Oskar Schindler

IN ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE SCENES IN STEVEN SPIELBERG’S film Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler slowly dictates the names he wants Itzhak Stern to type on to the famous “Schindler’s List.” Schindler seems to struggle to come up with the names of the thousand Jews he wants sent from Płaszów to his new sub-camp at Brünnlitz (BrnZnec), near his hometown of Svitavy, in what was then the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Böhren und Mähren). As Stern nears the completion of the list, he asks Schindler whether he was buying the names on the list from Amon Göth. Schindler replies that the list was costing him a fortune.¹ When Stern completes the list, Schindler takes it to Amon Göth, who says after looking it over that it contains one clerical error: the name Helen Hirsch. Göth tells Schindler that he cannot let Helen Hirsch go because he wants to take her back to Vienna with him. Schindler reminds Göth that he cannot take a Jew home with him after the war and Göth replies that perhaps he should take Helen to the woods and shoot her. Instead, Oskar offers to play a game of cards with Göth to win her freedom. Schindler suggests they play double or nothing. If Göth wins, Oskar will give him Zł 7,400 ($2,312.50); if Göth’s winning hand is a “natural,” Oskar will pay him Zł 14,800 ($4,625). But if Schindler wins, he can put Helen Hirsch on his list.²

This scene, which was taken from Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s List, is pure fiction.³ For one thing, Oskar Schindler had no role in preparing the famous list other than giving SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, some general guidelines for the type of workers he wanted on the list. Moreover, Amon Göth was in prison in Breslau when the list was being prepared and played no role in its creation. In reality, the creation of the famous “Schindler’s List,” like so much of the Schindler story, is much more complex. Its author was not Oskar Schindler, Itzhak Stern, Mietek Pemper, Abraham Bankier, or even Amon Göth. Instead, the person responsible for the preparation of “Schindler’s List” was a corrupt Jewish OD man, Marcel Goldberg; he was the assistant of SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Müller, who was responsible for the transport lists. Spielberg’s version of the creation of the famed “Schindler’s List” certainly fits more comfortably with his efforts to underscore Oskar Schindler’s decency and concern for his Jewish workers, but the reality is that Schindler had very little to do with it and he admitted as much after the war. In fact, only about a third of the Jews on the list had worked for Oskar Schindler in Kraków before he was given permission to transfer part of his factory operations to Brünnlitz. And more often than not, many of those who were put on Goldberg’s list were prominent prewar Cracovian Jews or important Jewish officials in Płaszów. Some Jews were able to bribe their way onto the list, though this was more the exception than the rule. Others were on the list because they had worked for Julius Madritsch or had worked previously for Josef Leipold, Brünnlitz’s new SS commandant. And some were on the list just because they were lucky.

The complexities surrounding the creation of the famous “Schindler’s List” list underscore the tragic series of events that led to its creation. The list was, Itzhak Stern told Schindler as he completed typing it in the film, “an absolute good, the list is life, all around its margins lies the gulf.”⁴ The gulf, of course, was the death and horror of the Shoah. And all the Jews who did not make it onto the list faced the possibility of death during the final months of World War II. Germany may have been losing the war, but this had little impact on their fate. The Nazi commitment to rid Europe of all Jews continued until the very end of the conflict.

For the Jews of Płaszów, a contradictory series of events took place in the first half of 1944. Conditions for the camp’s general inmate population seemed to improve at about the same time that the number of prisoners there increased as the Germans used Płaszów as a transit camp for large numbers of Hungarian Jews on their way to Auschwitz. Some of the most poignant scenes in Thomas Keneally’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film are drawn from this tragic period in the camp’s history.

After the SS officially declared Płaszów one of its official concentration camps in early 1944, conditions seemed to improve. Mietek Pemper testified in Göth’s 1946 trial that Płaszów’s commandant was limited in his deadly behavior by SS regulations on the mistreatment of prisoners in concentration camps, something he had not had to contend with when Płaszów was a forced labor camp. Pemper admitted that during the first months of its existence as a concentration camp, Płaszów “became a place of rest” when compared to earlier conditions.⁵ Another Schindlerjude, Dr. Aleksandr Bieberstein, a camp physician, testified at the same trial that conditions also improved in other aspects of camp life. Selections were now made by German camp physicians, which meant there were fewer arbitrary deaths based on medical evaluations.⁶

The idea of the SS having regulations about the mistreatment of Jews and other prisoners seems contradictory, but there was a peculiar logic to it. As Heinz Höhne explains it, “the really horrifying feature of the annihilation of the Jews was that thousands of respectable fathers of families made murder their official business and yet, when off duty, still regarded themselves as ordinary law-abiding citizens who were incapable even of thinking of straying from the strict path of virtue.”⁷ From Heinrich Himmler’s perspective, the SS mass murder program was to be “carried out coolly and cleanly.” Even as the SS man committed his crimes, he had to remain “decent.”⁸ Himmler explained to SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a self-styled protégé of Reinhard Heydrich, that if he found an SS man who had become excessively dutiful or showed a lack of restraint, he had to intervene. “Anyone,” Himmler told Franke-Gricksch, “who finds it necessary to dull his senses, or forgets himself in the face of the enemy who is handed over to him, shows that he is no true SS Commander.”⁹

And Himmler backed up his ideas about the unreasonable treatment of prisoners with regulations that forbade “independent, individual actions against the Jews” and even required camp guards to sign a statement every three months “acknowledging their duty to refrain from maltreating prisoners.”¹⁰ In reality, of course, the camp administration and staff had a great deal of flexibility in how they interpreted these rules and regulations, which Wolfgang Sofsky has called “terror incorporated.” The modest limits on concentration staff behavior were counterbalanced by the excessive rules governing inmate behavior. According to Sofsky, “because everything was forbidden to the prisoners, all was permitted for the personnel.”¹¹ From the SS’s perspective, the defining point regarding the mistreatment or murder of Jewish prisoners seemed to center around whether the act was personal or political. If a Jew was murdered because of “political” reasons, this was acceptable behavior. If, however, a death was caused by “selfish, sadistic, or sexual” motivations, then the accused SS man could be tried for murder or manslaughter.¹² Such regulations would later be used against Amon Göth in the SS investigation of his multiple crimes, particularly the murder of Wilhelm Chilowicz, the camp’s chief Jewish administrator.

The May 14, 1944, Aktion

But whatever new sense of order and moderation that seemed to settle over Płaszów in the first three or four months of 1944 dissipated after Amon Göth got a secret telegram from SS-Standartenführer Gerhard Maurer, the head of Amtsgruppe D2, a branch of the SS WVHA (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt; Economic and Administrative Main office), which oversaw all aspects of concentration camp prison labor.¹³ According to Mietek Pemper, who saw the secret message from Maurer to Göth, the head of Amtsgruppe D2 wanted to know whether Göth could temporarily handle some additional prisoners from Hungary who were ultimately to be sent to different armament sub-camps from Auschwitz. He went on to explain that SS regulations stipulated that such armaments workers had to be housed in a neighboring camp. Göth replied that he could take up to 10,000 prisoners if Maurer let him “clean out of the camp” the sick, the weak, the elderly, and children. He also wanted permission to “double use the plank beds.” Göth went on to explain that he could assign some of his workers to barracks where they would share the same assigned spots in one of the standard plank beds. One worker would be assigned to his or her spot in the collective bunk while the other worker was at his twelve-hour day or night shift. When the shift changed, so did the person who occupied the bunk space. This was Göth’s solution to the space problem.¹⁴

Maurer rejected the idea of assigning two people to the same bunk space because of sanitary concerns, but did give Göth permission to initiate a Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), an SS euphemism for a selection or roundup of prisoners that would lead to their murder. Maurer then informed SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel, Auschwitz’s commandant, to expect a transport from Płaszów.¹⁵ Maurer and Liebehenschel were desperate. Six weeks earlier, German forces had occupied Hungary, once a staunch German ally, to prevent it from switching sides in the war. Until this point, Hungarian Jews had suffered from a series of anti-Semitic laws that had restricted their civil and economic rights and forced them into harsh labor service duties but allowed them some semblance of autonomy. This all changed with the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. A Sonderkommando unit headed by Adolf Eichmann accompanied German forces as they entered Hungary and began to implement a Final Solution for Hungary’s 825,000 Jews. What followed over the next few months was a highly concentrated ghettoization and deportation program that saw 437,402 Jews rounded up and transported, mainly to Auschwitz, where they were murdered as part of Aktion Höss. The SS estimated that it would have to handle from 12,000 to 14,000 Hungarian Jews a day in Auschwitz II-Birkenau and dramatically increased its manpower and killing capacity to handle the new arrivals. The first Jewish transports left Hungary for Auschwitz on May 15 and continued steadily until July 9, 1944. In a few months, the SS was able to murder more than half of Hungary’s prewar Jewish population. The transports were halted by Hungary’s ruler, Admiral Miklós Horthy, in response to international outcries and the proximity of Soviet forces.¹⁶

About 10 percent of the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz were deemed fit for slave labor and were transferred to other camps. About 6,000 to 8,000 Hungarian Jews were sent from Auschwitz to Płaszów.¹⁷ Ana Harsanyi Novac was one of those Hungarian Jews who spent a few weeks in Auschwitz before being transferred to Göth’s camp. She remembered seeing the sign as she was marched through the front gate that read Arbeit macht Frei (Work Will Make You Free).¹⁸ Ana spent six weeks in Płaszów before she was sent back to Auschwitz. Her initial perspectives on the camp were quite different from those of the hardened Polish inmates who had somehow survived Göth’s depredations. She described Płaszów, where she and the other new Hungarian inmates were placed in quarantine, “like a real town” where the “barracks look like new houses.” She said the new arrivals looked “like real women and real men who might have gathered for a real reason in the square of a real town” as they stood together for evening roll call.¹⁹

But she soon became disgusted by Göth’s fascination with public hangings and his warped fascination with “pageantry.” Once the quarantine was lifted, Ana was assigned to work in the quarry, the hardest work in Płaszów, where she lifted and helped pass stones from one end of the quarry to the other. It was there that she saw Göth at his worst. One day, everyone in the quarry, including the Kapos (foremen), suddenly stopped working. As one of the Kapos yelled out, “Los, Schweine, bewegt euch” (Come on, you pigs, move it!), Ana fell to the ground just as Göth jumped over her on his white horse. She described him as “a panting whale, with an enormous belly and fat, pendulous breasts” and medals that “trembled on his breast.” As he looked over the work crew, Göth spotted a victim, a young girl, and began to chase her down, hitting her with his riding crop. When the girl accidentally dropped the stone she was carrying on the hoof of the commandant’s horse, Göth unleashed one of his dogs on her, who chased the girl through the quarry until she stumbled and fell. Göth’s dogs then ripped her apart.²⁰

