War II.⁵⁸

MajorFranz von Korab commanded Abwehr operations in TZšín and later, Kraków. Over time, Schindler and von Korab became close friends. In his 1951 letter to Fritz Lang, Oskar described von Korab as his “best friend in the Krakower years.” According to Emilie, Major von Korab’s mother was Jewish. For a long time, he was able to keep this a secret until one of his nephews inadvertently slipped and let the authorities know about his uncle’s secret. Major Korab was stripped of his rank and military honors and kicked out of the military. He spent the last year of the war in Prague, where he was killed by Czech partisans because he was a German-speaking civilian. Von Korab’s wife then moved to Vienna, where she lived after the war. Emilie said that Major Korab looked like the classic Aryan Nazi with his blond looks and “Appolonian” stature. She felt that despite his Jewish background, Major Korab “represented better than most, including the Führer himself, the paragons of race and beauty that Nazism was championing.” According to Robin O’Neil, Korab made the initial contacts that enabled Oskar to lease a former Jewish factory in Kraków after the war began. Two months after the war ended, Oskar thanked von Korab and a handful of other German officers for their courageous efforts to help Jews.⁵⁹

Leutnant Lang worked closely with Oskar in Mährisch Ostrau and with Leutnant György, who often went by the civilian name of Dr. Greiner. Sepp Aue reported that before the German takeover of what remained of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, he frequently saw Schindler give Lang and György “various papers, packages” and other “luggage” or “baggage” (zavazadla), an indication that Oskar supplied the two German agents with a great deal of information about the Czech military. Lang originally worked for Abwehr in Opava; after the conquest of Poland he was transferred to Prague. During the war, he was released from military service because of a serious motorcycle accident injury.⁶⁰

Indications are that Oskar’s German superiors thought highly of him. According to Alois Polansky, he received numerous awards, including a Horch, an extremely expensive road car designed by August Horch, the founder of Audi, for his work in 1938 and 1939. But according to Eva Marta Kisza, one of Schindler’s mistresses, the two of them were walking down a Berlin street when Oskar spotted a light blue Horch in a showroom window. Emilie said that the luxurious two-seater Horch had been made for the Shah of Iran, but because of the war, it was never delivered. Eva added that the impulsive Oskar fell in love with the car and convinced his Abwehr superiors to give him the money to buy it. During the war he had the Horch painted gray. The car became Oskar’s most prized possession and he used it to escape capture by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.⁶¹

Since this all took place during the war, Oskar probably never returned to the business world. More than likely, Schindler never fully left Abwehr. Those who work in intelligence are forever sworn to secrecy. As will be seen later, the fact that Abwehr sent him on a special mission to Turkey in 1940 indicates the great trust that Canaris’s organization put in his skills.⁶²

Yet what were the principal fruits of Oskar Schindler’s espionage efforts in the spring and summer of 1939? According to Dr. Mečislav Borak, Schindler was involved in German plans for the invasion of Poland, particularly the seizure of the Gliwice radio station and the takeover of the Jablunkov Pass railway tunnel and tracks during the early hours of the German attack. However, Professor Jaroslav Valenta of the Historical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences doubts that Schindler played much of a role in the seizure of the radio station at Gliwice because this was not in his area of operation; moreover, the seizure was controlled by the SS and the SD, though supported by Abwehr. According to Professor Valenta, most historic evidence tends to support this conclusion. Still, direct and indirect evidence does suggest that Oskar played an active role in German efforts to seize the Jablunkov Pass.⁶³

Abwehr, Schindler, and the Invasion of Poland

As Britain, France, and the Soviet Union searched for ways diplomatically and militarily to thwart a German invasion of Poland in the spring and early summer of 1939, the Wehrmacht and Abwehr moved ahead with plans for the invasion of Poland.⁶⁴ If there was an uncertain factor in this planning, it was the response of the Soviet Union to an invasion of Poland. German military planners had assumed that the Poles would try to hold back German forces long enough for Stalin to respond. This never happened. As Anglo-French-Soviet talks faltered over Stalin’s insistence that he be given the right to act defensively against any country on his western frontier that seemed to be moving into the German camp, low-level nonaggression talks began between Moscow and Berlin. Though they did not bear fruit until August 23 and 24, 1939, the talks between Germany and the Soviet Union removed the immediate prospect of war between these two countries and made Stalin an active participant in the takeover of Poland.⁶⁵

Once Hitler was certain that an agreement with Stalin was possible, he established the final timetable for the attack on Poland. On August 12, 1939, Canaris put all his espionage units on full alert. Two days later, Hitler met with his Wehrmacht chiefs in his Berghof mountain retreat outside Munich. The following day, Canaris ordered his commando and sabotage units to move into position in Poland. On August 19, two trucks from Abwehr II delivered uniforms to the SD for the 364 Abwehr and SS operatives who were to take part in the phony assaults just inside Poland. Three days later, Hitler met again with a larger body of Wehrmacht commanders, including Canaris. Also in attendance was Hermann Göring, who was about to be named head of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich (Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidigung) and Hitler’s official successor, and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. On Hitler’s instructions, all his top officers wore civilian clothing. At the end of the meeting, which, as usual, the Führer dominated, he told his military leaders that he expected the attack on Poland to begin in four days. His parting words: “I have done my duty. Now do yours.”⁶⁶

