Oskar Schindler

THE NAZI-DOMINATED WORLD THAT OSKAR SCHINDLER ENTERED in the fall of 1939 was one plagued by moral and economic corruption. Beyond being Hitler’s new “racial laboratory,” the General Government, that part of Poland not integrated directly into the Greater Reich or occupied by the Soviet Union, quickly became a kingdom ripe for German exploitation. Greed and the desire for instant wealth often replaced racial ideals as the driving forces behind the German occupation of what remained of Poland. Though these principles often clashed, sometimes the Germans used them to rationalize the exploitation of stolen Polish and Jewish resources.

The General Government really consisted of three worlds: one German, one Polish, and one Jewish. At a distance, the German world of the General Government was the most normal, though this was a façade. Karl Baedeker published one of his famous travel guides in 1943 for Hitler’s so-called racial laboratory, Das Generalgouvernement: Reisehandbuch von Karl Baedeker. It could be purchased at Alfred Fritzsche’s German book store on Adolf Hitler-Platz in Kraków for Zł 14 ($4.37).¹ Though it seems bizarre to publish a travel guide for the most infamous killing field of the Holocaust, this was the twisted world of Nazi Germany and the General Government. Soldiers on leave from the Eastern Front as well as businessmen probably found the detailed guide quite useful. Governor General Hans Frank wrote a welcoming note for Badeker’s guidebook:

Baedeker published his 1943 guide at the height of the Final Solution (Endlösung), but he made no mention of the five death camps then in operation in the General Government. Auschwitz and Beŀżec are identified only as train stations. In his section on Warsaw, Baedeker said that one could take the train from the former Polish capital to Białystok via Malkinia. Few knew that Malkinia was the nearest station to the Treblinka death camp.³

Baedeker opened the section of his guidebook on “Krakau und Umgebung” (Kraków and Environs) with the usual travel guide discussion of transportation, information, hotels, restaurants, and theaters. It included a detailed map, in color, of the city. Kasimir (Kasimierz), the former Jewish quarter, is listed on the lower right portion of the map. The name Podǵorze is listed at the very bottom of the map, though there is nothing to indicate that it was once the site of a Jewish ghetto. The new forced labor camp at nearby Płaszów is also not mentioned, but the travel guide does indicate that you would take the Krakau-Płaszów line eastward to Tarnów and Przemyśl.⁴

The Baedeker guide could also help you find more than just theaters, hotels, and restaurants. It listed all of the important Nazi Party and General Government offices, and its maps listed the newly renamed streets, plazas, and other sites of Kraków. You could also consult Dr. Max Freiherr du Prel’s more extensive guide to the complex inner workings of the General Government, Das General Gouvernement (1942). Schindler certainly kept a copy in his office at Emalia. It had articles on every facet of regulated life in the General Government. The most valuable part of du Prel’s edited work, though, was the detailed list of state, Party, and police officials at every level of the General Government. And Hans Frank wrote the introductory statement, as he did for Badeker’s guide.⁵

For daily news on events in the General Government and Kraków, Schindler and other Germans read the Krakauer Zeitung, which began daily publication on November 9, 1939. With a circulation of 100,000, it became what du Prel called the “newspaper of the East.”⁶

The Krakauer Zeitung reported the usual war news, which was given extensive coverage on its front and back pages. But it also carried historical articles and the usual ads that one would find in a normal newspaper. The ads could lead you to a good optician or a place to buy a Pelikan pen. You would also find announcements for the performances of the Kraków Philharmonic, the General Government’s State Theater, and the SS- und Polizei-Theater. And if Oskar needed a German office worker, he had to look no farther than the Krakauer Zeitung’s want ad and personal section. Two pages in each sixteen-page edition were devoted to sports news and restaurant ads. One can easily see Oskar looking through the Krakauer Zeitung each morning over coffee at his office on ul. Lipowa 4. In the fall of 1943, he probably read the anti-Semitic series on prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jews and the article on Jewish art, “Jüdisches parasitentum ohne Maske (Jewish Parasites Without a Mask).” He was also no doubt intrigued by Hanns Stock’s article on the fifth anniversary of the German takeover of the Sudetenland.⁷

This façade of normalcy did not exist for the General Government’s 15 million Poles. Hitler regarded Hans Frank’s racial laboratory as a source of cheap manpower for the Third Reich’s industrial and agricultural needs. The General Government’s non-Jewish population was to be allowed minimal educational and cultural opportunities. They were a subjugated people who existed for one purpose: to serve the unskilled labor needs of the Third Reich. Soon after Frank became the head of the General Government, he decreed that all Poles between eighteen and sixty were obligated to work for the Reich. On December 14, 1939, he expanded this obligation to include young people between fourteen and eighteen years old.⁸

A little more than 10 percent (1.7 million) of the General Government’s Poles, including Ukrainians, had been sent to the Third Reich as forced laborers by 1944. About one sixth of these Polish forced laborers were POWs. This does not include the 400,000–480,000 Poles put into concentration camps by the Germans and used as forced laborers there. These Poles became the nucleus of the Third Reich’s forced labor population that totaled almost 6 million by the fall of 1944. Yet Poles, and later Soviet forced laborers, were viewed differently from other non-Germans forced to work in the Third Reich. In the spring of 1940, Himmler wrote that the Poles were to be regarded as “a leaderless worker people (Arbeitsvolk)” who were to provide Nazi Germany an annual pool of laborers for farm work, road building, construction, and quarry work. Hitler agreed with Himmler’s thoughts on this matter. To insure that the Poles knew their place in the Reich, severe restrictions were placed on their movements. They were also made to wear a special badge and were put under orders to avoid sexual intercourse with Germans. To insure the latter restriction, Himmler ordered that special brothels be set up just for Poles.⁹

Though some Poles had gone voluntarily to the Reich as laborers in the early months of the war, tales of harsh treatment and low wages eventually made it difficult for the Germans to recruit the large numbers of Poles they needed to work in Germany, particularly on farms. The forced roundups of Polish workers that followed prompted a run on falsified certificates of employment in the General Government. The Arbeitsämter could give these certificates only to workers in local government or the armament industry. In time, the Germans distrusted the certificates because so many were forged.¹⁰

By 1940, Schindler ran three businesses in Kraków: Emalia, the Shlomo Wiener enamelware firm, and the Prokosziner Glashütte, a glassware factory just across the street from the main Emalia complex. Collectively, Schindler’s three firms employed hundreds of non-Jewish Poles. Oskar never said much about the Poles who worked for him and it is hard to determine exactly how many he employed during the war. In the several reports about his wartime activities that Oskar prepared after the war, he noted that at its peak of operations in 1944, Emalia employed from 1,700 to 1,750 workers, 1,000 of them Jews. He took a small number of Polish workers with him when he moved to his new factory in Brünnlitz in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the fall of 1944, though the nucleus of the labor force at his new factory consisted of the 1,000 Jews on the famous “Schindler’s List.” Oskar left behind 650 Polish workers to continue operations at Emalia until Soviet forces occupied Kraków in January 1945. Oskar also employed from 350 to 380 workers at his Prokosziner glass factory in Kraków. According to Oskar, he became the leaseholder of the glass factory through a direct contract with Finanzpräsident Hermann Senkowsky, who also oversaw the former Polish State Monopolies for Tobacco, Spirits, Salt, Matches, and Lottery (Polnische Staatsmonopole für Tabak, Spiritus, Salz, Zündholz und Lotterie) in the General Government. By the time Schindler was forced to close the glass factory in 1943 because of railroad construction, it was producing about 1 million vodka bottles a month. Because Oskar did not include the costs of running the glass factory in his postwar reports detailing his expenses for saving Jews, we can conclude that most of the Prokosziner workers were probably non-Jewish Poles.¹¹

In many ways, the non-Jewish Poles working for Schindler were the backbone of his operations. Schindler had a small staff of Germans who helped oversee all aspects of plant operations, though he relied on Poles to supervise his workforce. His Polish workers, unlike his Jewish slave laborers, were free to come and go and were treated more or less as normal employees by other Germans, particularly the SS. In a report he prepared in Argentina in 1955 on his wartime activities, Schindler said that “the hundreds of Polish workers [he employed] offered a valuable bridge to the Aryan side and kept the contact to the city [of Kraków] intact for them [his Jewish workers].” This bridge was usually to the black market.¹²

Sol Urbach gave one instance of how this bridge to the outside worked. Sol initially worked as a metal presser at Emalia, but soon got a job with a woodworker named Wojcik and his sons. Sol was responsible for maintaining the blackout shades in Schindler’s offices and also did other small woodworking chores in Emalia’s offices. Wojcik’s sons used their positions at Emalia to steal goods from Schindler and sell them on the black market. They forced Sol to help them. He felt that he had no choice but to work with Wojcik’s sons if he wanted to keep his job in the woodworking shop. Sol was the key to their operations because he lived in the factory’s barracks, which Schindler constructed for his Jews after the Kraków ghetto was closed in 1943. Because Sol’s duties gave him easy access to Schindler’s offices, Wojcik’s sons would occasionally force Sol to enter an office at night and lower the pots and pans they had stolen earlier in the day out of the window. Sol wrapped the pots and pans in paper and lowered them to Wojcik’s sons in the street below with ropes supplied by the brothers. If caught, Sol would have paid with his life.¹³