On Sunday, May 7, 1944, about a month before Ana’s arrival in Płaszów, Göth ordered the camp’s chief German physician, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Max Blancke, to initiate a “medical inspection” (Gesundheitsappell). The final selection process was completed a week later. What transpired has been vividly depicted in Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film. Keneally claimed that Göth had organized the medical inspection like a “country fair.” The Appellplatz in the prisoner’s compound was festooned with banners that read “FOR EVERY PRISONER, APPROPRIATE WORK!” and loudspeakers “played ballads and Strauss and love songs.”²¹

Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein and Mietek Pemper tell a far less colorful story. The initial medical inspection took place on May 7. After the normal morning roll call ended, Płaszów’s head Jewish administrator, Wilek (Wilhelm) Chilowicz, ordered the inmates to remain in place while the SS and Jewish OD men surrounded their barracks. The Jews standing at attention on the Appellplatz were particularly unnerved when the children’s barrack, the Kinderheim, was also surrounded. Murray Pantirer told me that he saw Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s infamous “Angel of Death” nearby, writing down the “names of all the children.”²² After a two-hour wait, Dr. Blancke, accompanied by SS-Obersturmführer Philipp Grimm and SS-Hauptscharführer Willi Eckert, arrived and ordered the women to return to their barracks. Göth explained that they were attempting to assign work based on an inmate’s physical abilities. Inmates determined to be too weak for certain types of jobs would be assigned easier tasks. In the meantime, SS-Hauptscharführer Lorentz Landstorfer and OD man Marcel Goldberg manned two tables with red files on them. The other Jewish OD men in the camp stood nearby to insure that each prisoner moved quickly through the inspection line. The prisoners, who were put in alphabetical groups, were ordered to undress and walk briskly in front of Dr. Blancke. Those considered too weak to work were directed to the tables with the red files, where Landstorfer recorded the physical grade given to him by Dr. Blancke. Though it was early May, the weather was cold enough to force the Germans and the OD men to wear extra clothing. The prisoners remained naked. The health inspection ended at about noon. Dr. Blancke and his staff then moved the tables and red folders to the women’s barracks, where, aided by SS-Aufseherin Alice Orlowski, they went through the same procedure.²³

Seven days later, the inmates were again ordered to remain on the Appellplatz after morning roll call. SS guards stood in front of the entrance to each barracks and guards with light weapons and machine guns stood along the Bergstraße, the main camp road that ran in front of the Appellplatz. Göth and his staff soon arrived and put the red folders on a table. They then began to call the names of prisoners with names in the folders to step forward and line up in groups of five abreast, facing the front gate. As SS guards marched the prisoners out of the Appellplatz gate, the 294 children in the Kinderheim were loaded onto trucks and driven off. Wilhelm Chilowicz tried to convince Göth to save the children of the Jewish OD men and their friends, but Göth allowed only a few to remain behind. Those who survived the Kindertransport (children’s transport) were all children of important Jewish OD men, Jewish Kapos, or children of other prominent Jews in the camp. A few other children were hidden by their parents in the camp’s toilets. Dr. Bieberstein, for example, hid a young girl in the hospital’s toilet. He added that as the children left the camp, the Germans played a song on the loudspeakers, “Mutti, kauf mir ein Pferdchen” (Mummy, buy me a pony). Bieberstein went on to say that it was impossible to describe the scenes that took place as the children were driven out of the camp.²⁴

Stella Müller-Madej was on the Appellplatz that day and the scene she described was as wrenching as the one portrayed in Spielberg’s film. As the women lined up on the Appellplatz, everyone sensed that something was different. Stella noted a sight she had never seen before: hundreds of SS men surrounding the prisoners’ square, their guns aimed towards the inmates. Stella wondered whether they were going to shoot everyone there. Everyone of importance was at the Appellplatz: Göth and his officers; Chilowicz, his assistant, Mietek Finkelstein, Marcel Goldberg, and all the Jewish OD men and Kapos. “The atmosphere,” she recalled, was “so tense that no one dared look around.”²⁵ In the distance, she noticed two open trucks outside the prisoner compound. And then, as she heard the sound of marching children, she knew why the trucks were there. Led by Tatele (Papa) Koch, they marched in rows of five abreast into the Appellplatz, where Koch gave Göth the list of children. Göth “waves his whip dismissively, as if he wants to show that it isn’t important any more.” When he summoned the trucks “with a wave of his whip,” they moved to the gate of the Appellplatz.²⁶

Göth had prepared for what happened next. As the frightened children were forced onto the trucks, “sobs burst from the breasts of mothers and fathers.” The children, who until this moment had “been standing there terrified, as quiet as mannequins,” began to scream in unison. As German guards pushed them onto the trucks, one child screamed, “Mother, Mummy, Daddy, Tatele, save me! I don’t want to go, I’m afraid, get me out of here!” Another small child tried to crawl away on his hands and knees, only to be stopped and thrown back onto the truck by one of the female SS guards. Stella remembered thinking, “No! This is unbearable! The whole apelplatz [sic] is howling, the whips are flying, the dogs barking.”²⁷

As the trucks drove off, their mothers and grandmothers began to rip their clothes and tear their hair. Some even crawled on their hands and knees towards Göth, somehow thinking their appeals might force him to change his mind. All the while, the Kapos and SS female guards (Aufseherinnen) beat children with their whips and forced them back into line. There was no way, of course, that any of the inmates could have charged the trucks as they did in Spielberg’s film. The trucks were outside the prisoners’ compound and Göth had scores of his own men and women on hand to insure order. Stella said in her memoirs that as the children left, the SS played “Mama, komm zurück” (Mama, come back), a song quite different from the one remembered by Dr. Bieberstein. Another Schindlerjude, Joseph Bau, said in his memoirs that the Germans played another German song, “Good night, Mother” (Gute Nacht Mutter).²⁸ This is the song that Spielberg has the Germans play in the film as the children are being driven off in the trucks. More than likely, the Germans played a variety of songs as they loaded the children onto the trucks, perhaps thinking this would soothe them. When the trucks left the camp, the multitude of SS guards, OD men, and Kapos closed in to restore order. As Göth and his entourage left, some mothers begged to be shot. The female guards kicked them and dragged them by the hair back to their place in line on the Appellplatz.²⁹

Later that day, word spread in the women’s camp that two children, Jerzy Spira and Julús Cinz, had been found hiding in the latrine. But another child was also hiding there, Roman Ferber. He chose the latrine because the guards would never go there because of the smell. “The pit was twelve feet deep. You couldn’t have jumped in it or you would have drowned. People would sit on boards with holes, and the stuff would fall inside. There were crossboards [under the boards], and this is where we used to hide, between the crossbars. I cannot describe the smell.”³⁰ The women wondered how to hide, clothe, and feed the hidden children. They decided it was best to leave them in the latrine for another day until it was safe to bring them out. In the meantime, several women volunteered to take care of them until they could be taken out of the latrine. Later, the children were hidden in the inmates’ Krankenstube (sick room) because, explained Stella Müller-Madej, “the Germans have a frantic fear of sickness [and] seldom go there.” Roman Ferber and Jerzy Spira survived and were later put on “Schindler’s List.”³¹

Göth sent almost 1,400 Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz that day, including the children. They were sent to the gas chambers soon after their arrival. Some of them were wearing newly issued striped prisoners’ uniforms; others wore clothes with yellow and red stripes painted on them. The new concentration camp’s first escape had taken place on May 5 and Göth now required all Außenkommandos (inmates who worked outside the concentration camp) to wear the new uniforms to make it harder to escape. There were not enough uniforms to go around, so those without them had yellow and red stripes painted on their clothing during roll call. But because the striped uniforms were in short supply, Płaszów’s commandant asked Liebehenschel to return them after he had gassed Płaszów’s former inmates. Göth testified at his trial that the reason he sent the request to Auschwitz was because that was the designated storage site for camp uniforms in the Kraków region. Pemper added that the uniforms of the former Hungarian Jewish inmates were never returned to Płaszów.³²

The Beginning of the End: Emalia and Płaszów

In many ways, the tragic action at Płaszów on May 14 underscored the contrast between life under Amon Göth and Oskar Schindler. For those forced to continue to live in Płaszów, life remained tenuous. For those two miles away at Emalia, life was more secure. The Jews working at Emalia and living in Schindler’s sub-camp were not forced to participate in the May 7 medical inspection in Płaszów, nor were they put onto the May 14 transport to Auschwitz. But as Soviet forces moved closer and closer, the security that many of Schindler’s Jews enjoyed at Emalia would soon disappear. There were certain things that even Oskar Schindler could not control. Many who had enjoyed the security of “Schindler’s Ark” would soon find themselves in transport to other concentration camps or back at Płaszów. Others who had enjoyed the security of political or financial prominence at Płaszów would take advantage of their situation to have their names and those of their families placed on the famous “Schindler’s List.” But before that happened, a series of dramatic changes took place at Płaszów in the late summer and early fall of 1944 that affected not only all the Jewish workers employed by Oskar Schindler but also those who lived at Płaszów. And in Berlin, Oskar Schindler pulled whatever strings he could to get permission to move part of his Kraków operations back to a site near his hometown in what was then the Sudeten region of Germany.