At 4:05 P.M. on August 25, the Wehrmacht High Command under GeneralWilhelm Keitel issued the order to invade Poland. Canaris immediately sent his combat and sabotage teams into action. Two and a half hours later, though, Keitel ordered his units to stand down at 8:30 P.M. because of new political developments. Great Britain, which Hitler had hoped to isolate through an alliance offer, instead signed a mutual assistance treaty with Poland that day. Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s Pact of Steel ally, now informed the Führer that Italy was militarily unprepared to join in a war that would probably include Britain and France. Oberst Edwin Lahousen frantically informed Admiral Canaris that his agents overseeing the attack on the Jablunkov Pass railway tunnel had lost contact with the sabotage team under Leutnant Hans-Albrecht Herzner. The fear now was that Herzner’s squad would provoke the very war that the Führer had just called off. Desperate Abwehr II radio operators in Germany and northern Slovakia did everything possible to contact the missing unit. Oskar Schindler’s Commando VIII unit was the main physical link to Herzner’s squad. On the morning of August 26, Oskar’s team informed Abwehr headquarters that it had heard reports of heavy rifle fire near the Jablunkov Pass and concluded that it was probably Leutnant Herzner’s unit.⁶⁷

Hours later, Canaris received more information about Leutnant Herzner’s activities. At 3:55 A.M. on August 26, Herzner’s unit was sent to the Eighth Army, which was part of Army Group South; this was the first official dispatch of World War II. It reported that it had taken nearby Mosty u Jablunkova station but had failed to take the Jablunkov tunnel. Herzner’s squad then captured a locomotive and tried to enter the tunnel, but the Poles repelled this effort as well. The Abwehr team, which was now trapped behind Polish lines, was ordered to fight its way to the Slovak border. It met stiff resistance from Polish police forces, who now tried to block the German team’s way out of Poland. By early afternoon, Herzner’s unit remained under heavy Polish fire as it tried to move across the Slovak border in the Raková-Madca region. Just before it entered Slovak territory, General Keitel ordered Herzner to remain in Poland.⁶⁸

Hitler had never intended to halt his invasion of Poland; instead, he delayed his assault for a few days to convince the British to abandon their guarantees to Poland and pressure Mussolini to reconsider his position about joining Hitler in war. By August 28, Hitler had decided to invade Poland on September 1.⁶⁹

On the afternoon of August 31, 1939, the special Abwehr, SS, and SD units that were to initiate the mock attacks were given the code words Grossmutter gestorben (Grandmother is dead). This was the signal for their final moves into Poland. A stunned Admiral Canaris, who received his orders for the initial assaults at 5:30 P.M, broke down and cried. For Canaris, war meant the end of Germany.⁷⁰ Two and a half hours later, Germans dressed in Polish uniforms fired shots across the Polish border and left the dead prisoners as “evidence” of Polish aggression. Another group under SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks attacked and captured the radio station at Gleiwitz. The phony “Polish” occupiers then announced, in Polish, an attack on Germany. Hitler now had his justification for war.⁷¹

The following day, the Völkischer Beobachter informed the German people that Polish rebels had moved into German territory and Adolf Hitler told the Reichstag that the Reich would now respond to fourteen “border incidents” of the previous night. The reality was quite different. Hitler had signed the final directive for the attack on Poland at noon on August 31. Seventeen hours later, five German armies moved into Poland, preceded by several Abwehr commando squads. Over the next few days, Hitler rejected the demands of Britain and France to withdraw as a prelude to negotiations. On September 3, London and Paris declared war on the Third Reich. By the time Soviet forces, after considerable German prodding, began to occupy their portion of eastern Poland, the Wehrmacht had almost completed its conquest of Poland and the destruction of Poland’s once proud military forces. Though some Polish units were able to escape into neutral territory, the Germans were able to defeat those that remained in Poland by October 6.⁷²

Kraków and the Early Months of the German Occupation

Kraków, Poland, would be Oskar Schindler’s home from 1939 to 1944. According to Emilie, he “fell in love with the bustling life and beauty of the city and did not want to leave; he was more faithful to it than to many of his women, certainly more than to me.” Kraków was also one of the first major Polish cities taken by the Wehrmacht in September 1939. Two German armies, Army Group North under General Fedor von Bock and Army Group South under Gerd von Runstedt invaded Poland in the early morning hours of September 1, 1939. Runstedt’s Fourteenth Army, operating out of Slovakia, was responsible for taking southern Poland, particularly the fortified city of Lvov. The Fourteenth Army was also to stop Polish units from moving into the safety of Hungary and Romania. In the first hours of combat, units of the Fourteenth Army took the difficult Jablunkov Pass from its Polish defenders. That evening, the force of the German attack saw the disorganized Polish Kraków Army flee in the face of the German assault. By September 5, the Fourteenth Army was on the outskirts of Kraków, which surrendered the next day. It would be another month before German forces completed the conquest of Poland.⁷³

Five weeks after Kraków surrendered to the Germans, Oskar Schindler made the three-hour trip from Mährish Ostrau to Kraków to explore the possibility of resuming his business career. When he arrived in Kraków, Abwehr officers had their hands full dealing with the fallout from defunct German plans to initiate a revolt in those parts of Poland and the Soviet Union with large Ukrainian populations. On September 19, Canaris had personally asked Oberst Erwin Lahousen, the head of Abwehr II, to set up operations in Kraków to deal with the large influx of Ukrainians fleeing Soviet troops, who had just moved into their occupation zone in Poland. Three and a half weeks earlier, Moscow and Berlin had signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and a secret accord that divided Poland almost equally between both countries.⁷⁴

For several years, Canaris and other Abwehr leaders had played with the idea of stirring up nationalist sentiment among the large Ukrainian minority in Poland and, at the opportune moment, uniting Ukrainians in Poland and the Soviet Union into a pro-Nazi Greater Ukrainian state. The Nazi-Soviet accord dashed hopes that such a state would come into existence.⁷⁵ At German prodding, the Soviet Union, which had just concluded an armistice with Japan, ending a four-month war on the Mongolian-Manchurian border, sent the Red Army to occupy its treaty zone in Poland. Vladimir Potemkin, the vice commissar of foreign affairs, told the Polish ambassador to Moscow, Waclaw Grzybowski, that Stalin did so to protect the Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland.⁷⁶