According to Schindler, he had seven Jews and 250 Poles working for him within three months after he took over Emalia. Edith Wertheim was in that first group of Schindler Jews. She said that Oskar wanted six girls to work in his factory and that Abraham Bankier was responsible for choosing them. She testified that she had no idea why she was chosen because she was “not a beauty.” On the other hand, she was a “very nice, clean girl with extremely long hair in two braids.” When Edith and the other young girls were brought to the factory to meet Schindler, they were all frightened of him. Oskar immediately sensed their fear and said, “Children, don’t be scared. You don’t need to worry because as long as you are working for me, you are going to live through the war.” Later, some of the other girls expressed doubt about Schindler because he was a Nazi. But Edith said, “Girls, I believe him. He’s a nice guy.” They responded, “Are you stupid?”¹⁴

During the course of the war, the number of Jews and Poles working for Schindler increased substantially. He declared that he had employed 150 Jewish workers by the end of 1940; the numbers increased to 550 in 1942; 900 in 1943; and 1,000 in 1944.¹⁵ These figures tend to contradict those given by some of the first Jews who worked for Schindler at Emalia. Edith Wertheim, for example, said that she was among the first small group of Jewish women hired by Schindler in the spring of 1941; Sol Urbach said he was one of the first group of a hundred males the SS rounded up in early fall 1942. By the time Oskar built his Emalia sub-camp in 1943, Wertheim said he had only thirty Jewish women working for him. It is possible that Oskar exaggerated these figures, particularly for the early years of the war.¹⁶

What prompted this dramatic increase in Jewish workers? Part of it was cost, part of it was efficiency, and part of it was Schindler’s efforts to save Jews. He initially hired Jewish workers because they were much cheaper than Polish workers. Dr. Menachim Stern, Itzhak Stern’s nephew, said that his uncle convinced Schindler to hire more Jewish women. One day Stern said, “You know how men are, they need their women to produce well.” So Oskar decided to increase the size of his female work force to keep his men happy.¹⁷ Though the Germans tried to freeze salaries and prices in occupied Poland at prewar levels, the system did not work very well because of the growing dependency on the black market. In time, more than 80 percent of the General Government’s population needs were provided by the black market. This applied to every aspect of the General Government’s economy. Schindler maintained two separate bookkeeping systems for his businesses, one for legitimate business and one for the black market. Schindler also had to maintain two wage scales for his Polish workers. The official wage scales were frozen at prewar levels of Zł 200 to Zł 300 ($62.50–$93.75) a month, but the unofficial wage scales could range from Zł 8 to Zł 35 ($2.50–$10.94) an hour. Even so, by 1944 an average Polish worker’s salary was worth only about 8 percent of its prewar level. On the other hand, it cost Schindler only Zł 5 ($1.56) a day for a Jewish worker. This salary was paid directly to the SS, which had control over all Jewish workers.¹⁸

Yet Schindler was motivated by more than cost. Over time, Jewish workers proved to be more reliable and efficient than Polish workers. To keep their war economy going, the Germans forced more and more foreign laborers, particularly Poles, to work in factories throughout the Third Reich; this caused a severe labor shortage in Polish factories. Factory owners raised salaries and even provided free meals to keep Polish workers on the job. Despite such incentives, absenteeism was rampant among Polish workers. One Polish scholar, Czesław Madajczyk, has estimated that by 1943 about a third of all Polish workers were regularly absent from work. It was normal, in fact, for a Polish worker to work four days a week at his regular job and spend the rest of his time working in the black market. One of the most popular jokes at the time centered around two Polish friends who had not seen each other for some time. After meeting on the street, one friend asks the other:

Oskar Schindler was in Kraków for one reason only, and that was to make money. A lot of money. And it was the black market that gave him this opportunity. The most lucrative business was with the Wehrmacht, which brought huge amounts of goods through its contacts with the Polish black market. According to Jan Gross, the potential for great profits on such deals was enormous, and it was easy to make a fortune in a short time. Schindler quickly grasped the importance of contacts with the black market, which is why he gave Abraham Bankier such a prominent position at Emalia. And it was probably profit that motivated Schindler, no doubt prodded by the trusted Bankier, to hire more and more Jewish workers.²⁰

Over time, though, Oskar Schindler did more than employ Jewish workers. He convinced the monstrous Amon Göth, the commandant of the Płaszów forced labor camp, to allow him to build a sub-camp with barracks and other facilities for his Jewish workers. Schindler even provided housing for 450 Jewish workers from nearby German factories. He became the protector of his Jewish workers and kept them healthy and well fed. And when other factory owners began to shut down their factories and return to the Reich with their profits in the face of the westward march of Stalin’s Red Army, Schindler arranged to open a new sub-camp and factory, Brünnlitz, near his home town of Svitavy, where he employed over 1,000 Jewish workers, most of whom survived the war. What brought about this transformation? How did a man of questionable morals who came to Kraków in the early months of World War II simply to make a great deal of money become one of the Holocaust’s most heralded Righteous Gentiles? This question begs no easy answer, though it probably lies in the evolution of Germany’s horrible mistreatment and eventual mass murder of the Jews, first in the General Government, and then in the rest of German-dominated Europe. Living as he did in the heart of the Nazis’ principal killing ground during the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler was surprisingly knowledgeable about German plans to murder all the Jews of Europe. His transformation ran parallel to the development of the Third Reich’s deadly Jewish policies between 1939 and 1942.

German Policy Toward the Jews in Kraków and the General Government, 1940–1942

By the fall of 1940, the German administrators in Kraków had stripped the 60,000 Jews living there of most of their legal and property rights. Yet Kraków’s Jews lost more than their property. They were also stripped of their jobs in non-Jewish businesses and institutions and robbed of most of their bank accounts and other investments. Though the local branch of the Main Trusteeship Office East (HTO; Haupttreuhandstelle Ost) in Kraków agreed to compensate former apartment house owners 75 percent of their former property’s value, this was reduced to 50 percent in the summer of 1940. Over the next six months, German compensation to Jewish property owners dwindled to almost nothing. And even if Jewish property owners did receive compensation, they were severely limited in their access to these funds in the Polish Post State Savings Bank or in Jewish credit unions.²¹

The gradual impoverishment of Kraków’s Jews was part of the greater German effort to rip Jews from the fabric of General Government society. On April 11, 1940, Hans Frank met with several Wehrmacht generals who complained that they had to live in apartment buildings where the only other tenants were Jews. The following day, at a meeting with his department chiefs in the Mining Academy in Kraków, Frank said that the situation was intolerable: If the Nazis wanted to maintain their authority in the General Government, German officials should not have to meet Jews when they entered or left their homes because they might “be subjected to the risk of falling victims to epidemics.” Consequently, the Governor General informed his administrators that he intended to rid Kraków of as many Jews as possible by November 1, 1940. Frank admitted that his scheme would result in a massive deportation of Jews. Yet such an action had to take place because “it was absolutely intolerable that thousands and thousands of Jews should slink about and have dwellings in a town which the Führer had done the greatest honour of making the seat of a high Reich authority.” Frank added that he intended to make Kraków “the town freest of Jews in the General Government.”²²

The Nazis had struggled with the so-called Jewish question since Hitler had become chancellor of Germany in early 1933. Over a six-year period, they had stripped Jews in the Greater Reich of all of their economic, professional, and political rights in an effort to force them to leave Hitler’s Nazi kingdom. In Poland, they faced new problems because of the size of the Jewish population. Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the Security Police and the SD (Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) and soon to be head of the Nazis’ new super police organization, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA; Reichssicherheitshauptamt), laid out the Germans’ general blueprint for dealing with the Jews of Poland in a memo, “The Problem of the Jews in the Occupied Areas,” that followed a September 21, 1939, meeting with Einsatzgruppen leaders in Berlin. Besides providing the guidelines for the creation of the Judenräte and other issues, Heydrich also spoke of the “final goal” towards the Jews, which, he said, would take some time. The first stage of this long-range “game plan” was the “concentration of the Jews from the countryside to larger cities.” Jews from those parts of Poland who were to be integrated into the Greater Reich were dumped into an area in the interior of Poland that later became the General Government. Towns and cities chosen as concentration areas were to be near a railway line or junction; Jewish communities with fewer than five hundred people were to be dissolved and the inhabitants moved to the nearest concentration point.²³

Essentially, Heydrich was thinking of the creation of a ghetto system throughout what remained of German-occupied Poland. On September 20, 1939, General Franz Halder, commander of the Army General Staff, noted in his diary that the “ghetto idea exists in broad outline”; two days later, Heydrich told General Walther von Brauchitsch, the Army commander in chief, that he planned to create a Jewish state near Kraków under German administration. Brauchitsch protested, and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s boss, intervened to assure the army chief that this was a long-range objective that would be realized in the future. The time frame for meeting this goal, a year, was laid out into another memo Heydrich sent to his department chiefs in the RSHA on September 27, 1939. The plan, which Hitler had approved, was to send all Greater Reich Jews to urban ghettos in the soon-to-be created General Government. These transfers would give Reich officials a “better chance of controlling them [the Jews] and later removing them.” Reich Gypsies, or Roma, were also included in this directive.²⁴

The idea of ghettos for Jews was nothing new. The first ghetto for Jews was created in Venice in 1516. The idea of forcing Jews to live in separate parts of cities spread to other European countries over the next four centuries. The purpose of the ghetto was to limit Jewish contact with Christians and to control Jewish economic activities. With the coming of the Enlightenment and the emancipation of the Jews, ghettos fell into disfavor in Christian Europe. The last ghetto in Europe, in Rome, was closed in 1870. The Nazis revived ghettos for Jews seven decades later.²⁵