According to Itzhak Stern, by early July 1944, rumors spread through the camp about its liquidation. Later that month, Oskar received an order from the Armaments Inspectorate in Kraków to begin to plan the evacuation of the armaments portion of Emalia to Germany. Though it would be another six months before the Red Army would take Kraków, Soviet forces had already crossed the Bug River and moved into Poland on July 17, 1944. Seven months earlier, Amon Göth told Julius Madritsch that the WVHA in Berlin had ordered him to close his factory immediately to make room for German Armament Works (DAW; Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke) authorized factories. Madritsch immediately drove to Berlin, where he successfully petitioned the WVHA to keep his factory operating in Płaszów. He based his appeal on the treaty he had signed with HSSPF Ost Wilhelm Koppe in the fall of 1943 that guaranteed the operation of his factory “until the end of the war.” This contract was now invalid because Płaszów was under WVHA jurisdiction. Madritsch quickly enlisted the help of a fellow Viennese, Postrat Grohe, the director of the German postal service in the East, who substantially increased the size of his office’s order with Madritsch. Grohe also contacted the directors of the Compulsory Labor Service (Baudienst) and the Textile Economic Group (Wirtschaftsgruppe Textil), who wrote Oswald Pohl, the head of WVHA, that “the existence of my [Madritsch’s] factories were absolutely necessary [to the war effort].” Consequently, WVHA signed a new agreement with Madritsch on February 24, 1944, to keep his factory open for six more months.³³

The Reich was desperate to maintain the dramatic rise in armaments output orchestrated by Albert Speer. These concerns even spilled over into the manufacture of uniforms, particularly after the Erntefest (Harvest Festival) massacre of 42,000 Jews in the Lublin district on November 3, 1943. General Maxmillian Schindler’s Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government received numerous complaints about the dramatic impact that Himmler’s last major “cleansing” operation in the General Government had on armaments-related production, particularly textiles.³⁴

One of the most serious problems facing German industry in the last two years of war was manpower. As more and more German males were drafted into the military, the German economy, particularly armaments-related industries, came to depend more and more on forced and slave foreign labor to sustain the high levels of armaments production. Until the defeat at Stalingrad, the Reich had depended heavily on the conquered parts of the Soviet Union for its largest pool of foreign workers. With the growing loss of Soviet territory after Stalingrad, Germany had to look elsewhere to fill these needs. Poland had supplied the second largest group of forced laborers in the Reich, though by 1944 the Polish labor market was no longer a viable outlet for the Reich’s foreign labor needs. This desperation helps explain the dramatic shift in SS attitudes in late 1943 and early 1944 towards the use of Jewish slave labor first in the General Government and later in the Reich as factories began to be moved westward to escape capture by Soviet forces.³⁵

Płaszów, for example, had become an important center for the export of Jewish labor to other armament sites in the General Government. On November 16, 1943, for example, 2,500 Jews had been shipped from Göth’s camp to Skarżysko-Kamienna to do munitions work for one of Germany’s largest arms manufacturers, the Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft Metallwarenfabrik (HASAG) of Leipzig. Two days later, 1,500 Jewish workers were sent from Płaszów to armaments plants in Kielce, Cz\stochowa, Pionki, Ostrowice, and Starachowice. This was about 15 percent of the Jews working in armaments-related work in the General Government. Hans Frank estimated in early 1944 that only 100,000 Jews were still alive in the General Government. Desperate for manpower, the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government increased its appeals for Jewish laborers throughout the first half of 1944, but concluded that summer that the “reservoir of Jews will soon be exhausted.”³⁶ Such desperate needs would ultimately play into Oskar Schindler’s hands as he planned to move his armaments factory into the Reich later that fall.

Once Oskar got his orders to break up his Jewish sub-camp (he continued to operate the enamelware part of his factory with 650 Polish workers until early 1945), the pace of the evacuation moved quickly. He got permission to keep three hundred workers at Emalia to help take apart and load that part of the factory that would be shipped to the Reich. The other seven hundred or so would be sent immediately to Płaszów. On the day of the selection, which took place at the end of the first week in August 1944, the SS lined Emalia’s Jews up as Oskar walked among them, selecting the three hundred Jews who would remain behind. According to Sol Urbach, Schindler first selected the most important Jews at Emalia, such as Abraham Bankier, to remain with him for a few more weeks. Then he began to select other Jews to be a part of Emalia’s remaining Jewish work force. As Oskar walked by, Sol decided to speak up, knowing full well that this could bring the wrath of the SS guards on him. He said, “Herr Schindler, kein Tischer ist geblieben” (Herr Schindler, you have no carpenter remaining with you). Oskar took Sol by the arm and put him in the group that would remain at Emalia.³⁷

For the next two or three weeks, the three hundred Jewish males worked to prepare for Oskar’s move to the Reich. Though Schindler was still involved in negotiations about the location of his new factory, he would ultimately ship “two hundred and fifty wagons of machines, production goods, and construction material” to his new camp in the Sudetenland.³⁸ One incident that seemed to hasten the pace of the work was the crash of an Australian B-24 Liberator bomber on the women’s barracks on August 17. Sol said that only the three crew members were killed. Soon afterwards, the three hundred Jewish workers were sent back to Płaszów and integrated into the general camp slave labor pool. Today, there is a small plaque at Telepod, the business complex on the former Emalia site, to honor the three crew members: Flight Leader John P. Liversidge (RAAF), Flight Lt. Pilot William D. Wright (RAF), and Flight Sergeant John D. Clarke (RAF).³⁹

But what happened to the other seven hundred Schindler Jews who were sent back to Płaszów? According to Sol Urbach, there were four hundred men in this group and three hundred women. The men were shipped to Mauthausen almost immediately after they got to Płaszów. According to Schindler, “one hot summer day” he was invited to a security conference of the SS leadership at Płaszów. As he entered the camp’s main gate, he noticed on the railroad tracks that ran beside the main road leading into Płaszów a long train with scores of “cattle wagons” filled with thousands of inmates. Oskar soon learned that the transport was bound for Mauthausen, a large German concentration camp about a hundred miles west of Vienna, near Linz. Though Oskar did not mention the date, the detailed inmate list in the Mauthausen archives for this particularly transport is dated August 10, 1944. Because Oskar mentioned that the train had been on the siding since early morning, and Jews on the transport mentioned they sat on the siding in the cattle cars for three days, it was probably August 8, 1944. There were 4,589 Jewish males on the Mauthausen transport that day; about 400 were Schindlerjuden who had recently worked at Emalia. They were about to be sent to one of the harshest work camps in the Third Reich where almost 60 percent of the 198,000 prisoners sent there during the war died from disease and starvation. More than a third of those who died at Mauthausen were Jews, mostly during the last year of the war. But the Schindler Jews had a much better chance of survival than the others sent there that year.⁴⁰ Several Schindler Jews on that transport confirmed Richard Krumholz’s statement that when they got to Mauthausen, they were “still physically strong from Schindler, not undernourished.” Their time at Emalia gave many of them the stamina they needed to survive the horrors of Mauthausen or other camps.⁴¹

Oskar knew that some of his former workers were on the transport. He bribed Göth to allow him to supply the cattle cars with drinking water and also got permission to bring hoses from the camp to spray the train cars. As they sprayed the metal tops of the cattle cars with water, Schindler had to suffer from Göth’s mockery of his “humanitarian stupidities as well as the jeers of his SS retinue.” Oskar had two horse-drawn wagons filled with large containers and buckets brought to Płaszów; when they arrived, he had the buckets filled with water and placed in each train car. He then gave the train guards a basket filled with Schnaps (a German liqueur) and cigarettes “with the plea to open the sliding doors of the wagons” each time the train stopped. Oskar added in his 1955 report to Yad Vashem that though this “action may seem minor, it took courage to help the thirsty ones before a group of powerful SS men” gathered at Płaszów for an important security conference. Several Schindler Jews testified after the war that once the train was underway, the SS did supply the inmates with water during the few times it stopped during its slow three-day journey to Mauthausen.⁴²

Spielberg captured this powerful moment in his film, as did Keneally in his novel. But did it really happen? Yes. Abraham Zuckerman, one of Oskar’s closest American friends after the war, had worked at Emalia since early 1943. He was on the Mauthausen transport in Płaszów that hot August day in 1944. He told me when I interviewed him and his business partner and fellow Schindlerjude, Murray Pantirer (Mejzesz Puntirer), in their Union, New Jersey office, that he and the other Schindler Jews had been put on the cattle cars immediately after they got to Płaszów. Once the cars were filled, they were moved to a rail siding. The rail cars were so tightly packed that the inmates had to stand up. They stood there in the sweltering heat for three days without food or water. Some of the men on the train went crazy; others died from dehydration and starvation. Some of the inmates even drank their own urine. Zuckerman said that “the stench was unbearable. It was impossible to move the corpses.”⁴³

This probably explains why Marek Finder, the husband of Schindlerjude Rena Ferber Finder, passed out when he was put on the Mauthausen transport. Marek did not wake up until he reached Austria. He told me that he felt guilty about not remembering anything about the transport or the Schindler incident and wondered why he could not recall anything during the horrible six or so days on the train. When I told him that his mind and body had probably shut down to protect his sanity, he seemed relieved.⁴⁴ Murray Pantirer was one of the Jews who hosed down the train cars. Schindler, who was wearing a white suit, yelled “Macht schnell!” (Hurry up) to make the workers with the hoses on top of the train cars move as quickly as they could. Their efforts were hindered because, instead of fire hoses, they used garden hoses to pour water on top of the metal roofs of the cars. Unfortunately, it was so hot in the cars that when the water hit the metal roofs it turned into steam, “simmering those who’d been baking inside.” Al Bukiet later testified that the steam “almost killed” them.⁴⁵

It is doubtful whether Oskar could have done more to help his Emalia Jews even if he knew where he was going to be permitted to open his new factory. But at the time he was not even certain of this. Once the Armaments Inspectorate in Kraków informed him that he had to move his factory westward, Oskar was told he could move to any factory site in the Rhineland in the western part of Germany or to a village in the Semmering Pass area in Lower Austria. In his 1956 report to Yad Vashem, Itzhak Stern quoted a letter he had just received from Schindler in which Oskar told him that he had refused this offer because he “would have to leave [his Jewish] workers behind.” Stern said Schindler’s decision not to abandon his Jewish workers was “characteristic of this man and the determining action of his life.”⁴⁶

Yet there was more to Oskar’s decision than just wanting to save his Jewish workers. Schindler had already revealed his postwar plans to the Jewish Agency representatives he had met in Budapest a year earlier. He wanted to return to the Sudetenland and start a factory in his former homeland. Mietek Pemper told me that Schindler told him during the latter days of the war that he had moved his factory back to the Svitavy area to restore his family’s honor, which had been lost when his father’s factory had closed during the Depression. Oskar also did not think that the Soviets would occupy Bohemia and Moravia at the end of the war and that Czechoslovakia would be restored as a nation. His new operations at Brünnlitz could then be transformed into a major source of enamelware for postwar Europe. Oskar hoped that his Jewish workers would stay with him to fulfill his dream.⁴⁷

But what Jews did Oskar have in mind? According to Emilie Schindler, Oskar told her after he got the evacuation order that he did not know many of his workers and knew only “the names of a few who [came] to our office” when something was needed. “But I have no idea about the others.”⁴⁸ This is probably true, though it contradicts the image of a man struggling in Spielberg’s film trying to come up with the names of 1,000 Jewish workers to put on the famous “Schindler’s List.” Oskar was a busy man during the war and was seldom on the factory floor. Moreover, he did not begin to use Jews in large numbers until 1943 and he left daily supervision and contact with them to others such as Bankier. This did not mean that he did not care about his Jewish workers, or for that matter, the large number of Poles who worked for him. He was simply too busy to get to know many of them.