Most of Poland’s 4.4 million Ukrainians (1931 census) were now trapped in Stalin’s new Polish territory, and more than 0.5 million lived in German-occupied Poland. During the next year, about 20,000 to 30,000 Ukrainians left Soviet Poland for the German zone. Soon after the war began, Abwehr set up a relief organization in Kraków to help the Ukrainian refugees. For the rest of World War II, Kraków would be a center of Ukrainian nationalist activity that was officially encouraged by the Germans. Many of the guards who oversaw Oskar Schindler’s workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz were drawn from this large Ukrainian emigré community.⁷⁷

The German invasion and conquest of Poland was brutal. According to Ian Kreshaw, occupied Poland was to become an “experimental playground” for the SS and the Nazi Party, both of which would play a key role in ruling Poland after it was conquered. Hitler regarded ethnic Poles as that “dreadful [racial] material” who stood in the way of his dreams of a greater Aryan-pure Germany. On August 22, Hitler told his top generals to “act brutally” towards all Poles. The Führer viewed Poland’s Jews “as the most horrible thing imaginable.” Hitler added that the aim of war was physically to annihilate the enemy, in this case the Poles. His special Einsatz squads had “orders mercilessly and pitilessly to send men, women, and children of Polish extraction and language to their death.”⁷⁸

Consequently, during the six years the Germans occupied Poland, they waged two wars against the Polish population: one against Polish Jews and one against non-Jewish Poles. Once in Poland, the Germans were determined to destroy the heart of the intellectual leadership or core of the Polish people and isolate the Jews from occupied Polish society. Specially trained Einsatzgruppen (special action groups) made up of 2,700 men from the SD, Sipo, and the SS were sent into Poland to combat so-called hostile elements. Initially used in the takeover of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluß) to establish police security, over time the Einsatzgruppen expanded their mission to include the neutralization or eradication of all societal elements deemed racially or physically dangerous to the German control of Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, and later, the Soviet Union. In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen became the principal killing squads the Germans used in their effort to mass murder all Jews in the Soviet Union.⁷⁹

Five Einsatzgruppen swept into Poland behind the Wehrmacht in early September 1939. What Ian Kreshaw calls an “orgy of atrocities” followed; it put earlier Nazi brutalities in the Greater Reich “completely in the shade.” The Germans were determined to wipe out Poland’s religious, political, and intellectual leaders as well as the nobility. Ultimately, this campaign against Poland’s elite resulted in 60,000 deaths.⁸⁰

Jews also suffered terribly during this period. In Kraków, which was occupied by the Fourteenth Army and Einsatzgruppe I under SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, many of the city’s 60,000 Jews fled the Nazi terror campaign. Yet the Jews in Kraków and elsewhere in Poland suffered not only from abuses at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen but also from atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht.⁸¹ One of the first Wehrmacht officers to voice concerns about this was Admiral Canaris, who ordered his Abwehr officers to watch the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and to report the atrocities they committed. Though Canaris was too cautious to lodge a formal complaint with Hitler, he did share his concerns with General Keitel on September 12 at the special armored “Führer Train” headquarters in Upper Silesia. Canaris told Keitel that he had heard of the shootings of Poles and Jews and of plans that the clergy and the nobility were to be “exterminated (ausgerottet).” Canaris seemed worried that the Wehrmacht would be blamed for these killings. Keitel said that Hitler had already decided on the matter and had told General Franz Halder, the army Chief of Staff, that if the military wanted no part in such actions, they should stand aside and let the Einsatzgruppen do their work. A month after this conversation, Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, where some of the worst atrocities had already taken place. As an active Abwehr officer, he was probably soon privy to the atrocities and to Canaris’s order that Abwehr keep an eye on the Einsatzgruppen.⁸²

The Creation of the General Government

If Poland was the racial laboratory for the SS, then the General Government was its killing field. With the exception of the Russian front from 1941 onwards, the General Government was the most brutal place in the Third Reich. In a meeting with important Nazi and Wehrmacht leaders in mid-October 1939, Hitler laid out the practical and ideological framework for the General Government. It was not to be treated like a German province nor was it to have a strong economy. Hitler intended the quality of life for the Poles there to be low and viewed the General Government as a primary source for forced labor. He viewed German efforts there as a Volkstumskampf (hard ethnic struggle) that should have no legal restrictions. Nazi control of this part of Poland would “allow us to purify the Reich area too of Jews and Polacks.” German activity in the General Government, Hitler told the gathering, was “the devil’s work.”⁸³ It was in this environment that Oskar Schindler would work so hard to save his Jewish workers in Kraków.

German plans for the administration and division of Poland after its conquest were put into place unevenly and reflected Hitler’s uncertainty over the future fate of the Polish nation. The Führer gave some thought to creating a rump Polish state, though he remained unsure about the exact nature of this entity until October 1939. His uncertainty centered around Stalin’s hesitancy to occupy his portion of Poland and the West’s response to German peace feelers in September and early October.⁸⁴ In the meantime, the Wehrmacht wanted to restore to normalcy all the areas it had conquered as quickly as possible. Before the invasion of Poland, it set up special “CdZs enemy country” (Chef der Zivilverwaltung, chief of civil administration) offices attached to each of the invading armies to oversee this process.⁸⁵

Almost immediately, conflicts began between Nazi Party officials and the military over the appointments and powers of the new CdZs. Sometimes, Hitler countered military appointments. The result was a growing conflict between the Wehrmacht and party officials that was to continue in various ways in occupied Poland throughout the war. Part of Oskar Schindler’s genius in saving his Jews was his ability to work within the shadows of this conflict and use it to his advantage.