What complicated all of this was the uncontrolled movement of Jews and Poles into the General Government from the recently conquered western Polish territories and Jews and Gypsies from the Greater Reich. There were about 600,000 Jews in the conquered Polish western provinces. Frank also expected that another 400,000 Jews would be sent into his “kingdom” from the Greater Reich. Himmler also intended to move about 400,000 Poles from this region into the General Government. Once this transfer program was completed by the spring of 1940, the General Government would have a Jewish population of 2 million.²⁶

Initially, the idea was to create a special Jewish reservation in the Lublin district. However, once the massive transfer began on December 1, 1939, Frank became concerned over the implications of such large population movements within his so-called kingdom. With the backing of Hermann Göring, Frank insisted that he be given full control over all shipments of Jews and others into the General Government. On March 23, 1940, Göring halted all further transports into the General Government. It was in the aftermath of this controversy that Frank decided to force Kraków’s Jews out of the city. The expulsions were to take place in two phases. On May 18, 1940, German authorities announced that Kraków’s Jews had three months to leave the city for another town in the General Government. Those who left by August 15, 1940, could choose their new place of settlement and take all their personal possessions with them. Those who did not leave voluntarily would be expelled after August 15 and would be limited to 25 kilograms (55 lbs.) of baggage per person; all other property would be transferred to the Kraków district Trustee Office.²⁷

In his April 12, 1940, meeting with his department heads, Frank had said that from 5,000 to 10,000 Jews would have to remain in Kraków because the Germans needed their handicraft, trade, and business skills. Frank expanded this number to 15,000 in his May 18 decree. The Judenrat under Dr. Bieberstein was to insure that all Kraków Jews complied with the May 18 regulations. Initially, the Judenrat asked Jews who had come to Kraków from other parts of Poland to consider voluntary resettlement. When this appeal did not work, the Judenrat reminded the city’s Jews of the August 15 deadline. On July 23, German authorities informed the Judenrat that it would not change the August 15 date for voluntary departures. Two days later, a notice signed by Dr. Bieberstein appeared in the new Jewish newspaper, the Gazeta Żydowska, reminding Kraków’s Jews of the German regulations regarding voluntary resettlement. It also included information about other cities in the General Government where Jews could settle.²⁸ The notice ended with

Though many Jews did leave Kraków during this period, far too many Jews were still in the city on August 15. The Germans responded by forming a joint German-Jewish eviction committee that issued special residency permits, the Ausweis, for Jews who could stay in Kraków. The committee, however, issued far more permits than the number allowed legally to stay in the city. An official investigation concluded that the reason for the excess permits was bribery or an honest desire to help fellow Jews. It also indicated that some former Kraków Jews had returned illegally to the city because they could not find homes in other parts of the General Government.³⁰

The failure of the voluntary resettlement program frustrated the Germans; on November 25, 1940, the Kraków district’s governor, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Wächter, issued a new decree in Polish and German about illegal Jewish residents in the city. He stated that “in order to cleanse Cracow of its Jews and leave in it only those Jews whose professions are still needed,” it was now forbidden for Jews to enter Kraków. Only Jews with the Ausweis (dokument odroczenia) could remain in the city. The Ausweis had to be carried at all times; those caught without it would be expelled from Kraków. Jews without the Ausweis had to present themselves at the Regional District Office for Refugees on ul. 3 Pawia between December 2 and December 11, 1940. This was to be done alphabetically over a five-day period. Wächter warned that the Germans intended to enforce the new decree and warned that anyone who failed to abide by it would be severely punished.³¹

By this time, Wächter had already gained a reputation for brutality. A year earlier, he reported to Frank that posters had appeared all over the city on November 11 commemorating Polish independence day. The governor general ordered Wächter to arrest and shoot one man from every building on which the posters appeared. Wächter dutifully rounded up 120 Poles for execution. Consequently, no one should have been surprised when Wächter began his brutal round up of Jews throughout Kraków, regardless of whether they had the Ausweis or not. Jews caught in the Nazi dragnet were sent to the former Austrian fort on ul. Mogilska and then, after they were opened, to ghettos in Warsaw, Lublin, Hrubieszów, and Biała Podlaska. A year earlier, Biała Podlaska had been the terminus point of the first SS death march, which involved eight hundred Jewish prisoners of war from the Polish army. The Germans continued to inter Jewish POWs in a camp in Biała Podlaska until 1941, when the camp was closed.³²

The Germans harassed the Jews who stayed in Kraków. In January and February 1941, they forced all Jews over age sixteen to spend a set number of days clearing the streets of snow. At the same time, Wächter decreed that all Jews living in the city would have to replace their Ausweis with a new identity document, the Kennkarte. But before they could receive the new document, Jews had to submit the old Ausweis with confirmation of the actual number of days they had worked in January 1941. On February 27, 1941, Wächter declared the Ausweis an invalid document. The only Jews allowed to remain in Kraków after this date were those with the Kennkarte or those promised one.³³

Four days later, Wächter published a 13-point ordinance in the Krakauer Zeitung that announced the creation of the Kraków Jewish Living Quarter (Jüdischer Wohnbezirk), or ghetto. Wächter explained that the ghetto, which would be in the suburb of Podgórze, was being established for security and health reasons. Though the Germans opened the first Jewish ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski near ŀódź in the fall of 1939, they did not begin to open ghettos in earnest for six more months. The opening of ghettos in the General Government took place randomly between 1940 and 1942. The first was opened in ŀódź , which was now part of the Greater Reich, on May 1, 1940. Six months later, the Germans opened another in Warsaw. Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the beloved Christian pharmacist in the Kraków ghetto, said that by early 1941, rumors were widespread that more ghettos would soon be opened in other parts of the General Government. Kraków’s Jews hoped the new ghetto would include Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter in Kraków. Jews had lived in Kazimierz since 1495. Though long regarded as one of the poorer sections of Kraków, the “Jewish town” was the vibrant religious, cultural, and intellectual center for the city’s Jews. Consequently, Wächter’s decision to force Kraków’s remaining Jews across the Vistula river to the run-down industrial district of Podgórze shocked many of the city’s Jews.³⁴

The second point of Wächter’s ordinance specifically established the boundaries of the new ghetto. Its northernmost border was the Vistula River. From there it would run along the rail line linking central Kraków with the suburb of Płaszów. It would include the central market square of Podgórze and end just below the Krzemionki Hills. The highest point here is Lasota Hill, where Oskar Schindler and his mistress, Amelia (Ingrid), an Abwehr agent, supposedly watched the violent closing of the Kraków ghetto in March 1943. Schindler’s Emalia factory on ul. 4 Lipowa was only a few blocks away from the ghetto’s western wall.³⁵

Wächter’s decree ordered all Polish residents living in those parts of Podgórze to move to Kazimierz by March 20, 1941. Jews were given the same amount of time to move to the ghetto. About 3,500 Poles lived in three hundred homes in Podgórze. Many of them were stunned by the German orders. They organized meetings and explored ways to prevent the transfers. Parishioners of Podgórze’s striking neo-Gothic St. Joseph’s Church asked their vicar, the Reverend Jozef Niemezynski, to discuss their concerns with the Germans. Father Niemezynski told Wächter that to create a ghetto in Podgórze just beyond the church’s grounds would work a severe hardship on his parishioners. For one thing, the Catholic priest argued, many of the faithful now forced to move to Kazimierz would have not only to cross the Vistula to attend church, they would also have to walk completely around the walled-off ghetto to get there. Father Niemezynski was told that there were already too many churches in Kraków. In fact, Wächter said, the vicar was lucky that St. Joseph’s was not in the ghetto itself. If it were, then “all the faithful from the parish would be lost.” Other representatives told the Germans that it would be impossible to move some of their businesses and workshops to Kazimierz because of inadequate facilities there. Their appeals fell on deaf ears. The March 3 ordinance stood.³⁶

The Judenrat was responsible for insuring that the transfers and the opening of the ghetto went smoothly. Excluded from the transfers from Podgórze to Kazimierz were major factories and businesses producing goods for the Wehrmacht. The Germans also permitted one other Aryan business to remain open in Podgórze, Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, Pod Orłem (Under the Eagle; today, Museum of National Remembrance). Pankiewicz and his Polish staff, Irena Droźdikowska, Helena Krywaniuk, and Aurelia Daner-Czortkowa, had to live outside the ghetto. According to Pankiewicz, the pharmacy, situated as it was on one of the ghetto’s main squares, Plac Zgody (Peace Square; today, Plac Bohaterów Getta, Plaza of Ghettos Heroes), “became witness to the inhuman deportations, monstrous crimes and the constant degradation of human dignity and self-respect of the occupants.” More important, Pankiewicz’s pharmacy provided the ghetto’s Jews with important contacts with the outside world. Schindlerjude Stella Müller-Madej described Pankiewicz as “a wonderful human being” and remained close to him after the war. On one occasion, he hid Stella under his desk during a German Aktion or roundup in the ghetto. In 1983, Pankiewicz was declared a Righteous Gentile (Righteous Among the Nations) by Yad Vashem in Israel.³⁷

Within days of Wächter’s March 3 decree, 15,000 Jews began to abandon their homes in Kasimierz and slowly make their way across the Vistula to the three hundred or so homes in Podgórze abandoned by the 3,500 Poles who once lived in them. The Poles, in turn, took up residence in the former Jewish homes in Kasimierz. What was once a normal, though rundown, suburb of Kraków now became a crowded Jewish ghetto where disease and hunger were constant threats to human life. Stella Müller-Madej described the traumatic forced march into the ghetto:

An excited Stella jumped up on the cart, only to see the family’s bundles tumble to the ground. After helping Stella put them back on the cart, her father began cheerfully to push it along the street. Stella and Adam, her brother, followed along

It is not a long walk from Kazimierz to Podgórze, though it probably seemed an eternity to those Jews carrying their lifelong possessions with them on unwieldy carts, wagons, or their backs. Stella and her family probably crossed over the Piłsudski Bridge, Kraków’s oldest, though they could have crossed another one just upriver. Because Germans destroyed all of Kraków’s bridges on the Vistula at the end of the war, the second bridge into the ghetto no longer exists, though one can still see its markings from across the river.⁴⁰

Stella and her family were given a room with a kitchen in a building on ul. Czarnieckiego; the common toilet was in the courtyard. The place was dirty and filled with roaches. Stella’s mother, Tusia, declared that she would “rather not live at all than vegetate for even a week in such conditions.” Tusia returned to her grandmother’s apartment outside of the ghetto for a few days while Stella’s father, Zygmunt, did what he could to make the room livable. In one of the Holocaust’s illogical twists, Stella’s grandmother was not required to move into the ghetto.⁴¹

There is a vivid photographic collection in the Archiwum Pavstwowe in Kraków that paints a graphic picture of the forced Jewish exodus into the ghetto. To facilitate the rapid movement of Jews from Kazimierz and other points in the city to Podgórze, the Germans forced Jews either to walk or take trains or boats across the Vistula to the ghetto. Whatever household goods were permitted in the ghetto were loaded on decrepit horse-drawn wagons; men, women, and children carried whatever personal goods they could. Often, Jews had to push their furniture and other personal items on aging carts. Germans guards were everywhere and they constantly checked and rechecked identity cards. The stress of the transfer showed darkly on the face of every victim.⁴²

The forced move into the ghetto came just before one of Judaism’s most important religious holidays, Passover (Pesach), which in 1941 was between April 12 and 19. The Germans often chose a period around a special Jewish religious holiday such as Passover or Rosh Hashana to implement a major transfer or roundup. The idea was to use the period of strict Jewish religious observance to catch their victims when they were most off guard. Whether this was the intent in March 1941 is uncertain. Regardless, because of Passover, the ghetto remained quiet until after the week-long holiday. Afterwards, bricklayers began to construct the three-meter (9.8 feet) wall around the ghetto. They placed over the Podgórze Market Square entranceway a large blue Star of David. Below it was a phrase in Yiddish: Jüdischer wojnbecirk (Jewish Housing Estate). Two large blue lamps stood above this entranceway; the Germans had workers finish the walls near it with what appeared to be the tops of Jewish gravestones. The Germans also decreed that all signs and other public inscriptions in Polish had to be redone in Hebrew throughout the ghetto. The only exception was the Polish sign over the entranceway to Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, Pod Orłem.⁴³

The three entrances into the ghetto were guarded by Polish police in navy blue uniforms. Though circumstances varied from ghetto to ghetto, particularly in the General Government, the Polish police had authority over the Jewish Security Police (OD; Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst) in the ghetto. The main entrance into the Kraków ghetto was at Podgórze Square, where the Germans opened the offices of the Judenrat and the German police. A second gate was built at the southeast rear of the ghetto at ul. Limanowskiego. The Germans constructed a third gate at the northeast entrance to Plac Zgody just before you crossed the Vistula on what is today Most (Bridge) Powstańców Ślaskich. If you were a Jewish worker fortunate enough to have a Blauschein issued by the Labor Office (Arbeitsamt), you could work outside the ghetto. You would leave for your job as a slave laborer through the Podgórze Square gate and return that evening through the one at Plac Zgody.⁴⁴

The population in the ghetto changed frequently. Soon after the ghetto opened in the spring of 1941, the Germans shipped Jews there from surrounding villages. That fall, authorities deported 2,000 Jews without proper identification from the ghetto.The roundups and deportations were planned by the Germans and undertaken with the help of the OD. In anticipation of the Kraków ghetto, the Judenrat created the Jewish OD force in Kraków at German instigation on May 5, 1940; the agency was headed by a former glazier, Symcha Spira, who was recruited by the Judenrat. Tadeusz Pankiewicz said that before the war Spira was an Orthodox Jew who wore a full beard and a long black capote. By the time he became head of the OD, he was clean shaven and wore a tailored uniform bearing many official looking insignias. Schindlerjude Malvina Graf described Spira as an immoral person who had many lovers. He also had serious health problems. The Germans liked him because he carried out their orders quickly and efficiently.⁴⁵

Though requirements varied from ghetto to ghetto, OD candidates had to have completed some military service, fit certain weight and height requirements, have an unblemished past, and be nominated by several individuals. The successful nominee would then have to be approved by the Judenrat. In Kraków and several other ghettos, the Germans had their favorite nominees, such as Spira, whose nominations could not be challenged.⁴⁶ The Kraków Jewish OD was divided into two sections, the Civil Division (Zivilabteilung) and the “uniformed” regular OD. Jewish members of the Civil Division wore neckties and blue coats and the regular OD wore coats buttoned to the neck. Members of both OD units wore armbands on their right sleeves with Ordnungsdienst in Hebrew. The Gestapo had direct contact with members of the Civil Division; members of the regular OD received their orders from the Judenrat. The responsibilities of the OD combined those of a normal civilian police force with those of prison guards. They also had the right to impose sentences traditionally handed out by courts. But what people most remember about the OD was their help during roundups and deportations. In time, the OD became the most despised symbol of the Nazi system throughout the ghetto. Many OD policemen fell prey to the rampant corruption that plagued German rule in the General Government, which only added to Jewish hatred of these units.⁴⁷

The Jewish OD were only part of a complex network of Judenrat organizations and facilities created to deal with the complexities of life and society in the Kraków ghetto. Among the most important was the Jewish Self-Help Society (JSS, Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe; Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna) at ul. Józefivka 18. The JSS, headed by Dr. Michał Weichert, was created in the spring of 1940 at the instigation of the Joint, which was searching for a Jewish-run organization in German-occupied Poland to distribute welfare aid to Polish Jews. The Germans insisted, though, that the JSS become part of a Nazi-run Main Welfare Council (NRO; Naczelna Rada Opiekuncza) that also had Polish and Ukrainian delegates. The NRO first came under the jurisdiction of the Nazi Party’s National Socialist People’s Welfare agency (NSV; Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt) and later Hans Frank’s Population and Welfare agency (BuF; Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge), created in April 1940. The Germans insisted that the German Red Cross, which was part of the NSV, act as the JSS liaison with the Joint. The JSS was a General Government-wide organization. Both the JSS and the Joint had offices in Warsaw and Kraków.⁴⁸

Weichert, who longed for independence from JSS headquarters in Warsaw and the Kraków Judenrat, partially got his wish after Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, and closed the Joint office in Warsaw. Though Joint Warsaw continued to operate illegally, it lost control of its JSS offices elsewhere in the General Government. Undeterred, the ambitious Weichert continued to run the Kraków JSS office, now in the ghetto and later in Płaszów. Initially, Weichert tried to help Jews throughout the General Government, though when the SS took over all Jewish matters in the General Government on June 3, 1942, his efforts were increasingly limited to Kraków’s Jews. By this time, with an eye towards the closing of the ghettos in the General Government, the SS ordered the dissolution of the NRO. Weichert was permitted to take over a new organization, the Jewish Aid Center (JUS; Jüdische Unterstützungsstelle), which was responsible for providing Jews in slave labor camps with whatever aid arrived for them from abroad. JUS continued to operate even after the the Kraków ghetto was closed in the spring of 1943, aided by at least one future Schindlerjude, Dr. Chaim Hilfstein. The SS finally shut down JUS in August 1943, though Weichert continued to work for the Polish relief organization, the Chief Aid Committee (Rada Głowna Opiekuncza). Weichert somehow managed to continue to send goods into the German slave labor camps. In early 1944, the Germans allowed him to reopen JUS; when the Germans closed it again in the summer of 1944, Weichert went into hiding. He survived the Holocaust, but many Jews, as well as the Polish courts, viewed him with suspicion. He was tried several times in Poland because of suspected collaboration with the Germans. He was found innocent on each occasion and ultimately migrated to Israel.⁴⁹

One of the most fascinating aspects of Weichert’s efforts to help Jews in the General Government was his contact with Oskar Schindler. There is no direct evidence concerning their relationship; but as both men were deeply involved in efforts to help Jews in the ghetto and in Płaszów, Weichert and Schindler probably had some sort of working relationship, particularly after Schindler made his first trip to Budapest in 1943 to bring Jewish Agency funds back to Kraków. According to Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, a Schindler Jew who wrote one of the most important books on the Jews of Kraków during the war, two of Weichert’s contacts in Kraków were Itzhak Stern and Mietek Pemper, two of Oskar Schindler’s closest Jewish associates during and after the war. Stern and Pemper, who worked in the office of Płaszów camp commandant Amon Göth, supplied Dr. Weichert with “secret documents and decrees,” which he turned over to the Polish underground. Dr. Bieberstein also says that Weichert supplied Schindler with his first shipment of medicines after he had moved part of his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitiz in the fall of 1944. Dr. Bieberstein was a prominent physician who headed the Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Kraków before the war and continued to serve in this position when the Germans moved it to the ghetto. Tadeusz Pankiewicz described Dr. Bieberstein as “an exceptional human being” who continued his hospital administrative work in Kraków after the war until his migration to Israel.⁵⁰