As Płaszów was being broken up, Oskar seemed initially powerless to do anything to help save his former Emalia workers. To a great extent this was caused by uncertainty about the fate of his small-arms production facility at his Kraków factory. This part of his operations at Emalia is quite mysterious and none of the survivors I talked to knew anything about it. They did, though, remember working in some aspect of enamelware production or general work around Emalia. Oskar said in his 1945 report that the armaments wing of Emalia produced only RM 500,000 ($2 million) as opposed to RM 15,000,000 ($6 million) in enamelware production during the war. He said his Polish workers made the enamelware while his Jewish workers made the arms.⁴⁹ It was the production of these arms, and not enamelware, which was still, up to a point, considered vital to the war effort, that convinced the Armaments Inspectorate to support Oskar’s efforts to move his armament operations, along with his Jewish workers, to Brünnlitz. Siemens-Bauunion G.m.b.H. had just completed a large building for this, which probably helped Schindler’s case because most of the machinery could be moved to wherever Schindler relocated his armaments production facility.

But what types of armaments did Oskar produce at Emalia? Thomas Keneally mentioned in his novel that at Brünnlitz, Schindler made “not one 45 mm shell, not one rocket casing.”⁵⁰ It is logical to assume that the Armaments Inspectorate approved Schindler’s move to the Sudetenland based on the production of the same type of weapons he had made at Emalia. On my first visit to the Brünnlitz factory site, I met a young boy whose family lived in a small house that had once been part of the Schindler factory. He showed me a collection of small shells he had collected from the site. One set of shells were elongated and about ten to twelve inches; the others were shorter but much thicker. These shells were similar in size to three different types of shells produced for the German 3.7 cm Panzerabwehrkanone 36, the standard German World War II antitank gun. Francisco Wichter, a Schindler Jew who now lives in Buenos Aires and who was a close friend of Emilie Schindler’s, told me that they produced shell casings for antitank guns at Brünnlitz. Francisco had worked for Brünnlitz’s commandant, Josef Leipold, at several Heinkel aircraft factories in Poland and knew something about German weaponry. Midway through World War II, the effectiveness of the 1930s era 3.7 Panzerabwehrkanone 36 had been reduced because of better Allied armor. The Wehrmacht responded with a “spigot bomb” shell, the 3.7 cm Stielgranate 41 (3.7 cm Aufsteckegeschoß), which extended the life of the 3.7 Panzerabwehrkanone. This was probably the shell that Oskar produced in Emalia and Brünnlitz.⁵¹

And though Oskar knew that the continued production of armaments at Brünnlitz would help save the lives of some of his Jewish workers, he was also aware that they would be under the jurisdiction of one of the remaining concentration camps in the Kraków region, Auschwitz or Groß Rosen. But this move was complicated by officials in the Sudetenland, who opposed moving more Jewish workers into the region. But first, at least according to Emilie, Oskar had to contend with Amon Göth’s opposition to the move. Oskar said after the war that Göth was supposed to move with Schindler to Brünnlitz. Emilie added that Oskar told her that Göth wanted to ship all of Płaszów’s Jewish inmates, including those at Emalia, to Auschwitz. She said in her memoirs that Oskar offered Göth “diamonds, jewelry, money, vodka, cigarettes, caviar,” but Göth would not budge. Oskar thought that maybe he should offer Göth “a couple of beautiful women to cheer him up.”⁵² If Göth was opposed to the move, then his opposition meant nothing after his arrest by the SS on September 13, 1944, for corruption and brutality. Oskar, who was also arrested as part of the Göth investigation, did move a lot of the former Płaszów commandant’s war booty to Brünnlitz. Göth, who still seemed to consider Schindler his friend, visited Brünnlitz several times during the latter months of the war while on parole.⁵³

Schindler stated after the war that his initial effort to move part of his Emalia operations to the Sudetenland was hampered by opposition from the “Reichsstatthalter [Reich Governor] Reichenberg” who forbade the employment of Jewish workers “in industry in the Sudetenland.” Schindler, was, of course, speaking in prewar terminology. On April 14, 1939, Hitler appointed Konrad Henlein as Reichsstatthalter of the Sudetengau with Reichenberg (Czech, Liberec) as its capital. By 1944, Henlein was still head of this region, but now was the Gauleiter (regional head) of the Gauleitung Sudetenland (Sudetenland Region), which was an integral part of the Greater German Reich.⁵⁴

Schindler’s claim that Henlein did not permit the use of Jewish slave laborers in the Sudetenland is not true. Though Henlein had implemented the Nazi Party’s harsh anti-Semitic policies towards the region’s small Jewish population (2,341 in 1939) during the war, there was little he could do to stop the employment of Jews in German factories there. Himmler, for example, had ordered the Organisation Schmelt, named after the police chief of Breslau, SS-Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt, to set up scores of armaments workshops and small factories in Silesia, and later, in the Sudetenland. Ultimately, Schmelt’s factories would employ over 50,000 Jews. Between 1940 and 1944, Schmelt built more than one hundred forced labor camps in Silesia and seventeen in the Sudetenland; they all used Jewish slave laborers. Himmler ordered these closed in 1943 though a number of them remained open as part of Groß Rosen’s satellite camp system. Schindler’s new camp at Brünnlitz simply became part of the Groß Rosen network. This did not mean, of course, that Oskar did not have to deal with opposition from Nazi leaders in the Sudetenland; he did, though it seemed to come more from local leaders in the Svitavy region than from officials in Reichenberg.⁵⁵

It is quite possible, of course, that Oskar got some resistance from Sudetenland leaders about the prospect of opening a new armaments sub camp in the region. With the war nearing its end, they probably wanted to do everything possible to distance themselves from some of the Third Reich’s more damning racial policies. But most of the resistance to Oskar’s move came from Wilhelm Hoffman, one of two brothers who owned the large textile factory complex where Schindler wanted to move his small armaments factory. Schindler wanted to lease only a portion of the vast, sprawling complex. After the German occupation of the Sudetenland, the Hoffmans, former cheese and butter makers in Vienna, became Treuhänder for the century-old textile factory owned by a Jewish family, the Löw-Beers. The Hoffman brothers purchased the former Löw-Beer factory outright during the war and renamed it Elisenthaler Tuch- und Hutfabriken Brüder Hoffmann.⁵⁶

Given that the Hoffmanns had taken over a previously owned Jewish factory, it is not surprising that they would want to stop any Jews from working there in late 1944. Oskar said that Wilhelm, who had strong ties with local Nazi Party officials, did everything he could to stop Oskar from moving into his complex with his Schindler Jews. Hoffmann tried to convince district officials, the Gestapo, and local Nazi Party officials from letting Schindler “judaize” the region with his new factory. Hoffman argued that if they let Schindler open his factory using Jewish workers, they would bring typhus and other diseases with them. Hoffmann also warned local officials that if they let Schindler open his armaments factory, it could subject the entire factory complex to Allied bombing raids.⁵⁷

It took many bribes and the help of two of Oskar’s friends in Berlin, Erich Lange of the Army High Command’s (OKH; Oberkommando des Heeres) Ordnance Department (Heereswaffenamt) and Oberstleutnant Süßmuth, who headed the Armaments Inspectorate office in Troppau (Opava), for Oskar finally to receive permission to move his armaments factory to Brünnlitz. Emilie Schindler said that Lange oversaw arms production in the region for the OKH. She liked the well-mannered Lange, who, she said, always wore civilian clothing when he inspected the Schindler factory in Brünnlitz to show his distaste for the “Nazi regime.” Lange explained that he was working for “his country and not for a specific government or system,” a standard line among Wehrmacht officers, particularly after the war. Emilie added that Lange “was known for his rectitude and sense of justice.” But he also had a reputation as a strict adherent of armaments production guidelines, which created some fear during his first inspection of the Schindler factory.⁵⁸

Oskar credited Süßmuth, who worked closely with Lange, with convincing district officials of the value of Schindler’s operations. Lange, of course, was Oskar’s liaison with Maurer’s D2 office, which would make the final decision on Schindler’s Armaments Inspectorate proposal to open a factory using Jewish labor. Maurer’s office would review Schindler’s plans on the housing and care of his Jewish workers and make certain that there was adequate security to prevent escapes. If the plans met D2 guidelines, then they would be approved. And it was Lange who intervened when Oskar’s Jews found themselves trapped in Groß Rosen or Auschwitz en route to Brünnlitz and helped to have them released and on their way to the Sudetenland.⁵⁹

Yet Süßmuth was involved in more than just helping Oskar get permission to open his Brünnlitz factory. According to Oskar, he also helped transfer about 3,000 Jewish women from Auschwitz to small textile plants in villages in the Sudetengau and southern Poland in the fall of 1944. Süßmuth moved the women out of Auschwitz in small groups of three hundred to five hundred to help them escape “extermination by the SS murderers.” Oskar added that this helped these women survive “the last year of the war.” Oskar mentioned five villages in his report to Yad Vashem in 1955. Four of them, Freudenthal (Bruntl), Jägerdorf (Krnov), Grulich (Králíky), and Trautenau (Trutnov) were in the Sudetenland; the fifth, Liebau (Legnica), was just over the border in Poland.⁶⁰

Presumably Süßmuth was involved in these transfers at the same time that Oskar was preparing for the transfer of 1,000 Jews from Płaszów to Brünnlitz. Interestingly enough, Auschwitz records do indicate that between October 14 and November 4, 1944, there were four separate transports from Auschwitz II-Birkenau to “other concentration camps” for 322, 348, 497, and 320 women. In addition, there were two larger transports (2,219 and 2,362 women) to “other concentration camps” on October 10 and November 4. Since Auschwitz records usually listed just the main camps in their transit records and not the sub-camps, it is quite possible that these were the women transferred by Süßmuth to other parts of Poland or the Sudetenland.⁶¹

But it took more than just the intervention of Süßmuth and Lange for Oscar to win final approval for the transfer of his workers from Płaszów to Brünnlitz. It would also take a lot of money and gifts. After the war, Oskar estimated that he spent RM 100,000 ($40,000) on bribes to complete the relocation of his armaments factory. He said that authorities knew that he was pressed for time and that his “generosity would be further increased by delays and displays of disinterest.” In other words, authorities in the Sudetenland, the Ostbahn (Eastern Railroad), the Armaments Inspectorate, the OKH, the WVHA, Kraków, Płaszów, Auschwitz, and elsewhere involved in the transfer decision took advantage of the situation and used Oskar‘s desperation to get whatever they could out of him. Schindler was also hurt by the fact that his reputation had been damaged by his arrest by the SS in the early fall of 1944 for corruption. He had to supply these officials with “donation packets” filled with “foreign cigarettes, cigars, Schnaps, coffee, ham, textiles, etc., for astronomical prices on the black market” to keep things running smoothly throughout the late summer and early fall of 1944. And this was just the beginning of the new round of bribery. When Oskar finally got his workers to Brünnlitz, he had to spend even greater sums on “donation packets” for officials in the Sudetenland and Groß Rosen.⁶²

The Chilowicz Murders

Oskar described this period as a nerve-racking time of desperation and uncertainty. It involved numerous trips to the Sudetenland and Berlin to sort out the difficulties he was having in getting permission to transfer part of his Emalia operations. These difficulties were complicated by his own arrest by the Gestapo for a few days in September 1944 and his interrogation by SS officials as part of the investigation into Amon Göth’s crimes. This investigation and some of the events that led up to it would have a very direct impact on Schindler’s efforts to save as many of his Jews as possible. In just a matter of a few weeks in August and September 1944, these developments would bring about several dramatic administrative changes in Płaszów that would play a decisive role in which Jews would be put on “Schindler’s List.”