By the end of September, Hitler had approved the army’s “Organization of the Military Administration in the Occupied, formerly Polish, Territories.” Southern East Prussia and eastern Upper Silesia were given special provisions; the rest of German-occupied Poland was divided into four military districts (Danzig-West Prussia, Posen, Łódź , and Kraków) overseen by the military aided by a civilian administration. The four districts were overseen by Commander in Chief East Gerd von Runstedt, who also commanded the Łódź military district. The senior civilian administrator under Runstedt was Hans Frank, a Nazi “Old Fighter” and its most powerful legal expert. Other prominent Nazis such as SS-Obergruppenführer Albert Forster (Danzig) and future SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser (Posen) held the chief administrative positions in the other military districts. The Kraków military district’s civilian administrator was to be SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Seyß-Inquart, a former Austrian chancellor who would later hold important administrative positions as deputy governor of the General Government and Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands. Each of these men were tried and convicted as war criminals after World War II.⁸⁶

Hitler’s appointment of top Nazis to these administrative positions in Poland meant that the traditional party infighting that had so plagued German administration elsewhere now would become rampant throughout Poland. Petty jealousy and backbiting now became the hallmarks of a Nazi Party-dominated administrative system that was about to undergo another major change as Hitler agreed to a new administrative structure for Poland that transferred governing power to the Nazi Party. Wehrmacht leaders had never been comfortable about administering a civilian area once a conflict had ended and order was restored. Administration was something best left to civilians, not soldiers. Germany’s military leaders were particularly glad to be rid of the political responsibilities of such administration.⁸⁷

Friction between the army and Nazi administrators intensified as army commanders became more and more critical of the brutality of the Einsatzgruppen against the Polish population. Hitler sided with the SS and told Joseph Goebbels on October 13 that the army was “too soft and yielding.” Four days later, he took the SS and the police out from under the military’s jurisdiction in Poland. The SS and other Nazi Party organs and functionaries would now be given a free hand to expand their experiments in what remained of the Polish “racial laboratory.”⁸⁸

The transformation of Poland into a civilian-administered area did not end army protests. Over several months, Generalleutnant Johannes Blaskowitz, Commander in Chief East, sent his superior, army commander Walther von Brauchitsch, two memos severely criticizing the reign of terror unleashed by the SS in Poland against civilians. Blaskowitz was fearful that if these activities were not halted, they could severely damage the German nation. Blaskowitz felt that the “brutalization and moral depravity” practiced by the SS could easily “spread like a plague among valuable German men.” The person principally responsible for spreading news among the officer corps about Blaskowitz’s memorandums was Major Helmut “Muffel” Groscurth, former head of Abwehr Untergruppe IS and a close associate of Hans Oster, Admiral Canaris’s Chief of Staff.⁸⁹

Hitler, who saw Blaskowitz’s first memo, called his ideas childish. According to the Führer, you could not fight a war using Salvation Army methods. The army leadership responded weakly to Blaskowitz’s complaints and worked out a compromise with Himmler and General Fedor von Bock sent a memorandum to all army commanders that decried the “unfortunate misinterpretations” of the security forces in Poland but said that their “‘otherwise uncommonly harsh measures towards the Polish population of the occupied areas’ were justified by the need to ‘secure German Lebensraum and the solutions to ethnic political problems ordered by the Führer.’” In the spring of 1940, Himmler spoke to senior army leaders in Koblenz and said that though he never saw such harsh actions himself, the policies were necessary to deal with the subversive actions of Polish nationalists and Bolsheviks. Though Blaskowitz remained in the army, he held secondary posts and was never promoted to Generalfeldmarschall.⁹⁰

Within days after the Wehrmacht had defeated the last pockets of Polish resistance in early October, plans began in earnest for the final territorial realignment of German-occupied Poland. Wilhelm Stuckhart, a state secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry, prepared several decrees for Hitler dealing with Polish regions that were to be integrated into the Greater Reich and the creation of a General Government for central and southern Poland. With Hitler’s approval, the new General Government for the Occupied Areas of Poland (Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was to come into existence on October 26, with Hans Frank as governor general (Generalgouverneur). Part of northwestern Poland was integrated into the Danzig-West Prussia Reichsgau under Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Albert Forster, and East Prussia was governed by Gauleiter Erich Koch. The area around the Polish city of Łódź was integrated into the Warthegau under Reichstatthalter and Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, and eastern Upper Silesia became East Upper Silesia. Two years later, East Upper Silesia was divided into two Gaue: Lower Silesia, its capital in Breslau (today Wrocław); and Upper Silesia, its capital in Kattowice (Katowice).⁹¹

Within weeks after Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, the creation of the General Government, with Kraków as its capital, was almost completed. Hitler had personally chosen Hans Frank to rule the new General Government. For the next five years, Schindler worked with officials close to Frank and lived literally in the shadows of Frank’s headquarters and official residence, Wawel Castle. Born in Karlsruhe in 1900, Frank was a legitimate “Old Fighter” who joined the Nazi Party in the fall of 1923. A law student in Munich, he took part in the legendary Beer Hall Putsch on November 8 and 9, 1923, when Hitler tried unsuccessfully to seize control of the Bavarian state government. He became Hitler’s personal lawyer and founded what later became the National Socialist League of Law Guardians (NSRB; Nationalsozialistischer Rechtwahrerbund). As the Nazi’s top lawyer, Frank was involved in several thousand cases involving the Nazi Party before Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.⁹²

Frank won a Reichstag seat in the 1930 elections and served as Bavarian Minister of Justice from 1933 to 1934. He created the Academy for German Law (Akademie für deutsches Recht) in 1933 and served as its president until 1941. In 1934, Frank became a Reich Minister without Portfolio. Yet despite his numerous positions and awards, Frank never entered Hitler’s inner circle. Generally, Hitler disliked lawyers. More important, throughout his Nazi career, Frank made moves and statements that alienated the Führer. For example, in 1934, Frank argued that the SA leaders murdered in the Röhm Purge (Night of the Long Knives) should have received trials.⁹³