There were three hospitals, an orphanage, and a post office in the Kraków ghetto, as well as a public bath complete with facilities for delousing and disinfecting. It is unclear, though, whether this also served as a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath). Sol Urbach said that he remembered the mikvah before the war because it was near the home of his relatives, who used it. However, he had no memory of the public bath in the Kraków ghetto; he said that while they lived in the ghetto, people found ways to maintain their own personal hygiene. He never was deloused or disinfected while in the ghetto and never had to carry an Entlausungsschein (delousing certificate), a document required elsewhere that certified the carrier had been deloused and disinfected.⁵¹

Religion and Jewish education flourished in the ghetto, though the latter was officially outlawed.⁵² There were three synagogues in the Kraków ghetto and Tadeusz Pankiewicz said that people continued to observe Shabbat and the Jewish holidays while living there. He said that their suffering was always evident on their faces during these times of worship. He often observed Orthodox men and women standing outside the makeshift synagogue near the rear of his pharmacy separately reciting their prayers on Shabbat. He added that the Kaddish, the prayers for the dead, were frequently recited in almost every Jewish ghetto home.⁵³

Yet hints of normalcy in the Kraków ghetto were a façade. The threat of violence and death was constant. Stella Müller-Madej’s family lived in constant fear for their personal safety, particularly that of their children. Stella was eleven years old when the ghetto opened and her brother, Adam, was fifteen. Adam and his parents had to leave Stella alone every day to go to work. Stella’s parents instructed her to avoid the ghetto wall areas, strangers, and “quarrels with children.” The day-time hours were very lonely for the young girl; she recalled she “kick[ed] around the Ghetto streets as if [she] were in a bewitched world.” As the child of secular Jewish parents, she found the “little rabbis,” the Orthodox Jewish children with their hair locks and conservative dress, “especially irritating.” But what really frightened her was the random violence. On one occasion before the completion of the ghetto wall, a gang of Polish children began to pick on her. When a Polish worker helping to build the wall intervened, his colleague admonished him to “let the kids have fun with the little Jew.” He then said, “Hey, Sarah [the Germans by this time required all Jews to have a Jewish name, often Sarah for females, and to carry an Amtsbestätigung documenting such a change], here’s an apple for you.” Then he threw the apple in Stella’s face, bloodying her nose. Angry with his coworker, the kind Polish worker shouted, “You son of a bitch, I’ll show you! Aren’t they putting them through enough hell without us?” He then came over, wiped Stella’s face clean of blood, and warned her that it would be best if she did not return to the wall construction site “because something really bad might happen.” He then asked Stella’s name. Ashamed of the behavior of his coworker, he told Stella that his name was Antoni. In fact, he added, it would be okay if she came back to the construction site. If she did, he would bring her a toy.⁵⁴

Though Stella’s parents forbade her to return to the wall construction site or to speak to Antoni, she did so surreptitiously. On one occasion, Antoni gave her a black puppy, whom Stella named Blackie. The puppy became Stella’s constant companion in the ghetto. In fact, though her parents had originally opposed her keeping him, they later agreed that Blackie was a good companion for Stella in these dangerous times. When the Germans had completed the ghetto walls, the atmosphere grew more deadly. Random acts of violence became more widespread and people no longer walked normally from place to place. In fear, they scurried about quickly to avoid being shot or beaten by Germans or Poles. The rumors of such mistreatment and death were often as frightening as the actual deeds. Stella constantly heard stories of German soldiers driving around in cars killing Jews “like birds on a roof,” or of children being tossed off a hill overlooking the ghetto by the “Blacks,” or the Baudinists (Baudienst), Poles drafted initially by the Germans for construction work and occasionally used to help the Germans with some of their Jewish roundups. But what most frightened Stella were the stories of Auschwitz she heard her father, who was now an OD man, whisper secretly to her mother.⁵⁵

Yet it was not education, religion, or even the fear of indiscriminate violence that concerned most ghetto residents; it was work. A job and the precious Blauschein that came with it was the bridge to life for Kraków’s Jews. Her father, Zygmunt, had worked long hours in a quarry before he became an OD man. Adam was employed in a nail factory in the nearby Grzegózki district, and her mother, Tusia, ran the office of an Austrian German button factory on ul. Agnieszki near Kazimierz. The wife of the factory owner, Frau Holzinger, became friends with Tusia. She gave Stella’s mother extra food, which she smuggled back into the ghetto. According to Stella, none of the Germans who met Tusia in the Holzinger office believed she was a Jew. On one occasion, Mrs. Holzinger invited Tusia to a reception in her home. Tusia hesitated, but Mrs. Holzinger insisted and promised to drive her back to the ghetto when the party was over. Everything went well until Tusia’s Jewish armband fell out of her purse in front of some of the German guests. A few were members of the SS. Mrs. Holzinger tried to explain away the incident as a joke, but Tusia feared it would cost her her job. It did not.⁵⁶

Some Jews worked outside the ghetto; others found employment in factories and other concerns within the ghetto’s walls. In an effort to bring some normalcy to life in the ghetto, several bakeries, dairies, and restaurants opened in the spring of 1941. One restaurant had a night club that featured the orchestra and two musicians who were made famous in Schindler’s List: violinist Henry Rosner and his brother, accordionist Leopold Rosner. The restaurant and bar were owned by Alexander Förster, who often entertained guests from the Gestapo there. Jews could provide the entertainment at such functions, but they could never be a part of them. With the exception of a few well-placed Jews such as Förster and Spira Symcha, few Jews could afford such luxuries or had the energy for them. Jews fortunate enough to have a job worked long, hard hours and usually came home exhausted, not only from the work but from the stress of living as forced laborers and prisoners of the Germans and their Polish collaborators.⁵⁷

German labor policies for Jews varied throughout the General Government and changed as the Germans developed new confinement and death policies for them. In the summer of 1940, Dr. Max Frauendorfer, head of Hans Frank’s Labor Division (Hauptabteilung Arbeit), issued regulations that laid out general guidelines for the use and payment of Jewish workers in the General Government. The police were to deal with questions regarding Jewish labor, though in reality it was overseen by Frauendorfer’s labor offices throughout the General Government. Frauendorfer argued that it was necessary to use Jewish labor because so many Poles were being sent to Germany to work. He added that many Polish Jews were skilled laborers and were to be used as part of the normal labor pool throughout the General Government. Because the Jewish Councils had limited resources, Frauendorfer decreed that Jews used in the normal labor market were to be paid salaries equal to 80 percent of that paid Polish workers. These guidelines did not apply to Jews used as forced labor.⁵⁸

Frauendorfer’s policies were totally ineffective. Polish and German businessmen were unwilling to pay Jews wages anywhere near Frauendorfer’s rates; if they were paid anything at all, it was usually in foodstuffs bought on the Aryan side. In all likelihood, the food given to Tusia Müller by Mrs. Holzinger was probably her salary. This situation worsened with the opening of the ghettos, which limited the ability of many Jews to continue to work openly in the free Polish or German side of the economy outside of the ghetto. This was particularly true after the Germans had begun to think seriously about the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the fall of 1941. Their plan would involve closing most ghettos, though questions remained about the use of Jews in slave labor situations, particularly after the experiment with Soviet POW slave labor had failed.⁵⁹

Various factories and businesses in the ghetto were owned by Poles and Germans, who used Polish and Jewish workers. One of the more famous was opened on the site of the former Optima Chocolate Factory on ul. Wigierska opposite the Jewish Orphanage, which was run by JSS. The factory, which was operated by the Zentrale für Handwerklieferungen, employed Jewish craftsmen who made shoes, furs, and clothing for the Germans.⁶⁰

Julius Madritsch, Raimund Titsch, and Oskar Schindler

Another well-known factory in the ghetto was owned by a Viennese businessman, Julius Madritsch. He came to Kraków in the spring of 1940 to keep from being drafted into the Wehrmacht. Though he initially became a trustee for two Jewish confectionary stores, Hogo and Strassberg, at the end of 1940, Madritsch soon was able to open a sewing factory that employed Jewish and Polish workers. Early on, Madritsch gained a reputation similar to Schindler’s when it came to the treatment of his Jewish employees. Most of the Schindlerjuden I interviewed knew of Madritsch and said he had a reputation as a good man who treated his Jewish workers well. Mila Levinson-Page worked for Madritsch and said he was “wonderful to his Jews.” Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenweig, one of two Jewish maids who worked for Amon Göth in Płaszów, remembered Madritsch well. Unlike Oskar, she recalled, Julius Madritsch never ran around with women. And on one occasion, Julius brought Helen medicine for her ailing mother.⁶¹

The two men became friends. And when it came time for Marcel Goldberg to make up the famous “Schindler’s List” in the fall of 1944, Schindler told Goldberg to be sure to include Madritsch’s people. Several years after Oskar Schindler was nominated to be a Righteous Gentile, Julius Madritsch and his factory manager, Raimund Titsch, were declared Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem. If you stand at the site of Schindler’s carob tree at Yad Vashem, you can see Madritsch and Titsch’s trees on the Avenue of the Righteous. Yet after the war, the friendship between Schindler and Madritsch soured because of a dispute over the transfer of some of Madritsch’s Jews to Brünnlitz and related matters. Oskar, though, always remained fond of Titsch.⁶²