One of the most controversial issues in the Holocaust was the role played by those in what Primo Levi described in The Drowned and the Damned as a “gray zone” of “protekcja [privilege] and collaboration” that existed between the Germans and others who ran the camps and its Jewish prisoners.⁶³ Levi, an Italian Jew who spent the latter part of the war in Auschwitz and became one of the foremost essayists on the Holocaust, went on to say in his autobiographical Survival in Auschwitz that “if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept…. The more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated.”⁶⁴ This was certainly true in Płaszów. Some of the most prominent people in the Schindler story, during and after the war, were part of this administrative “grey zone.” Yet, with a few exceptions, these were honorable human beings who used their positions to help their fellow Jews. Yet, as Wolfgang Sofsky has pointed out, there was also a camp aristocracy, what Levi called the “Prominents,” who wielded vast power and lived lives of comparable luxury unknown to the average prisoner.⁶⁵

The Jewish OD (jüdischer Ordnungsdienst; Jewish Order Service) men lived in their own barracks with their families; office functionaries lived together in a barracks set aside for some of the more privileged prisoners. Mietek Pemper admitted in his testimony during Amon Göth’s trial in 1946 that there was a time when he received extra food rations because of his special status as a Płaszów stenographer.⁶⁶ A member of the “grey zone” also had easier access to the black market and medical facilities. And though Mietek Pemper and Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig and others like them lived in constant fear for their lives, they had a better chance of surviving the Holocaust than many of the transit prisoners who stayed briefly in Płaszów on their way to Auschwitz or another death camp. Primo Levi, in fact, noted that it was the “Prominents” who represented “a potent majority among survivors.”⁶⁷ But as Isaiah Trunk has pointed out in his study of the Judenrat (Jewish Councils) during the Holocaust, even those Jews forced to work for the Germans would themselves be the Shoah’s “final victims.”⁶⁸ The key here is how one used one’s influence and power in the camps. Most of the prominent Schindlerjuden in Płaszów used what modest power or influence they had to help others, though there were exceptions. Very often, of course, those they helped were relatives or acquaintances. Those who abused their power came to be, as Primo stated, the “hateful and hated.”⁶⁹

In her memoirs, Malvina Graf, a Cracovian Jew who survived the Kraków ghetto and Płaszów but was not on one of “Schindler’s Lists,” expressed some of her own frustration towards those she thought were among the privileged in Płaszów. She wrote that Göth showed some favoritism towards some of his Jewish prisoners, particularly Mietek Pemper and the two Rosner brothers, Henry and Leopold. Henry and Leopold were both musicians who played frequently for Amon Göth and were featured in the film, Schindler’s List. She remembered two occasions when Göth intervened to save a friend of Pemper’s or Pemper himself. She evidently got her information from her sister, Balbina, who worked for Kerner in the Jewish OD office. On one occasion, a friend of Pemper’s, Luisa Lis, was taken to Chuwoja Gorka, Płaszów’s principal killing site, for execution. When Göth learned of this, he personally went to “Prick Hill,” stopped the executions, took Luisa out of the execution line, and brought her back to the women’s camp. Graf’s point in all this had less to do with Pemper than with her concern over the feelings of those on Chujowa Gorka after Göth left with Luisa. “They were given a last bit of hope when their executions were ‘stayed’ only to see that their deaths had been postponed only momentarily.”⁷⁰ Graf added that in August 1944, Göth needed someone to type a highly secret letter for him. She claimed that to maintain such secrecy, “any secretary who typed a letter containing information was shot immediately after completing the task.” To protect Pemper, Graf claimed, Göth instead asked for a volunteer to come to his villa and prepare the letter. A Mr. Goldstein volunteered, typed the letter, and was then executed.⁷¹

Anything is possible, of course, though this story does not fit with what we know about the operations of Göth’s office. He only allowed his part-time German secretary, Frau Kochmann, to type his most sensitive letters, though he often called Pemper to his villa late at night for dictation. This was a chaotic period in Płaszów and Göth was nervous about Dr. Konrad Morgen’s criminal investigations into SS camp corruption elsewhere. This was also when Göth sought permission to murder Chilowicz and several other prominent OD men in the camp on false charges, so it is quite possible that the letter in question was the one to HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe asking permission to kill Chilowicz and other prominent OD men. Pemper, whom Göth seemed to trust, was not expendable because he was too valuable to the commandant. Given the sensitive nature of the letter to Koppe, it would also have been unwise for Göth to have Frau Kochmann type it, because she probably would have shared its contents with her husband, a judge in the city. So it is quite possible that he chose a volunteer to type it, and then had him killed on Chuwoja Gorka. This, of course, is all speculative and had nothing to do with Mietek Pemper. But Graf’s comments about Pemper reflect some of the unspoken frustration I have sensed from Jewish survivors of Emala and Płaszów who did not make it to “Schindler’s Ark” in Brünnlitz. For every Jew saved by Oskar Schindler, there were many, many more who did not, some of them former Schindlerjuden at Emalia. Some survived and others did not because they did not have the connections, means, or luck to make it onto his famous “list of life.”

Sadly, the most hated Jews at Płaszów were also the most powerful at one time or another. This list included Wilek (Wilhelm) Chilowicz and his wife, Maria Chilowicz, and his top assistants, Mietek Finkelstein and Maier Kerner.⁷² Other prominent OD men were Wilhelm (Wilek) Schnitzer, Chilowicz’s secretary, Romek Faeber, and Schoenfeld.⁷³ Each of them, or at least their fates, would play an important role in determining which Jews would be sent to Oskar Schindler’s new camp in Brünnlitz, which meant life, and who would not. Chilowicz was the head of the Jewish OD unit at Płaszów. It was his responsibility to maintain order in the closed Jewish portions of the camp and to help oversee all movements of Jews in and out of the camp. For better or worse, these responsibilities gave Chilowicz and those closest to him vast power over the Jewish inmates in Płaszów.

To visualize this, go back and watch how Steven Spielberg traces the story of Marcel Goldberg, the real author of “Schindler’s List,” in his film. He begins in the early part of the film with Goldberg sitting near Leopold “Poldek” Page and other Jewish black marketeers in Kraków’s Marjacki Bazylika (St. Mary’s Basilica) as Oskar Schindler tries to interest them in doing business with a German. What follows throughout the rest of the film is the subtle tale of Goldberg’s gradual moral degeneration. Schindler, for example, gives Itzhak Stern first a lighter, then a cigarette case, and finally a watch to bribe Goldberg to send more Jews to his factory from Płaszów. And though Spielberg erroneously made Oskar Schindler and Itzhak Stern the authors of the famous “Schindler’s List,” it is apparent in his depiction of Goldberg throughout the film that he was aware that this OD man had a lot more to do with this matter than either Schindler or Stern.⁷⁴

What corrupted Chilowicz and men like him was power mixed with greed. Wolfgang Sofsky said that the camp “aristocracy” had “everything the other prisoners lacked: enough to eat, warm clothing, sturdy shoes.” They slept in their own beds, were clean-shaven, and did not have to shave their heads. If they were ill, they were given special medical care. They had access to the camp’s brothel and to numerous other forms of entertainment. But “during the day, they spread terror in the camp, supported and admired by their servants and lackeys.” At night, while playing cards, “they consumed the day’s loot—a bottle of liquor, some cigarettes. In the midst of hunger and misery, the aristocracy lived in its own special world.”⁷⁵ This was the world of Wilek Chilowicz and those closest to him.

In fairness to Chilowicz, a few Schindler Jews, Roman Ferber among them, spoke kindly of him. Chilowicz, who had no children, hid Roman in the camp. But Ferber also admits that Chilowicz was Göth’s “flunky” and helped the commandant “amass a fortune on Kraków’s black market.” He also admitted that Chilowicz “collected quite a nest egg for himself.”⁷⁶ Dr. Stanley Robbin said that it was Chilowicz who sent him to Emalia, ultimately a life-saving gesture.⁷⁷ Abraham Zuckerman remembered one occasion when he and several hundred other Jews were taken by Chilowicz to Chuwoja Gorka after several women had escaped. Zuckerman was fully prepared to die. Instead, Chilowicz just lectured them harshly about the escapes and told everyone to go back to work. Zuckerman thought that Chilowicz “had some compassion… and he only put on a display of anger for his Nazi superiors.”⁷⁸ While she was in Płaszów, Stella Müller-Madej remembered hearing that Chilowicz was “trying to do some good things” for them, although she never saw any of his good deeds. She added that he was “not a kind person” and “shouts at us all the time, calling us sons of bitches, an expression that is always on his lips.”⁷⁹

But Chilowicz and his wife, Maria, and many of those who worked as OD men for them, also had very violent, vulgar reputations. Maria Chilowicz, who was in charge of the women’s camp, was nicknamed “the duck” because she was bow-legged and walked “like a duck.”⁸⁰ She, like her husband, always carried a whip and constantly referred to the camp women as “whores.” Aleksander Bieberstein considered Wilek and Maria Chilowicz sadists.⁸¹ Igor Kling remembered how they treated him when he arrived at Płaszów in the spring of 1944 from the Borysław ghetto. Both Chilowiczes met the transport at the camp’s front gate. “Chilowicz and his wife, they started cursing us right away. Using such profanity! The women were shocked. I remember he was wearing riding breeches and boots—all shined up—and a white silk shirt. He had a whip in his hand, a full head of hair.”⁸² Sally Huppert (Sara Peller) remembered trying to sneak a seven-year-old cousin into Płaszów after the closing of the ghetto. She was met at the gate by Göth and Chilowicz, who refused to let her bring the young girl into the camp. Sally tried to hide the young child under her coat but Chilowicz took the girl away. She was presumably murdered soon afterwards.⁸³