At a distance, none of this seemed seriously to affect Frank’s career. When the war began, he had joined the reserve battalion of the Potsdam Ninth Infantry Regiment. When he became the chief administrative head (Oberverwaltungschef) of the Wehrmacht’s occupied Polish territories, he lobbied hard for the governor general’s position and hoped it would increase his power. Even before he became governor general, he began to transform the administrative structure he had inherited from the military.Chaos abounded, which later worked to Oskar Schindler’s advantage. Technically, only Frank and Hermann Göring, the chair of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich (Ministerrat für die Reichsverteidigung), could issue decrees in the General Government. Yet it was not Göring, who was also head of the Four Year Plan (Vierjahresplan), which oversaw economic war planning, who became a threat to Frank. Early on, Göring made Frank his defense commissioner in the General Government to oversee his interests there. Instead, the threats came from elements in the Party, government, and military who longed for access to the General Government’s resources and manpower.⁹⁴

Frank and the SS in the General Government

Frank brought considerable power and prestige to his position as governor general. From his perspective, he was answerable only to Hitler and tried to adopt the Führerprinzip of absolute authority under one leader throughout the General Government. To underscore his imperial pretensions and to reduce the significance of the Poles’ modern capital, Warsaw, Frank chose Kraków, the political and intellectual seat of Polish kings, as the capital of the General Government. He chose as his official residence Wawel Castle, the medieval home of Poland’s Catholic prelates and monarchs. But Frank preferred to spend as much time as possible in the neo-Gothic castle once owned by the Polish architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohuzs on the outskirts of the city in Przegorzały overlooking the Vistula River. Nazi Party officials in Berlin jokingly referred to the Government General as the “Frankreich” (Hans Frank’s kingdom), a play on the German word for France and a reference to the early medieval German-French kingdom. Frank’s imperiousness affected his family. His wife, Brigitte, saw herself as the “Queen of Poland” and acted out the part in a most corrupt way; in fact, charges of corruption against Frank and his family seriously undermined his authority. In the spring of 1942, Frank met with Hitler, Dr. Hans Lammers, the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, and Martin Bormann, the Führer’s alter ego and private secretary, over charges of corruption. When Frank promised to reform, particularly with regard to his wife’s family, Hitler seemed satisfied. Frank got away with his crimes because other Nazi officials, who were as corrupt as Frank, feared that pressing their charges too firmly against him could backfire. We shall see that this was not the last of Frank’s troubles with his enemies or with the Führer.⁹⁵

Frank’s cronies in crime and genocide were the officials he appointed to help him run the General Government. His first deputy governor was Arthur Seyß Inquart, an Austrian-trained lawyer who had earlier served as the Reich governor (Reichsstatthalter) of Austria and Reich Minister without Portfolio. After the conquest of The Netherlands in the spring of 1940, Seyß Inquart became the Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, a position he held until the end of the war. In the fall of 1945, Seyß Inquart and Frank were tried and convicted of several of the four counts of the 1945–1946 Nuremberg trial of twenty-two major Nazi war criminals: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Both were hanged on October 16, 1946, in Nuremberg.⁹⁶

After Seyß Inquart’s departure, Dr. Josef Bühler, who testified at Frank’s trial and was himself later tried and executed in Poland for war crimes, ran the day-to-day affairs of the General Government as its state secretary (Staatssekretär). Bühler oversaw the twelve (later fourteen) major administrative divisions of the “Frankreich.” The central administration of the General Government was divided into major divisions (Hauptabteilungen) that dealt with education, railways, postal service, the economy, and so forth. Because these divisions were similar to those in the Reich, German officials in Berlin and elsewhere often went directly to the General Government’s divisions to do business, thus bypassing the power-hungry governor. Bühler made matters worse by occasionally setting up offices that conflicted directly with the work of the General Government’s major divisions.⁹⁷

The General Government was divided into four, and then later, five districts: Kraków, Lublin, Radom, Warsaw, and Galicia. Each district was ruled by a Gouverneur, who was usually a Party member, and a civilian Amtschef. Each district’s governor enjoyed an absolute local authority that occasionally conflicted with the interests of the General Government. During his five years in Kraków, Oskar Schindler had to deal frequently not only with General Government officials headquartered in Kraków but also with the Kraków district’s governor, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Gustav Freiherr Wächter and his successors, SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Richard Wendler and Dr. Curt Ludwig von Burgsdorff.⁹⁸

Frank’s efforts to wield absolute control over the General Government were complicated not only by the bloated administrative system he tried to govern but also by his limited authority over key elements in the Nazi dictatorship—the SS and the military. Though Frank was able to hold his own with the Wehrmacht, he was, according to Hans Umbreit, “on a losing ticket from the start” when it came to Himmler and the SS. Himmler was the Reich Führer-SS and Chief of the German Police (Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei). He had under him the newly created Reich Main Security Office (RSHA; Reichssicherheitshauptamt), Germany’s new super police organization, and was also Reich Commissioner for the Fortification of the German Volk-Nation (Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums). This latter position gave Himmler considerable authority to press his claim as the guardian of police and political authority in the Nazis’ new “racial laboratory.” Because Himmler was much closer to Hitler than Frank when it came to dealing with the “Jewish question,” the Reich Führer’s position in the General Government was further strengthened.⁹⁹

Himmler’s principal representative in the General Government was the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF; Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer). The HSSPF oversaw the various branches of the Order-Keeping Police (Orpo; Ordnungspolizei) and Sipo (Security Police; Sicherheitspolizei), which included the Gestapo, Kripo (Kriminalpolizei; criminal police) and the Border Police (Grenzpolizei). The HSSPF had under him subordinates who oversaw SS and police matters in the five districts of the General Government. During his five years in Kraków, Oskar Schindler not only had to deal with two General Government HSSPFs (Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, 1939–1943; Wilhelm Koppe, 1943–1945) but also with the Kraków district’s HSSPFs (Karl Zech; Schedler; Julian Scherner, 1942–1943; and Teobald Thier).¹⁰⁰

Originally, Himmler saw the HSSPF as the overseer of the various police forces and SS units in areas under German control. During the war, he tried to expand powers of the HSSPF to include authority over all political and racial matters in the Third Reich. Consequently, Himmler and his subordinates became Frank’s principal competitors in the General Government during Frank’s long years of rule there.¹⁰¹