But Titsch was more than just a good human being; he was also an excellent photographer who secretly took photographs of Amon Göth and the Płaszów forced labor camp after Madritsch moved his sewing factory there in 1943. It is Titsch who has provided us with pictures of the overweight, half-naked Göth; some show him armed for target practice, live Jews his targets; other show him standing with his vicious dogs, Rolf and Ralf. Titsch, who knew the photographs were deadly evidence, always kept them hidden, even after the war. According to Thomas Keneally, Titsch did not have them developed but instead hid them in a park in Vienna. Titsch learned after the war that he was listed as a traitor in the files of ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen; Organization of Former SS-Members), a secret SS network, and feared for his life. In 1963, Leopold Page bought the secret photographs from Titsch for $500, who was seriously ill with heart disease. Later, Page would donate the entire Titsch collection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.⁶³

Madritsch’s story, which is drawn from his brief memoirs, Menschen in Not! (People in Distress), is important for the details he gives us about the inner workings of the German administrative system in Kraków, particularly as it relates to helping Jews. What Schindler and Madritsch achieved was far too complex to have been done without the help of others. Madritsch’s story provides a deeper look into the complexities of life and business for factory owners like himself and Oskar Schindler. Yet Madritsch’s account of his years in Kraków also provides us with a deeper look into the world of Oskar Schindler. Until the last year of the war, Schindler and Madritsch seemed quite close. Schindler even asked Madritsch to move his sewing factory to Brünnlitz. Madritsch’s account of his failed efforts to gain permission for the move, his attempts to put some of his Jews on Goldberg’s “Schindler’s List,” and his donation of fabric to Schindler adds depth to the Schindler story.⁶⁴

Madritsch wrote in his memoirs that he sought to avoid the draft not because he was a shirker, but to avoid serving as an involuntary mercenary for the “‘new apostles’ [the Nazis], who had already forced on [his] homeland the blessings of the Thousand Year Reich.” There is no doubt that Schindler and Madritsch were drawn together by their common Austrian heritage. The key to success for a German businessman in the General Government was well-placed contacts and Madritsch, like Schindler, had many. He got his start in business through a friend, Fritsch, who managed the Stafa department store in Kraków. Fritsch in turn introduced Madritsch to Dr. Adolf Lenhardt, a Viennese economic specialist with the General Government. Lenhardt helped Madritsch find a position as a textile specialist with the Textile Trade Association in Kraków (Textilfachmann zur Textilhandelsges m. b. H., Krakau) and later managed Madritsch’s second sewing factory in Tarnow. At the same time, Madritsch became trustee for the two confectionery businesses.⁶⁵

Madritsch was even-handed in his dealings with his Polish and Jewish workers, who gave him insight “into the methods that the German civil administration and the SS and police chiefs were using.” Soon after he got into the confectionery business, Madritsch learned that he could make a great deal more money manufacturing textiles. When word spread among the Jewish community that Madritsch was considering opening a textile factory, representatives of the Judenrat approached him about the prospect of hiring Jewish specialists. Madritsch’s greatest difficulties with German authorities came after the opening of the Kraków ghetto. He had to intervene constantly with the SS, the police, and the Labor Office to obtain work permits for his Jewish workers. An Austrian countryman, Major Ragger, frequently intervened for Madritsch with the SS and the police. But he had more trouble with the Labor Office, which insisted that he hire Poles instead of Jews. General Government labor officials charged that Madritsch was “a saboteur of the Jewish transfer [into the ghetto] and could encounter difficulties with the Gestapo.” Evidently, this did not deter Madritsch, who was able to hire an increasing number of Jewish workers because they were “important to the war effort.”⁶⁶

In the midst of the opening of the Kraków ghetto in the spring of 1941, Madritsch was finally drafted into the Wehrmacht. From April 1941 until November 1942, he had to turn over the trusteeship of his factory to Heinz Bayer. He had been quite concerned about who would take over his half completed sewing factory because the previous trustee, Lukas, an SA (Sturmabteilung, Storm Division; Storm Troopers) Führer, had initiated a reign of terror over the workers. Raimund Titsch, Madritsch’s “collaborator,” continued to run the factory and kept Madritsch, who was stationed in Vienna, informed about developments there and in Kraków. Titsch kept a detailed account of all the firm’s business affairs in a personal diary. Before Bayer assumed management, he met with Madritsch in Vienna, where they decided to set up a new business; they would use Madritsch’s special business certificate, which gave him the right to operate a factory that produced goods for the military and allowed him to use Jewish workers. But like Schindler, Madritsch also relied on several Jewish workers, such as Naftali Hudes and Mr. Karp, for advice on setting up his new factory.⁶⁷

All of this took place in the spring and summer of 1942 when the SS was opening its death camps for Jews throughout occupied Poland and struggling with the Wehrmacht over control of Jewish workers. Heinz Bayer began to suffer from eye problems and stress caused by “the relentless persecution of the Jews.” Over time, Bayer became unfit for work; in August 1942, he resigned his position with Madritsch’s firm and returned to Vienna. Fortunately, the Wehrmacht gave Madritsch several long leaves to return to Kraków and in August 1942 allowed him to return to Kraków permanently. Madritsch was finally released from military service later that year. He said that if his superiors in Vienna had not allowed this, “everything [in Kraków] would have collapsed.” Madritsch added that Wehrmacht did not think much of his soldiery skills because his superiors “took only little delight in [his] ‘professional’ performance.”⁶⁸ But would this completely explain their decision to grant him such extensive leaves to return to his businesses in Kraków? Probably not. Given the struggle that was taking place between the Armaments Inspectorate and the SS over Jewish labor in 1942, it is quite possible the Wehrmacht concluded that Julius Madritsch was more valuable to them running a military-related factory in the General Government than manning a desk in Vienna.⁶⁹

The Controversy over Jewish Labor and the Final Solution

Madritsch returned to Kraków just as German policies towards Poland’s Jews were undergoing a dramatic, deadly change. When the Nazi leadership had set in motion plans for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, they struggled for months with the role of Jewish labor vis-à-vis the goals of the Final Solution. As the death camps began to open throughout occupied Poland, the idea was to send able-bodied Jews to concentration camps as slave laborers and Jews incapable of work to the death camps. Yet even here there was controversy because of conflicting Nazi racial and economic goals. Though Nazi racial goals initially took precedence over economic ones when it came to the Final Solution, Germany’s desperate manpower needs forced Reich leaders to rethink this issue, particularly after the failed experiment using Soviet POWs as slave laborers. By early 1942, the SS began to shift to a policy of destruction through labor. According to Christopher Browning, this meant that “Jews capable of labor were to work productively and die in the process.”⁷⁰

In the General Government, though, where Jews had come to play an important role in the industrial labor force, such a policy was counterproductive. This conflict came up during the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942. Delayed because of the outbreak of war between Germany and the United States, Reinhard Heydrich called the meeting in hopes of obtaining “clarity on questions of principle” regarding the Final Solution from the prominent representatives of various ministries in the government and the Nazi Party who attended the conference. Dr. Josef Bühler, Hans Frank’s state secretary (Der Staatssekretär in der Regierung des Generalgouvernements) stated that he wanted to put it on

Bühler ended his remarks with a request that “the Jewish question in this area be solved as quickly as possible.”⁷² But the idea of concentrating those Jews essential to the German war effort in slave labor camps also concerned Bühler, who feared the camps would “destroy the existing organizational forms within which Jews were working and damage their ‘multifaceted use.’”⁷³

The Wehrmacht, particularly the Armaments Inspectorate (Wi Rü Amt) under General Georg Thomas, was also fearful of such disruptions. Initially, the Armaments Inspectorate had opposed the use of Jewish labor for security reasons; but by the spring of 1942, the Armaments Inspectorate, working with the SS, used Jewish labor in an aircraft factory in Mielec. The idea was that Jewish workers would replace Poles and Ukrainians sent to the Reich as forced laborers. The Wehrmacht then began to experiment with the use of Jewish labor elsewhere in the General Government. General Maximillian Schindler, the head of the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government, was so pleased with this experiment that in May 1942 he proposed the employment of 100,000 Jewish workers, which would release a similar number of Poles and Ukrainians for work in the Reich. The following month, General Schindler proposed moving all shoe and clothing factories from the Greater Reich to the General Government, where he would run them using Jewish laborers. In early July, General Schindler and Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the HSSPF in the General Government, worked out an agreement whereby Jews working in the armaments industry would be housed in factory barracks or in SS-run slave labor camps.⁷⁴

Hans Frank initially supported the idea of keeping some Jews to use as slave laborers in the General Government. He also seemed to support the pleas of some German officials that more food was needed to keep the “work Jews” fit for hard labor. But by the summer of 1942, with the war against the Soviet Union entering its second year, concerns over the use of Jewish labor in war production gave way to worries about a serious food shortage in the Third Reich. This fear played into the hands of Heinrich Himmler, who on July 19, 1942, announced that the General Government must be cleared of all Jews by the end of the year. The only exceptions were Jews in forced labor camps in Warsaw, Kraków, Cz\stochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All firms employing Jews were to be closed or transferred into these forced labor camps. Exceptions had to be approved personally by Himmler. The Reichsführer-SS added that these moves “were necessary for the new order in Europe as well as for the ‘security and cleanliness’ of the German Reich and its spheres of interest.” Himmler added that violations of his decree “would endanger peace and order and would create in Europe ‘the germ of a resistance movement and a moral and physical center of pestilence.’”⁷⁵