But more feared than Chilowicz or his wife were two of his assistants, Mietek Finkelstein and Maier Kerner. Stella Müller-Madej said that the inmates in Płaszów feared Finkelstein, who was quite vulgar and “usually a little drunk,” more than Amon Göth.⁸⁴ Aleksander Bieberstein said that Finkelstein would beat inmates into unconsciousness.⁸⁵ But the prisoners were even more afraid of Kerner. Stella said he was “a completely evil man” who inspired “hysterical fear. He waves a cane around and beats people needlessly.”⁸⁶ But he did more than wave his cane. Bieberstein wrote in his memoirs that, though a religious man, Kerner had no compunction about mistreating prisoners and beating them over and over, particularly in the face.⁸⁷ Stella Müller-Madej added that the children in Płaszów, whom Kerner constantly chased with his cane but never hit, made up a Yiddish song about him:

Kerner, Finkelstein, and other top OD men were involved in Chilowicz’s effort to amass wealth while they were in Płaszów. Mietek Pemper said that the basis of Chilowicz’s wealth came from the goods that Göth had collected from Kraków’s Jews after the closing of the ghetto. Though Göth was supposed to send these valuables to the Reichsbank, he told Chilowicz to keep most of it for his [Göth’s] own “expenses.” These goods became the basis of Göth’s black market empire at Płaszów. Chilowicz, who handled Göth’s black market deals, always managed to skim something off the top for himself.⁸⁹

But Julius Madritsch said that Chilowicz did more than steal from Göth. Madritsch expressed great disdain for Chilowicz and the other “small number of Jews who, being friendly with the camp commanders, had the nerves not only to betray their fellow Jews and fellow sufferers for invalid, insignificant advantages” but also extorted “special bonuses” from Madritsch and other factory owners “without a sense of shame.” Madritsch remembered one occasion when Chilowicz suggested to Göth that they needed to “get rid of 20 percent of our people, since they are too old and the camp was too full.” Fortunately, Madritsch and Titsch were able to talk Göth out of this and convinced him that the elderly in the camp were their “most valuable expert workers.”⁹⁰

In the end, Chilowicz’s power and greed led to his undoing. He became arrogant and bragged that “if no Jews survive the war, Chilowicz will certainly survive it.”⁹¹ As the camp was being evacuated, Göth became concerned that Chilowicz would be shipped out of Płaszów to another camp in the Reich. If that happened, he might reveal some of the secrets of Göth’s illicit activities. Göth, of course, was well aware of Dr. Konrad Morgen’s year-long investigation into corruption in the concentration camp system, and he had plenty to worry about. Yet SS regulations prevented Göth from murdering the Chilowiczes and their top aides outright.

When Płaszów became a concentration camp, the SS imposed stricter rules for the execution and punishment of prisoners. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s trial that the SS staff now had to sign a declaration that they would not kill any prisoners. If a commandant wanted to execute someone, he would have to send a telegram to SS headquarters in Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler and SS-Obergruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of RSHA, would review the request and approve or disapprove it.⁹² In the Chilowicz case, Göth would argue that Chilowicz was planning a camp revolt. But new regulations stipulated that Göth had to have the approval of local police authorities, not SS headquarters, to murder the Chilowiczes; this meant the approval would come from HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe.⁹³

To get Koppe’s permission for the Chilowicz executions, Göth had one of his noncommissioned officers, SS-Oberwachmann Josef Sowinski, prepare a detailed, false report about a potential camp rebellion led by Chilowicz and other OD men. Over the past eighteen months, there had been major concentration camp or ghetto uprisings in Sobibór, Treblinka, and Warsaw, as well as the July 20, 1944, attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life. In this unstable atmosphere, Göth could expect a positive response from Koppe. In his letter to the HSSPF, Göth asked Koppe for permission to stop the revolt and execute its leaders. Several days later, Koppe sent Göth a secret letter giving him the authority to carry out the executions.⁹⁴

Thomas Keneally spent several pages talking about the Chilowicz murders, though his account is different from those of others who were there. In Keneally’s account, Amon Göth arranged to have Sowinski try to sneak the Chilowizces, Finkelstein, and Wilek Chilowicz’s sister and brother-in-law, Malia and Romek [Moniek] Ferber, out of the camp in a truck. Göth provided Sowinski with a gun to give Chilowicz, and as the truck moved through the front gate of the camp, Göth, Hujar, and several other SS men (Ivan Scharujew and Amthor) stopped them. They found that “Chilowicz’ pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by the desperate inmates of the camp.” Göth then, according to Keneally, shot all of them. During his trial in 1946, Göth testified that he shot Chilowicz and the others “because he tried to escape, owned a weapon, and some valuables.”⁹⁵

The real story is quite different, though Roman Ferber, Moniek’s brother, simply quotes from Keneally’s account in his interview with Elinor Brecher. But he adds that the story about the diamonds is fiction: “Those guys weren’t that dumb. They buried all that stuff, and some of it was found after the war.”⁹⁶ But other Schindlerjuden tell a different story. On August 12, 1944, the day before the Chilowicz murders, Wilek Chilowicz went to the shipping department at Julius Madritsch’s sewing factory complex just up SS Straße from the commandant’s villa. Chaskel Schlesinger was working in the shipping department and accompanied Chilowicz, who he thought was “a monster,” to the Madritsch warehouse to pick up some fabric. Chilowicz told Schlesinger: “We’re not going to let them get away with this. We’re going to fight!”⁹⁷ At the time, Chaskel had no idea what he was talking about. The next day, Wilek Chilowicz’s sister, Malia Ferber, told Margot Schlesinger that Göth had just searched Chilowicz’s barracks and found a gun. Chilowicz claimed that Göth had given him the gun.⁹⁸

The same day, August 13, Schindlerjude Celina Karp Biniaz remembered seeing Wilek and Maria Chilowicz again working at Madritsch’s warehouse. Madritsch was not there at the time. Celina heard that Göth was coming and hid behind some bales of fabric. Göth walked into the warehouse, found Wilek Chilowicz, and shot him to death. When Maria Chilowek ran into the room to see what was happening, Göth shot her as well. Thirty minutes later, Moniek Ferber, Chilowicz’s secretary, was walking into his barracks and found Göth and several other SS officers waiting for him. Göth asked Moniek, “Where is your wife?” Ferber called Malia to come out of their room. Göth then shot both of them. During the next few hours, Göth also murdered Mietek Finkelstein, Wilek Schnitzer, and Schoenfeld.⁹⁹

After the shootings, Stella Müller-Madej remembered being forced to go to an area between the men and women’s barracks to see the bodies. As the inmates marched to the spot where they lay, she saw Göth on horseback. Near him were two inmates holding a banner that read: “Everybody who puts up resistance will die this way.”¹⁰⁰ Mietek Pemper said that a sign next to the bodies explained that Chilowicz had been killed because “he tried to escape, owned a weapon, and some valuables.”¹⁰¹ Chaskel Schlesinger remembered that the sign said they were killed “because they want[ed] to run away, and they had jewels and guns.”¹⁰² As the inmates slowly walked past the bodies, Göth told the inmates that this would be their fate if they tried to mount a rebellion. But all Stella could remember was the awful sight of “flies crawling into the nostrils and open mouths of the corpses.”¹⁰³

But this was not the end of the ordeal. The inmates were then marched to the Appellplatz, where Göth forced them to watch the hanging of two young men. One was so badly beaten that Kapos had to carry him to the gallows.¹⁰⁴ The other victim, Adam Sztab, was the leader of ZOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; Jewish Fighting Organization) in Płaszów. ZOB was one of the principal armed Jewish resistance groups in Poland and had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising the year before.¹⁰⁵ Adam had also taken care of Göth’s dogs, Rolf and Ralf, which Stella told me was the reason Göth killed him. Stella said in her memoirs that Göth had wanted to kill Adam once before because he had “crossed” the commandant, but Ruth, Göth’s mistress, stopped him. But the real reason Göth disliked Adam, Stella told me when I interviewed her in Kraków, was that he was jealous because Rolf and Ralf seemed to like Adam more than they liked Göth. Anything is possible, though it would seem more logical that Göth would have murdered Sztab for his underground activities, not out of jealousy over his dogs. This reasoning was Alexander Bieberstein’s explanation behind the hangings.¹⁰⁶

But Stella knew Adam not as a ZOB leader but as a childhood acquaintance. He had been a close friend of Stella’s brother, Adam, and fondly remembered playing with Adam Sztab before the war. She, her brother, and Adam Sztab would play ball in one of Kraków’s parks. Once, when Adam Sztab tossed her the ball, he yelled to her, “You’re a butterfingers if you don’t catch it, Stella.”¹⁰⁷ Now Stella had to stand at attention during his execution. Stella was unable to watch the hangings but remembered seeing Adam’s body quivering from the hangman’s rope. She also remembered Göth telling the inmates that there had been a conspiracy and that the “other rebels will meet a similarly harsh fate.”¹⁰⁸ According to Alexander Bieberstein, a sign was put near Sztab’s body that read: “Tak zginą wszyscy, który ukrją brov” (Anyone who hides weapons will be killed).¹⁰⁹

It is hard to determine from survivor testimony who exactly was killed in Płaszów on August 13, 1944. Aleksander Bieberstein mentioned Chilowicz and his wife, Finkelstein, Ferber, Schnitzer, and Schoenfeld.¹¹⁰ Mietek Pemper, the principal witness against Amon Göth in his 1946 trial, spent a lot of time answering questions about the killings during the war crimes proceedings against Göth. He mentioned the “assassination of Chilowicz and his family,” which meant the Ferbers and the Chilowiczes.¹¹¹ Schindler Jew Chaskel Schlesinger added that in addition to the Chilowiczes and the Ferbers, Göth also murdered two of Chilowicz’s nephews that day. Roman Ferber added that Göth also killed another of Chilowicz’s sisters, Feiga S. In fact, Ferber noted, Göth killed just about anyone related to Chilowicz. Finally, Stella Müller-Madej mentioned the executions of Adam Sztab and another man.¹¹² What we do know was that it was a blood bath that sent a chill through the camp. Sometime later, as the Kommando 1005 units were clearing out the mass graves in Płaszów, Iser Mintz found Wilek Chilowicz’s body and his gold watch, a birthday gift from Płaszów’s Jewish inmates. On the back there was an inscription in German, “Für seinen guten Dienst” (For his good service). After Iser discovered the watch, one of the Kapos took it from him, only to discover that it was not real gold. He tossed it back to Iser, who sold it for two or three loaves of bread.¹¹³

The SS, Crime, and Corruption

The murder of Płaszów’s principal Jewish leaders seemed to be the final straw for the SS, which arrested Göth a month later on a variety of charges, including the Chilowicz murders.