The Wehrmacht and the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government

Because Frank had no authority in military matters, the Wehrmacht was less problematic to Frank than Himmler and the SS. Frank had the greatest difficulties with General Blaskowitz and played an important role in his dismissal. Blaskowitz was succeeded by Generalleutnant Curt Ludwig Baron von Gienanth, who held the title of Military Commander in the General Government (Militärbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement) and, in 1942, Military Commander of the General Government District (Wehrkreisbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement). In 1943, General der Infantrie Siegfried Haenicke replaced Gienanth as commander of the General Government military district.¹⁰²

The relationship between Frank, the HSSPF, and the military was always tense, particularly after the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union in 1941 and the transformation of the General Government into the prime killing center of the Final Solution, the German plan to mass murder of all the Jews of Europe. Though we now know that the Wehrmacht played more of a collaborationist role in this mass murder campaign against Jews, the deadliest military complicity took place in occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Regardless, the Wehrmacht regarded the General Government as an important staging area for its war with the Soviet Union and resented the conflicting goals of the SS and its various police operatives, who came to see the General Government less as a war zone than as a killing field.¹⁰³

Oskar Schindler’s success in protecting and saving his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz centered around his close ties with Wehrmacht officers in Kraków, Berlin, and elsewhere. As previously mentioned, his ties within Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr were essential to his work. Equally important, however, were his links to the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate (Rüstungsinspektion) and Himmler’s Security Police, Sipo. On three occasions after the war, Schindler specifically thanked his friends in Abwehr, the Armaments Inspectorate, and Sipo for their help not only in aiding his Jews but also for arranging to have him released after his three arrests during the war. In his letter to Fritz Lang in 1951, Oskar explained their motives. He said that the supportive officers in Abwehr and the Armaments Inspectorate were “partly anti-Nazi, or at least opponents of the SS and its methods.” He added that they were “on the side of Canaris during the ever-widening gap between the Abwehr and the SD.”¹⁰⁴

The person he always mentioned first in his postwar statements about helpful Wehrmacht officers was Generalleutnant Maximillian Schindler, the head of the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government. As the war with the Soviet Union lengthened, the military viewed the General Government, with its large human labor resources, as an important element in war production. And key to Wehrmacht war planning in the General Government was Oskar Schindler’s namesake, General Schindler. Though not related to Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten German businessman let everyone he dealt with in the General Government think that he and General Schindler were relatives; indeed, some thought that Oskar was General Schindler’s son. The fictitious tie between the two men worked to Oskar’s advantage, though Maximillian Schindler and his Sudeten German namesake had very little in common. Born in 1881 in Bavaria, Maximillian Schindler had served as an infantry officer in World War I. According to Oskar, General Schindler later was a German delegate to the League of Nations and also served as Military Attaché to the German embassy in Warsaw. In September 1939, General Schindler became the OKW’s representative for industrial matters in Poland (Industriebeauftragter des OKW in Poland) and then head of the Armaments Inspectorate of the General Government (Inspektor der Rüstungsinspektion im Generalgouvernement), with the rank of General. In 1944, he became the head of the Armaments Inspectorate West (Rüstungsbeautragter West). He settled in Munich after the war and died in 1963.¹⁰⁵

General Schindler was also one of only a handful of officers whom Oskar thanked at the end of the war for helping him save his Jews. What we know about General Schindler’s activities in the General Government comes from a study of German defense and armaments production, Geschichte der deutschen Wehrund Rüstungwirtschaft (1919–1943/45), by the head of the Armaments Inspectorate, General Georg Thomas, and Albert Speer’s Der Sklavenstaat (The Slave State). Though neither work provides clues as to General Schindler’s political sentiments, he must have been well respected throughout the German armaments industry because he remained in his post after Thomas’s dismissal in 1943. Oskar Schindler’s choosing to put General Schindler at the top of his small list of officers who helped him during the war also says a lot about Maximillian Schindler. One possible assumption is that General Thomas, himself a vocal critic of Hitler’s inadequate wartime military plans, provided General Schindler with the same type of protection that Admiral Canaris did for his own rebellious officers and administrators. The relationship between Thomas and Canaris is particularly intriguing, as we shall see. Though they were never close, their erstwhile antipathy to Hitler’s ongoing war efforts periodically brought them together.

Given Oskar’s friendship with General Schindler, it should come as no surprise that he also had close ties with two other prominent Armaments Inspectorate officers, Oberstleutnant Ott, the head of the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate in Kraków, and Oberstleutnant Süßmuth, who headed the Armaments Inspectorate office in Troppau (Opava) in what had become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Later, Oberstleutnant Süßmuth, at least according to Oskar, was instrumental not only in helping Oskar get permission to move his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944, but he also had about 3,000 Polish Jewish women transferred from Auschwitz to smaller forced labor camps, where they all survived the war. Ott died at the end of the war or soon thereafter; Süßmuth settled in Vienna.¹⁰⁶

Oskar was also close to another armaments specialist, Erich Lange of the Army High Command’s (OKH; Oberkommando des Heeres) Ordnance Department (Heereswaffenamt). Lange, an engineer, would play a key role in getting Schindler’s Jewish workers released from their brief incarceration in the Auschwitz and Groß Rosen (Polish, Rogożnica) concentration camps in the fall of 1944 while en route from Kraków to Brünnlitz. Emilie described Lange as a gentleman who always wore civilian clothing whenever he visited the Schindlers in Brünnlitz to show “his disapproval of the Nazi regime.” Lange frequently mentioned that he worked for Germany and not the Nazi regime. Emilie found Erich Lange to be “most cordial and friendly” with a strong “sense of justice” and moral integrity.¹⁰⁷

The most interesting thing about the support that Oskar received from important figures in the Armaments Inspectorate is the similarity between these ties and those with Abwehr. Some Abwehr officers, particularly those who helped and befriended Oskar, were operating under the umbrella protection of Admiral Canaris, who shared some of their sympathies. Could the same be said of Armaments Inspectorate officers? Yes. General Thomas also had serious misgivings about Hitler and the Nazis, though they had less to do with Nazi political and racial policies than with Hitler’s ill-thought-out military plans. Regardless, Thomas would be increasingly seen by Nazi leaders as a defeatist and critic of the Nazi regime. And like Canaris, he would be arrested after the July 20, 1944 assassination plot against Hitler for his activities.