Two days before the issuance of Himmler’s deportation decree, Krüger informed General Schindler of the termination of all deals between the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate dealing with Jewish labor. Krüger also told General Schindler of the new plan to house all Jewish workers essential to the war effort in newly constructed concentration camps. Because Himmler’s overall plan involved the closing of ghettos throughout the General Government, Krüger promised Schindler that this would be done “in agreement with the Armaments Inspectorate.”⁷⁶

What General Schindler quickly discovered, though, was that Himmler’s massive Jewish deportation scheme was seriously affecting military production. Efforts were made to persuade the SS to take actions against Jews only after it discussed the matter with the Armaments Inspectorate. The Armaments Inspectorate also reminded the SS that with the shipment of so many Poles to the Reich, “Jews [were] the sole available labor manpower.” The problem was that the only factories covered by this agreement were linked to the defense contract plants (Rüstungsbetriebe), armaments factories that had direct contracts with the Armaments Inspectorate. The accord did not cover businesses involved in the production of armaments for firms in the Greater Reich or for the office of the military commander in the General Government.⁷⁷

The Wehrmacht briefly tried to take a stand against Himmler. On August 15, 1942, a meeting was held in Kraków between representatives of the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government and Krüger’s office. Members of the Armaments Inspectorate were told that the plan to use Jewish labor to replace Polish labor was null and void. They were also reminded of Hermann Göring’s recent statement:

One of General Schindler’s representatives, Hauptmann Gartzke, countered that the Armaments Inspectorate needed Jewish workers because military “work orders are mounting.” He added that “it would be impossible to replace overnight the Jews employed as trained workers in the factories of the Armaments Inspectorate.”⁷⁹

At the end of the meeting, the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate seemed to have worked out a compromise. It was agreed that the Jews working for the Armament Inspectorate in the Warsaw ghetto, the largest Jewish slave labor population in the General Government, would be put into a “special armament ghetto” in the Warsaw ghetto and separated from other Jews. However, two days later, Krüger told General Schindler that this agreement was now invalid and that the Warsaw ghetto was to be closed. The SS would now take over control of all Jewish laborers in the General Government. The Armaments Inspectorate would have to deal with the SS on all Jewish labor matters. In situations where Jewish labor was permitted, the Armaments Inspectorate not only would need the permission of the SS to obtain Jewish labor but also would have to build the barracks to house them. Given the serious shortage of barracks in the military, this was an impractical demand.⁸⁰

The Wehrmacht’s modest attempt to thwart Himmler’s efforts ended on September 5, 1942, when Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the OKW, ordered Generalleutnant Kurt Ludwig Baron von Gienanth, the military commander in the General Government, instantly to replace with Poles all Jews working for the Armaments Inspectorate and the Wehrmacht. Himmler, who now planned to push for the removal of Gienanth because of earlier reports of SS difficulties with the general, found his task easier after General Gienanth sent a letter to OKW on September 18 underscoring the ridiculousness of Himmler’s scheme:

Gienanth added that the deportation of the Jews by the SS had seriously slowed war production in the General Government, which meant that top priority winter production orders could not be completed. He was referring, of course, to the dreadful needs of the Wehrmacht as it went into its second harsh winter against the Soviet Union. He warned the OKW that the removal of Jews from the Wehrmacht’s factories “would bring about a considerable reduction in the war potential of the Reich and hold up supplies for the front lines as well as for troops in the General Gouvernement.” He estimated production gaps of 25 percent to 100 percent if Himmler followed through on his deportation orders.⁸²

Himmler responded to Gienanth’s letter on October 9 and pointed out that there was a difference between so-called armament enterprises, such as tailor, shoe, and carpentry shops, and real armament factories that produced weapons. Himmler let Gienanth know that he was prepared to take over shops that produced goods such as uniforms for the war effort. He added:

Himmler added that in real armaments workplaces, Jews were to be segregated into work halls. Over time, the work halls would be integrated into factory camps, and eventually these would be consolidated into several large concentration camp businesses that employed Jews. Himmler thought these special complexes would be located in the eastern part of the General Government. None of this was to be permanent; Himmler pointed out that even these remaining Jews, “in accordance with the Führer’s wish, [would] disappear some day.” Himmler was proposing that the SS now be directly involved in military-related industries, both through the control of Jewish labor and the making of items such as uniforms.⁸⁴

To insure military compliance, Gienanth was replaced as military commander of the General Government by General der Infantrie Siegfried Hanicke. Several days later, Oberst Forster, General Hanicke’s Oberquartiermeister, met with Krüger to work out specific details about Himmler’s new armaments production proposal. This involved all companies doing business with the Armaments Inspectorate or the military commander of the General Government. Forster and Krüger both agreed there would be a reduction in the use of Jewish labor in the armaments industry though this had to be done by mutual agreement. The Armaments Inspectorate would pay the SS Zł 5 ($1.56) a day for male Jewish workers and Zł 4 a day ($1.25) for female Jewish workers. The businesses involved were allowed to deduct up to Zł 1.60 ($0.50) a day for “maintenance.” These funds were to be transferred to the Reich treasury, which had been financing the concentration camp system since 1936. Presuming that a business using Jewish workers took the maximum maintenance allowance, this meant that the SS was paid Zł 3.40 ($1.06) daily for male Jewish workers and Zł 2.40 ($0.75) a day for female Jewish laborers. This was the arrangement that Julius Madritsch and Oskar Schindler began to use in their factories. After the war, Schindler stated that he paid the SS Zł 5 for each of his workers in Emalia.⁸⁵

The new SS-Wehrmacht armaments production agreement did not include the numerous civilian businesses and agencies that used Jewish labor linked to the war effort. Many of these concerns were devastated by the loss of Jewish labor as the SS continued its massive roundup of Jews for the death camps at Auschwitz II—Birkenau, Sobibór, Treblinka, Bełźec, Kuhlmhof (Chełmno), and Majdanek. Frank alluded to these losses in a meeting on December 9, 1942.

By the time that the SS and the Wehrmacht concluded their agreement in the fall of 1942, the Final Solution was entering its deadliest phase. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Germans put together specially trained Einsatzgruppen to initiate a mass murder program aimed principally at Jews but also the communist leadership in the conquered parts of the Soviet Union. There were about 3,000 men in the four major Einsatzgruppen units (A, B, C, and D), many of them members of the SS. They were drawn from all RSHA branches, such as the Gestapo, Sipo, and Kripo, as well as Order Police units and the Waffen-SS. From June 1941 to January 1942, the Einsatzgruppen murdered about 500,000 Soviet Jews.⁸⁷ In the midst of what appeared to be another brilliant military victory for Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leadership, led by Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Herman Göring, began to make plans for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Heydrich laid out the general outline for the plan in a letter to Göring in the spring of 1941. On July 31, 1941, Göring signed an order prepared by Heydrich that gave him the right to move ahead with planning the Final Solution:

While the German leadership began to plan the Final Solution, the Einsatzgruppen and others continued their violent killing campaign against Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, and the communist elite in the Soviet Union.

But the Final Solution was to involve more than just the mass murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen. An integral part of the Final Solution centered around the opening of killing centers throughout German-occupied Poland. The Germans already had considerable experience with such techniques in Germany, where from 1939 to 1941, they operated six T-4 killing centers for the German handicapped. The program was sponsored by Hitler’s private Chancellery (Kanzlei des Führers) and the Reich Ministry of Interior (Reichsministerium des Innern) and took its name from the address of the front organization created to maintain the program’s secrecy, No. 4 Tiergarten Straße, Berlin. Operation T-4 murdered about 70,000 handicapped Germans principally using carbon monoxide as a gassing agent. The victims’ bodies were then cremated. The Germans officially shut down Operation T-4 in the summer of 1941 because its purpose had become public knowledge, though the murder of the handicapped continued not only in Germany but in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Some of the T-4 specialists were brought to the east, where they formed the nucleus of the Final Solution, particularly in the Aktion Reinhard death camps. Working with other specialists from the SS and German businesses, they helped design a variety of killing chambers, vehicles, and crematories to murder and cremate their victims quickly and efficiently.⁸⁹

Though only about half of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in death camps, the six major death camps in occupied Poland came to symbolize the worst of the Holocaust.