Their deaths, when combined with the arrest of Göth and the general disorder surrounding the closing of the camp, created leadership voids that would have a significant impact not only on the authorship of “Schindler’s List,” but also on the names placed on it.

By 1944, the SS had become an economic force in its own right through its control of a growing complex of factories and other enterprises. SS wealth grew substantially after the seizure of Jewish businesses in Poland and the use of Jewish concentration camp labor in factories controlled by the SS. The SS was able to develop almost total monopolies in furniture, ceramics, and mineral water production, though once the fortunes of war turned against Germany, Himmler’s organization began to shift to more armaments production to maintain its economic vitality.¹¹⁴

This lust for wealth and profit bred a culture of greed and corruption in the SS, particularly in the General Government. Himmler addressed this issue in a speech to SS officers in the fall of 1944:

Embedded in Himmler’s speech was the uncertainty surrounding SS enforcement of its own codes dealing with corruption and criminality.

Himmler saw the SS not only as the guardian of the Nazi state and its values, but also as Nazi Germany’s role model, its racial educator. Himmler, working with Richard Walther Darré, an Argentinian German who became head of the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office (RuSHA; Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt) in 1931, saw the SS as “a new racial-German aristocracy.” Along with these racial ideals were medieval ideas of honor and chivalry that were to elevate SS members to a special status in Nazi Germany.¹¹⁶

Yet this vanguard and protector of the Nazi racial revolution was made up of human beings, and as such they were prey to the failings of a state within a dictatorial state. Corruption became a serious problem within the SS during the war, particularly in the vast complex of concentration, forced labor, and death camps that it ran. Theoretically, the regular SS was subject to normal German criminal and civil law, though in 1939 a separate legal system was developed for the Waffen SS. In reality, though, as SS-Oberführer Günther Reinecke, the Chief Judge of the Supreme SS and Police Court explained in his Nuremberg testimony in 1946, the SS “internal disciplinary law consisted of the right of exclusion,” meaning that anyone with a criminal record could not be a member of the SS and those who committed crimes as SS members “had to leave the SS.” The reality, of course, was quite different. For all practical purposes, the SS remained a law unto itself.¹¹⁷

The SS had its own Legal Department (Hauptamt SS-Greicht), which oversaw a network of Supreme SS and Police Courts, SS and Police Courts, and SS and Police Courts Martial. Needless to say, their effectiveness in controlling corruption among an SS membership that declined in quality during the war years was less than sterling, particularly in the General Government. Occasionally, when corruption was blatant, the SS would step in and punish the victim, as it did in the case of SS-Untergruppenführer Lorenz Löv, the deputy head of the General Government’s Central Administrative Office. Charged with running a large black market ring, Löv was brought to trial in SS and Police Court VI in Kraków and convicted by Chief Judge SS-Oberführer Dr. Günther Reinecke, who sentenced him to life imprisonment. Reinecke explained in his secret judgement statement that he chose not to pass a death sentence on Löv because the same charges could have been brought against Hans Frank’s family and close associates. After the war, Reinecke explained that such SS criminality could be traced to the infiltration of the SS “by personas and organizations completely alien to the character of the SS.” This, of course, was ridiculous, because men such as Amon Göth, Oskar Dirlewanger, and Karl Otto Koch were veteran Nazis who had joined the SS early in their careers.¹¹⁸

Oddly enough, there were also SS regulations dealing with the mistreatment of prisoners in the SS camps, even Jews. When acts of sadism were combined with corruption, which often went hand-in-hand, Himmler would periodically unleash investigations. According to Heinz Höhne, “sadism undermined its [the SS] discipline and corruption destroyed its ideology.”¹¹⁹ Occasionally, SS members were even punished for such crimes, though more often than not they got away with it. The contradiction here was that the SS would send legal experts into a camp to investigate an act or two of sadism while thousands were being butchered nearby in the same camp.¹²⁰

A case in point: the investigations initiated by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, an assistant judge in the SS and Police Court (SS- und Polizeigerichte) in Kraków, against the brutal activities of SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger, a suspected sexual deviant. Dirlewanger ran an SS Death Head Sonderkommando unit (SS Totenkopfverbände), the SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger, which waged vicious campaigns against partisans in Poland and the Soviet Union and Jews in the Kraków and Lublin ghettos. In his Nuremberg testimony after the war, Morgen explained that while operating in the Lublin ghetto, Dirlewanger had entertained some SS officers by torturing young Jewish girls to death. Dirlewanger then had soap made from the fat of some of the victims, who died horribly from strychnine poisoning. According to Raul Hilberg, this is one of the first instances that reference was made to the “soap-making rumor.”¹²¹

Morgen’s efforts to have Dirlewanger arrested in early 1942 for his crimes were unsuccessful, though this might have prompted the transfer of Dirlewanger’s unit to Belorussia several months later. Morgen did quarrel with HSSPF Ost SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger over his investigations, which resulted in a punishment for Morgen: his transfer to the Russian front with the Waffen SS Viking Division. Though the SS continued to investigate Dirlewanger’s crimes, Himmler regarded him as something of an SS hero because of his actions against partisans, particularly in the Warsaw and Slovak uprisings in 1944. Dirlewanger ended the war as an SS-Oberführer. He received the War Order of the German Cross (Kriegsorden des Deutschen Kreuzes) in gold in 1943 and was one of only 7,200 Germans to receive the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes). Dirlewanger disappeared after the war and rumors had him in Cairo and France. Actually, he died mysteriously in a French prison, where his body was exhumed in November 1960.¹²²

In 1943, Morgen joined the Economic Crimes Office of Kripo, the Reich Criminal Police. The SS and Police Court in District XII, which included the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, asked Kripo for help in investigating a corruption ring in the camp centered around Buchenwald’s former commandant (1937–1941), Karl Otto Koch. The SS and Police Court insisted, though, that Kripo’s investigative officer had to be an SS officer. Morgen, who by this time was an SS-Sturmbannführer in the Waffen SS, fit the bill. In his investigation, Morgen found a “network of corruption” with “ramifications extending into the other concentration camps.”¹²³ Morgen also discovered evidence of Koch’s brutality and decided to link these crimes with Koch’s corruption in his final report to Arthur Nebe, the head of Kripo. Nebe refused to act on Morgen’s report so Morgen then took the case to Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Müller suggested that Morgen see the head of the SS Legal office, SS-Obergruppenführer Franz Breithaupt, who concluded that this was a matter for Heinrich Himmler. Ultimately, Morgen sent his report to Himmler, who gave Morgen the go-ahead to initiate criminal proceedings against Koch, his wife and co-conspirator, Ilse, and their cronies.¹²⁴

By this time, Koch, who had been arrested on corruption charges in the winter of 1941 and then quickly released on Himmler’s orders, was transferred to Lublin to become commandant of Majdanek, a new Soviet prisoner-of-war camp there. Koch lost his job in the summer of 1942 when the SS brought new charges of criminal negligence against him after several prisoner escapes in Majdanek earlier that spring. The SS later dropped the charges after Koch explained the circumstances of the escapes and gave him a job in Berlin working as a liaison between the SS and the postal service.¹²⁵

Morgen had Koch arrested and brought to Buchenwald, where he personally interrogated Koch. Ultimately, Koch confessed to his crimes and was executed by the SS in the spring of 1945. Once Morgen got Koch’s confession, he then initiated similar investigations in other concentration camps where he finally discovered the depth of SS crimes against Jews and other victims. Morgen was not interested in officially approved racial or euthanasia killings, just those of an “arbitrary” nature. Morgen sent SS investigative teams into Buchenwald, where he lived for eight months as part of his efforts against Koch, and also into camps and ghettos in Kraków, Płaszow, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Dachau, Warsaw, and Vught in the Netherlands. Amon Göth was investigated in the summer of 1944 by one of Morgen’s teams. Morgen was able to win two hundred convictions out of the eight hundred cases he investigated in 1943 and 1944. He personally arrested five concentration commandants, two of whom were shot after their convictions. One of those executed was Koch, who was shot by the SS in Buchenwald in April 1945. His wife, Ilse, who was tried as her husband’s accomplice, was acquitted.¹²⁶

However, just as Morgen was intensifying his investigations, Himmler ordered Morgen to limit himself to the Koch case. In reality, the SS had become afraid of Morgen and his investigative teams. Stefan Heymann, one of the prisoner clerks at Buchenwald, told American investigators immediately after the war that he [Morgen] was extraordinarily feared and hated by all SS officers in Buchenwald. They breathed easier when Morgen moved back to Berlin because they feared the investigation could also bring to light incriminating material about themselves. And, indeed, they had all been as corrupt and brutal as Koch.¹²⁷

In the summer of 1946, Morgen testified as a defense witness in the International Military Tribunal’s Nuremberg case against the SS, one of six Nazi organizations indicted as criminal organizations. The former SS officer and prosecutor then “disappeared into obscurity.”¹²⁸

Amon Göth was not the only person under investigation by the SS and the Gestapo with ties to Oskar Schindler. In his July 1945 financial statement, Oskar listed Julian Scherner, the HSSPF in the Kraków district, for example, as one of the principal recipients of bribes he paid to the SS during his five years in Kraków. Another important Kraków-based SS officer jailed for fraud and theft was SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase, who personally oversaw the brutal Aktion in the Kraków ghetto on October 28, 1942. The SS charged Haase with various crimes. The most serious was the theft of paintings from Jewish victims in the ghetto. One of those stolen was by Wojciech Kossak, one of Poland’s most famous artists, who coincidentally died in Kraków in the summer of 1942. Kossak’s paintings were popular among Germans in Kraków, which added to the severity of Hasse’s theft.¹²⁹