Thomas and Canaris

Yet who was Georg Richard Thomas? He was the son of a factory owner from Forst in eastern Germany. He joined a Junker unit in 1908 and was commissioned a lieutenant in 1910. He served on the Western Front in World War I. A decorated officer, he remained in the army after the war and he became a protégé of Ludwig Beck, later Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army (Chef des Generalstabes Wehrmacht) and later an anti-Nazi resistance leader. Named Chief of Staff of the Army’s Weapons Office (Chef des Stabes des Heereswaffenamts) in 1930, Thomas would be the center of military planning for the German armed forces when Adolf Hitler came to power three years later. The rearming of Germany had long been one of Adolf Hitler’s priorities. Well before his public announcement of German rearmament in 1935, Hitler had greatly increased state expenditures for Germany’s armed forces. Some in the military, Thomas and Canaris among them, would argue on the eve of World War II that Germany was not ready to fight a lengthy war. And they were right. Hitler’s efforts to rearm and build a modern economy had created tremendous tensions between the military and civilians charged with revitalizing various sectors of Germany and preparing it for war.¹⁰⁸

How did Thomas fit into all this? According to the Reich Defense Law of 1935, which was amended in 1938, the Minister for Economic Affairs, who also served as the General Plenipotentiary for the Economy (GBW; Generalbevollmächtigter für die Wirtschaft), would oversee general supervision of businesses important to the war economy. During wartime, the Wehrmacht, particularly Thomas’s office, would supervise businesses involved in armaments production. Hitler tried to resolve the conflicting demands and needs of both groups by putting Hermann Göring in charge of a new overall economic rebuilding program in 1936—the Four Year Plan (Vierjahresplan)—which envisioned a nation and military ready for war once the plan was completed. Göring quickly became Germany’s economic dictator, though the military, which retained control over armaments production, did everything possible to reassert its control by hammering out a special relationship with the GBW.¹⁰⁹

Though Germany made tremendous strides in the early years of the Four Year Plan, its efforts to rearm for Hitler’s goal of a lengthy conflict backed by a full war economy fell far short of the military’s needs in even a limited war. In the summer of 1939, General Thomas told Wehrmacht leaders that Germany’s economic preparation for war had weakened over the past year and that supplies of essential raw materials would last only a few months. Thomas hoped his report would help Wehrmacht leaders talk Hitler out of war; but if war came, it should be “total war” against Poland and the countries of southeastern Europe to acquire vital raw materials.¹¹⁰

After he read Thomas’s negative report, Admiral Canaris asked the general to talk to General Keitel, the head of OKW, about the inadvisability of war over Poland. This was the beginning of a special relationship between Thomas and Canaris that lasted at least until Thomas resigned as head of Defense Economy and Chief Armanents Office (Wi-Rü Amt Werkwirtschafts- und Rüstungshauptamt) in 1943. Thomas, long a voice in the wilderness about Germany’s military readiness to fight aggressive war, was frustrated when Albert Speer (whom Hitler appointed in 1942 as his new Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions [Rmf-BuM; Reichsminister für Bewaffnung und Munition]), decided to place Thomas’s regional officers and armaments inspectors directly under Rmf-BuM. Though Thomas still commanded Wi-Rü, his power and influence were reduced considerably by Speer’s move.¹¹¹

Canaris had become acquainted with Thomas when the latter commanded the army’s Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). By the time Canaris approached Thomas about the Wehrmacht’s war preparedness, Thomas was recognized as the military’s foremost armaments expert. Yet Thomas was more than that and Canaris knew it. The forty-nine-year old Thomas was also a well-placed and influential officer with strong misgivings about the Nazi system. He was particularly shaken by the twin crises in 1938 surrounding the resignation of Minister of War Werner von Blomberg, on charges that he had married a prostitute, and the dismissal of Supreme Military Commander Werner von Fritsch, who was charged with being a homosexual. The failure of the army’s leadership to protest Fritsch’s treatment troubled many officers, including Thomas and Canaris, who saw in the Fritsch crisis an assault on their treasured military values. Hitler now used both situations to his advantage by assuming full personal control of the Wehrmacht through the newly created OKW under Keitel. The Fritsch crisis was also an important watershed for Thomas, Canaris, and other officers later involved in various aspects of the anti-Hitler resistance.¹¹²

It was no accident that in August 1939 Canaris tried to enlist Thomas’s help in convincing General Keitel of the foolishness of war at that time. In early 1940, both men were drawn together around the issuance of the “X-Report,” but this time they were on different sides of the resistance fence. In the fall of 1939, a new conspiracy plot against Hitler developed initially with Canaris’s approval that involved Thomas and Abwehr officers such as Oberst Hans Oster, now head of Abwehr’s Central Division and Canaris’s Chief of Staff, and Sonderführer K (Hauptmann) Dr. Johannes von Dohnányi, the brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The recently appointed Dohnányi officially served as adviser to Canaris and Oster on military and foreign policy, though he also worked to expand Abwehr’s anti-Hitler contacts. Also working with Oster and Dohnányi was Oberstleutnant Helmut Groscurth, Canaris’s Abwehr liaison with the OKH, and retired Generalleutnant Ludwig Beck, now one of the principal figures in the military opposition to Hitler.¹¹³