The first camp to began gassing Jews as part of the Final Solution was Chełmno (Kulmhof), about forty-five minutes west of ŀódź, where the SS used mobile gas vans to asphyxiate their victims. The SS murdered their first group of Jews at Chełmno on December 8, 1941. Estimates are that as many as from 150,000 to 320,00 Jews were murdered at Chełmno from 1941 to early 1945.⁹⁰

The SS opened its most deadly killing center, Auschwitz (Oświ\cim), located forty miles west of Kraków, in the summer of 1940 as a concentration camp for Poles. Himmler ordered the opening of a second complex, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following spring. In the fall of 1941, Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s commandant, and his deputy, Karl Fritzsch, killed Soviet POWs in two experiments in Auschwitz I using a cyanide-based fumigant, Zyklon B. Höss ordered the murder of the first Jews at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in mid-February 1942 using this deadly gassing agent. The next year, Höss greatly expanded the killing and body-disposal facilities at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. From 1942 until early 1945, the Germans murdered about 1 million Jews and another 100,000 Gypsies, Soviet POWs, Poles, and others in Auschwitz.⁹¹

While Höss and Fritsch experimented with Zyklon B, Himmler appointed the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) in the Lublin district, Odilo GloboOnik, to head a program designed to murder all the Jews in the General Government. After the murder of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech partisans on May 27, 1942, those in charge of this campaign named their operation Aktion Reinhard. From November 1941 until July 1942, the SS opened three more death camps as part of Aktion Reinhard at Bełźec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The Aktion Reinhard death camps were never meant to be permanent; after the murder of what remained of most of the Jews in the General Government, Himmler decided in the spring of 1943 to close the three camps, all traces of their existence to be destroyed.⁹²

In late February 1942, the SS began the experimental murder of Jews in the gas chambers at Bełźec, about a hundred miles northeast of Kraków. The SS used carbon monoxide gas in canisters and pumped it into the death chambers. Over the course of ten months, the SS murdered 550,000 to 600,000 Jews at Bełźec.⁹³ A second Aktion Reinhard camp, Sobibór, was opened north of Lublin in the spring of 1942. During the fourteen months it served as a death camp, the SS murdered as many as 200,000 Jews there. The Germans used a heavy captured Russian diesel engine to pump carbon monoxide into Sobibór’s gas chambers and then cremated or buried the bodies in mass graves. Sobibór was transformed into a concentration camp in the summer of 1943, though Himmler closed it after an embarrassing uprising there on October 14, 1943, that saw about half of Sobibór’s remaining six hundred prisoners attempt an escape. Only about fifty managed to elude their German captors.⁹⁴

The SS opened the third Aktion Reinhard death camp, Treblinka, to the northeast of Warsaw, in the summer of 1942. Initially a German forced labor camp, Treblinka became, after Auschwitz, the deadliest of the German killing centers in the General Government. Estimates are that about 763,000 Jews and 100,000 non-Jews were murdered in Treblinka. As at Sobibór, carbon monoxide was pumped into gas chambers from a diesel engine. The victims’ bodies were then buried in mass graves. As the Germans made plans to close Treblinka, a rebellion broke out on August 2, 1943. About 750 of the 850 Jewish inmates left in Treblinka took part in the uprising. Most were killed or caught within twenty-four hours, but about 90 successfully escaped the initial German dragnet and fled to the interior of Poland.⁹⁵

There was one more death camp in occupied Poland, Majdanek, located in the suburbs of Lublin. Today, one can eerily look at what remains of the concentration and death camp from a nearby apartment window. In the summer of 1941, Himmler ordered Globocnik to open a concentration camp in Lublin for 25,000 to 50,000 prisoners with the idea of “employing them in the workshops and on building sites of the SS and police.”⁹⁶ The Majdanek inmates were to be used in various SS ventures and to help build an “SS settlement” in Lublin, which Himmler hoped would become the center of SS activities and supply for operations in the Soviet Union. As HSSPF in Lublin, Globocnik saw Majdanek as his personal camp. He had seven gas chambers built there that used Zyklon B, though the Germans also used the gallows and the guillotine to murder their prisoners. About 60 percent of the 360,000 Jews, Poles, Soviet POWs, and others who were murdered in Majdanek died from harsh labor conditions, malnutrition, or disease. The SS began to dismantle Majdanek in the spring of 1944; it was liberated by the Red Army that summer.⁹⁷

Madritsch’s Operations in the Kraków Ghetto

Once Madritsch returned permanently to Kraków, he found it difficult to do business with the SS and, in turn, the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate, without considerable help from others in the General Government’s administration. Because of his extensive contacts in the Textile Trade Association in Kraków, Madritsch was able to get an order for uniforms from the Wehrmacht that “qualified [his] firm as an armaments factory.” He got a bank loan of Zł 1,370,000 ($428,125) greatly to expand the size of his operations and opened a second factory in Tarnow. He employed eight hundred workers in each factory, many of them Jews. Like Schindler, Julius Madritsch relied upon his German and Polish contacts to keep the factory running. He mentions his most important supporters and collaborators throughout his memoirs. At the end of the introduction to his brief memoirs, he names five upright coworkers who were particularly important in helping Jews and Poles. With the exception of Mrs. Anneliese Pipgorra, who worked in his office, the other four upright coworkers he mentions were from Austria. This list included Raimund Titsch, Dr. Adolf Lenhardt, Mrs. Maria Herling, another office worker, and a police lieutenant, Oswald Bousko, vice commander of Schupo (Schutzpolizei; municipal police, or constables) in Podgórze. Madritsch is equally complimentary of his Polish collaborators, whom he considered no less helpful than his German and Austrian friends. He said he “had blind trust in their loyalty, bravery, and intelligence” and felt linked to them in “sincere friendship.” Madritsch was also very proud of the relationship between his Jewish and Polish workers and bragged that despite the opposition of the SD, he periodically held adherence nights (Gefolgsabende) before the creation of the ghetto that he said were “comparable to family reunions” for his Jewish and Polish workers.⁹⁸

Yet there were also others who were instrumental to his success in helping Jews and Poles during the war. He was particularly dependent on Herr Mißbach, the head of the Textile Trade Association in Kraków. It was Mißbach who gave Madritsch the numerous “certificates documenting the importance of [his] firms for the war effort.” According to Madritsch, Mißbach knew exactly the type of information needed on the various reports he supplied the Armaments Inspectorate teams that periodically evaluated Madritsch’s operations to insure that he met Wehrmacht production standards. According to Madritsch, Mißbach was so good at preparing these phony reports that he was able to convince the Armaments Inspectorate that he ran the “largest ‘armaments’ factory in the G.G., even though in reality [Madritsch] produced at least 95 percent for the civil sector.”⁹⁹

Madritsch goes on to mention four more mid-level German bureaucrats (Graßnickel, Stoffregen, Reddig, and Schneewind) from the trade association in Kraków who “helped… turn out production numbers according to the full number of laborers, even though [Madritsch] had at most 40 percent specialized workers.” Madritsch never says whether these officials helped out from the goodness of their hearts or because he bribed them. But regardless of their motives, these officials were able to rewrite reports that made it seem that 40 percent of Madritsch’s Jewish workforce was doing the work of “100 percent Jewish expert workers.” But his trade association friends did more than pad numbers: They made sure that Madritsch received orders that were easy to produce and used a minimal amount of cloth to insure greater profits.¹⁰⁰

Like Schindler, Madritsch had to reward German officials and others with extensive bribes and gifts to insure their support. Over time, Madritsch found that doing business in the General Government became more and more expensive. He attributed part of this to the dramatic rise in the cost of living for civil servants in the General Government. Though many Reich officials initially left their families behind in the Reich, they often brought their families to Poland later to cut expenses. Consequently, Madritsch found these officials seemed “less reluctant” to accept bribes from businessmen such as Madritsch and Schindler. Yet an increase in the cost of living was not the only reason that some Germans accepted bribes. Some were simply greedy and corrupt. Regardless of the motivation, how did Madritsch acquire the extra funds for the bribes? He did it by efficiently cutting the cloth he had for uniform production and then having “his people” sell it on the black market. He used the extra funds to bribe German and Polish officials for extra pay or food for his workers.¹⁰¹

Though Madritsch never talked about the amount of money he made in Kraków and Tarnow, he did mention the amount of money he had to pay the SS for “subsistence” and for food subsidies. At the peak of his operations in 1943–1944, he was paying the SS Zł 350,000 ($109,375) a month for subsistence and spent Zł 250,000 ($78,125) a month for extra food for his workers. This seems like an incredible amount, but it was not out of line with the amounts paid by Oskar Schindler to the SS or spent for extra food during the same period, though Schindler’s figures seem lower than Madritsch’s estimates. It is possible that both men exaggerated the amounts they spent during the war to help Jews, but for different reasons. Moreover, Schindler, unlike Madritsch, does not discuss total monthly subsistence payments to the SS. Oskar wrote his principal financial report just after the war ended with the idea of getting compensation first from Jewish organizations and later from the West German government. Madritsch wrote Menschen in Not! in 1962 after his name came up as a possible Righteous Gentile candidate in Israel.¹⁰²

The introduction to Menschen in Not! was written by Dr. Dawid Schlang, a professor at the University of Vienna and the general secretary of the Zionist Association in Austria. Dr. Schlang wrote, “We can consider him [Madritsch] with pure conscience as a member of the tiny and hidden Zadilkei [Tzaddik] Umoth Haolam [thirty-six righteous of the different peoples on whom the world rests],” a reference to the Talmudic legend of the Thirty-Six Tzaddikim, or righteous persons. The term Tzaddik is used in the Jewish scriptures to describe, among others, Noah, and refers to a person of great moral character who by his lifestyle inspired others to follow a similar path of faith and piety. The Talmudic legend says that no one except G-d knows the identity of the Tzaddikim, though the existence of the world depends on their unselfish lives and work.¹⁰³

The evolving labor policies in the General Government, particularly as they related to Jews, created problems as well as opportunities for Oskar Schindler and Julius Madritsch. With the onset of the Final Solution, it became more and more difficult to hire and keep skilled Jewish laborers. On the other hand, the Third Reich’s growing labor shortages also created opportunities for German factory owners who were already accustomed to dealing with the General Government’s complex and corrupt black market. They discovered that well-placed bribes could get them almost anything, even Jewish workers. The skill of Germans such as Schindler and Madritsch was inherent in their balancing of personal concern for the well-being of their Jewish slave laborers with the broader Nazi demand for the elimination, through mass murder or forced labor, of all Jews from the face of Europe. During the latter years of the war, both German factory owners found a way to weave their way through the complex racial and economic worlds of the General Government, though, in the end, it was Oskar Schindler who did the most to save his Jewish workers.