Soon after the German invasion of Poland, Oster convinced Canaris to appoint a new army second lieutenant, Dr. Josef Müller, to Abwehr’s main office in Munich. Oster intended to use Leutnant Müller, a staunch Catholic, to establish ties with the British government by way of the Vatican. Oster and other conspirators wanted to determine the interest of the British in peace terms in the aftermath of a coup that would topple Hitler and form a new government. Müller’s contact with the Vatican was a Jesuit priest, Father Robert Leiber. From the end of September 1939 until early 1940, Müller, who was known in intelligence documents as “Mr X,” met several times with Leiber, who transmitted information to Müller about the Vatican’s contacts with the British government. The Abwehr officers hoped to take the British terms to General Franz Halder, the army’s Chief of Staff, and his boss, army commander Oberst General Walther von Brauchitsch, in hopes they would support the coup and halt plans for the German invasion of Western Europe. The result of these talks was the controversial “X Report,” which was prepared by Dohnányi in January 1940 and delivered by General Thomas to General Halder in early April 1940. The mysteriously rewritten “X Report” had little effect on Halder and Brauchitsch because they did not see it until just before the invasion of Denmark and Norway.¹¹⁴

Despite Hitler’s successes in the spring and early summer of 1940, Thomas and Canaris remained concerned about Hitler’s aggressive war plans. Yet both men played both ends against the middle as they sought to promote and protect their own careers. After Canaris learned of the details of Aufbau Ost (buildup in the east) in August 1940, the initial planning stage for Hitler’s planned assault against the Soviet Union, he asked Thomas to prepare a detailed report about the ability of the Wehrmacht to wage such an extensive war. Thomas, now enamored with the expansion of his own vast power, particularly after his appointment as head of Werkwirtschafts- und Rüstungshauptamt on August 1, 1940, saw the invasion of the Soviet Union as a means of resolving some of Germany’s raw material and labor problems. Consequently, he had no problem supporting Göring’s plan to let I. G. Farben build factories at Auschwitz to make synthetic rubber and gasoline.¹¹⁵ After Thomas was made head of the Economic Organization East (Ostorganisation; Wirtschaftsorganisation Ost) in 1941, he became less sanguine; in reports to OKH and Keitel, he spoke of huge military shortages. There is some sense that Thomas might have been trying to convince Hitler to reconsider his attack against the Soviet Union. Thomas continued his negative reports when the war with Russia began. Over time, Keitel came to view Thomas’s reports as “defeatist,” and Hitler refused to read them.¹¹⁶

Yet something else was also lurking in Thomas’s mind, particularly once the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Thomas visited the Russian front in the fall of 1941 and learned first hand the policy of mass murder adopted by Hitler and the SS. According to Ulrich Hoffmann, a prominent civilian leader in the resistance, Thomas visited selected commanders on the Russian front in an unsuccessful effort to drum up new support for a coup in August or September 1941. By this time, talk was widespread in upper Wehrmacht circles about the atrocities being committed in Russia. On September 15, Canaris signed a memorandum prepared by Count Helmuth James von Moltke, a military and international affairs expert at OKW and head of the Kreisau resistance circle. The memo, which was given to Keitel, voiced strong objections to the recent OKW decisions regarding Soviet POWs. Thomas, who had close ties with Moltke and Canaris, was probably consulted about its contents.¹¹⁷

As the atrocities continued, the Wehrmacht was drawn deeper and deeper into the genocidal circle through its support of the various SS killing squads. In October, General Thomas visited General Brauchitsch, to discuss the rising tide of atrocities in the Soviet Union. The army commander already knew of the “beastliness” that was rampant in the east, and realized that he had to share responsibility for it.¹¹⁸ Yet these discussions were never acted upon, probably because of the air of victory surrounding Germany’s dramatic successes in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the resistance was not well organized, and resistance leaders were now being watched by various branches of Germany’s super police organization, the RSHA. More serious discussions of a coup would come after the failed offensive before Moscow in 1941–1942 and the terrible losses at Stalingrad a year later. By that time, Thomas and Canaris’s reputations and careers were damaged beyond repair.¹¹⁹

Hitler briefly removed Canaris as head of Abwehr in early 1942 after Himmler accused him of using Jewish agents. Though Canaris was able to convince the Führer to return him to his command, his influence waned considerably after this incident. At about the same time, Thomas lost out in a power struggle with Albert Speer, who became the new Minister of Armaments and Munitions after Todt’s accidental death. By the end of the year, Thomas had lost all authority over armaments issues and in early 1943 asked to be relieved of his military duties. A few months later, the military, with the aid of the Gestapo, arrested Dohnányi for corruption; Oster was placed under house arrest and transferred to the Führer-Reserve, where he could still wear his military uniform. Ultimately, Oster was dismissed from the service. Though the military cleared Dohnányi in 1944, he was now turned over to the RSHA. In early 1944, Hitler fired Canaris. Abwehr was taken over by the RSHA. Thomas, Canaris, Oster, and others involved in various resistance activities during the war were arrested and tortured after the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. Canaris, Oster, and Dohnányi were executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. Thomas managed to survive the war. He died in American custody at the end of 1945.¹²⁰

What do all of these developments and intrigues have to do with Oskar Schindler? Quite a bit. Schindler relied heavily on his ties with Abwehr and the Armaments Inspectorate, particularly General Schindler, to help him acquire the vital armaments contracts necessary to open or keep his factories running in Kraków and Brünnlitz (Brnenec).¹²¹ Emilie also used Oskar’s contacts with Abwehr and the Armaments Inspectorate to get him out of jail on numerous occasions during their years in Kraków. Moreover, Schindler’s work as a courier for the Jewish Agency in Budapest was partly facilitated through his Abwehr ties. What is difficult to determine is the impact of these connections on Schindler’s personal feelings towards Hitler and the Nazi system. Was his effort to use and later save the Jews who worked for him in Kraków and Brünnlitz affected by his ties with Abwehr and Armaments Inspectorate officers who held anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi sentiments?