When he was interrogated about his crimes, Haase said he got the paintings from Wilhelm Kunde, an SS Hauptscharführer and Kriminalsekretär who specialized in Jewish affairs. Kunde, of course, denied everything. He claimed that Haase acquired the paintings from two Jewish informers for the Gestapo, Steinfeld and Brodman. Later, Steinfeld said that Haase had ordered the two Jewish informants to give the paintings to Kunde. After the ghetto closed, Kunde would drop by Pankiewicz’s pharmacy in the empty ghetto almost every day before the SS shut it down. Kunde seemed to like the Polish pharmacist, who occasionally gave him “gifts.” Kunde liked to talk about the war and other matters, and on one occasion, Kunde told Pankiewicz that he had to be very careful about taking bribes because of jealousy among the Germans in Kraków. Kunde said he knew of one SS officer who had drawn attention to himself by depositing vast sums of money in his bank account. When he could not explain where the money came from, the SS arrested him. Kunde said that to avoid any hint of corruption, the only jewelry he wore was a cheap steel watch. He also shunned bars and theaters to avoid calling attention to himself. If he wanted to entertain friends or colleagues, he did it at home.¹³⁰

Oskar Schindler knew all this, and his genius was his ability to use German greed to his advantage when dealing with people like Göth and Scherner. He also understood the importance of discretion and was probably quite careful about flaunting his own well-being. What got Oskar into trouble with the SS and the Gestapo was not only the size and nature of the bribes that he gave SS and other officials, but their indiscreet display of them. It did not help Oskar’s case, of course, that he also showed some sympathy towards his Jewish workers. Yet in another sense, Oskar’s bribes to prominent SS and General Government officials, combined with his important connections to the military, probably gave him a modicum of protection. There is no doubt, particularly by 1943, that if Schindler had been arrested and thoroughly investigated for corruption, his testimony could probably have ruined the careers of quite a few SS members. But Oskar was also protected because his factories produced goods of value to officials in the General Government and the SS, either directly or as bribes. Yet pots and pans would not seem to be of value to anyone except a housewife. But with the heavy rationing of metal, everyday pots and pans became a scarce item in the Nazi world. Oskar said, for example, that the “need of the office directors [for kitchenware] was unbelievable; the distribution of kitchenware [as bribes] was up to 30,000 kg (66,138 lbs) per year. I even delivered [kitchenware] to their aunts and grandmothers who had been bombed out in the Reich.”¹³¹ In addition, Oskar traded Emalia kitchenware for food.¹³² But in time, his black market dealings and the bribes he paid to Amon Göth would catch up with him and almost destroy his efforts to use such dealings to help save his Jewish workers.

The Arrest and Investigation of Amon Göth

The arrest of Amon Göth on September 13, 1944, on charges of corruption, abuse, and murder initiated a six-month SS investigation into all aspects of Göth’s tenure as Płaszów’s commandant from February 1943 until September 1944. This was the last major investigation of Dr. Morgen’s SS team of lawyers and judges. Göth’s SS file says little about the investigation. On April 14, 1944, the WVHA recommended that Göth be officially accepted as an SS-Hauptsturmführer in the Waffen SS reserves and be transferred from the headquarters company of the HSSPF General Government to the WVHA’s Amtsgruppe D. The reason for the transfer was that Płaszów was now an official concentration camp and no longer under the authority of the HSSPF in the General Government.¹³³ The request was rejected ten days later by SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Dr. Adolf Katz because Göth had not completed his basic Waffen SS reserves Leadership Training Course. Until he had done this, Katz said, there was no way to determine whether Płaszów’s commandant had proven “his aptitude for being a Waffen-SS Reserves officer.”¹³⁴

One reason Göth might have failed to complete his reserve training was his desire to avoid serving in the Waffen SS on the Eastern front. There had been a steady flow of officers and men from the Waffen SS Death’s Head Division (Totenkopfdivision) battlefield units to and from the concentration camps throughout the war. On the one hand, such a move could have been a career move for Göth; on the other, it terminated his life of luxury and corruption in Płaszów and hindered his plans to use his booty as a nest egg for a comfortable postwar life.¹³⁵ Dr. Katz’s resistance to Göth’s transfer was finally overcome and in early June he officially became part of the Waffen-SS reserves, assigned to 11th SS-Standarte (Regiment) Planetta, which was headquartered in Vienna. Göth had served with this unit with distinction earlier in the war in Kattowitz.¹³⁶

These are no other documents in Göth’s SS file until August 31, 1944, when a note card, with information supplied by Göth, was placed in it that gives his work and home address. He listed “KL. Plaszow, Cracow, P.O. Box 1024, (7a)” as his work address and “Vienna VI/56. Mariahilferstrasse-105” as his home address.¹³⁷ Several days later, HSSPF Koppe received a note that included an August 16, 1944, letter from Hans Stauber, the chief treasurer of Army Post Administration Kraków (Heeresstandortverwaltung Krakau), to Heinrich Himmler, about the closing of Płaszów. Stauber was a close friend of Himmler’s and at one point in the letter referred to him as Heini. What concerned Stauber about the evacuation of Płaszów was the loss of Jewish labor. He took this as an SS slight against the Wehrmacht in the aftermath of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Stauber pleaded with Heini to do something to resolve this dilemma. He added that “today everyone needs to give of his best and each task must be accomplished in view of the great goal, the imminent final victory.” The most interesting part of the letter are his criticisms of the way Płaszów was run. He thought the “fact that one takes, for example, cigarettes, from the prisoners to portion them out among the guards or that a loaf of bread is being offered to the prisoners at Zł 600–1,000 ($187.50–312.50) for sale (supposedly from nearby placed Jews!!) surely casts a bad light on the supervision [of the camp].”¹³⁸

Though it is possible that Stauber’s letter to Himmler might have provided some new information for the SS investigation into the numerous charges against Göth, they were not the basis of Dr. Morgen’s legal efforts against Płaszów’s commandant. According to Mietek Pemper, who testified against Göth in his 1946 trial, the charges came from disgruntled SS men who had served under Göth. They were angry for the cruel way Göth treated them and for “bringing charges against them to the military court [SS and Police Court].” Pemper testified that Göth had reported one SS man for stealing a small sum of money. The SS man told the SS court that he did not understand why he had to be punished so hard when the “commandant owned a great fortune in valuables [and] foreign currencies.”¹³⁹ However, in 1964, Oskar Schindler told Martin Gosch and Howard Koch, who interviewed him for a film script they were preparing on his life, that the SS was angry because Göth had executed two Jewish prisoners who were spies for Himmler. The SS, Oskar explained, was “determined to get something on him [Göth],” which led to an investigation that revealed Göth’s corruption.¹⁴⁰

The final note in Göth’s file was dated September 6, 1944. It is a wire from Koppe to SS-Standartenführer Brandt of the Gestapo’s office in Koblenz informing him that Göth was still in Kraków-Płaszów. Koppe told Brandt that the camp was about to be completely shut down and that most of its inmates had already been sent elsewhere. He added: “A process of judicial inquiry is going on against Hauptsturmführer Goeth because of usurpation of official authority. During the course of the process other suspicious facts that arise will be investigated simultaneously.” Exactly a week later, Amon Göth was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Breslau, where he would remain in jail until October 22, 1944.¹⁴¹ There is some confusion about where Göth was actually arrested. Mietek Pemper, who is our principal source on the SS investigation into Göth’s crimes, testified at Göth’s 1946 trial that he was arrested in Kraków. But he told me during our first interview in 1999 that the SS arrested him in Vienna, where he was visiting his father.¹⁴² Helen (“Susanna”) Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig also remembered Göth’s arrest in Płaszów. On the day in question, “Susanna” heard the door bell ring. When she opened the front door, she saw two civilians who asked for Göth. She told Göth, who was upstairs, about the two men and he came downstairs to meet them. In the meantime, “Susanna” had stopped at the top of the stairs leading down to the kitchen and watched everything. Göth got his hat and “his belt with the gun,” and then walked out the front door between the two men. “Susanna” then told Helen Hirsch what she had just seen. “I think they take him away.” Helen replied, “You’re such a child; who would take him away? He’s the chief commander. No one can touch him.”¹⁴³

“Susanna” said that she and Helen were alone in the villa for several days. The implication is that Ruth Kalder was also absent. Then they received a telephone call from Göth. “His voice was completely different.” He told his maids to pack him some underwear and socks and that someone would pick them up for him. “Then we knew he was arrested and would never come back.” “Susanna” said his arrest saved her life; she was certain he would have killed both maids because they “knew too much.”¹⁴⁴

It is possible, of course, that Göth was taken by the two men, who were probably Kripo (Kriminalpolizei; criminal police) agents, to Vienna to get his affairs in order before his formal arrest. Kripo and the SS and Police Courts worked hand-in-hand on the concentration camp investigations. Dr. Morgen had been made head of the investigations because he was a Kripo specialist on economic crimes and was also a Waffen-SS officer.¹⁴⁵ Göth’s arrest sent shock waves through Płaszów. Mietek Pemper told me it was like “the Pope[’s] being arrested for stealing silver spoons.”¹⁴⁶

What followed was a well-coordinated investigation that involved the detention of Oskar Schindler and various Schindlerjuden. With the exception of Mietek Pemper, the Schindlerjuden interviewed at Płaszów were luckier. On the same day that Göth was taken away by the Kripo agents, an SS and Police Court team arrived in the camp to begin its investigation. SS-Untersturmführer Judge Tauers headed the investigation. He interviewed three Schindlerjuden, Zygmunt Grünberg, an engineer and construction supervisor at Płaszów; Dr. Leon Gross, the chief Jewish physician; and Mietek Pemper.¹⁴⁷ Construction was constantly going on during Göth’s reign at Płaszów and Göth seemed always to set unrealistic building deadlines for Grünberg, whom he beat when they were not met. Schindlerjude Joseph Bau said that Grünberg “absorbed in silence blows that would have felled a boxing champion.”¹⁴⁸ On one occasion, Göth even held Grünberg’s wife and daughter hostage to force him to complete a project in forty-eight hours. Appeals by Grünberg’s SS supervisor, SS-Obersturmführer Huth, could not dissuade Göth from doing any more than extending the deadline by twenty-four hours.¹⁴⁹

Grünberg, Gross, and Pemper were taken to Göth’s villa for interrogation, though the SS investigators released Grünberg and Gross after a few hours. After the initial interrogation of Pemper, the SS officers left him in the villa and went to talk to SS-Hauptscharführer Lorentz Landstorfer and SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, noncommissioned officers who worked with the Jewish prisoners. Müller, one of the senior noncommissioned officers at Płaszów, had once been in charge of Julag I. He also oversaw a lot of the camp construction. Müller had gained a reputation for brutality not only at Płaszów but also at Julag I and the Bochnia ghetto. Landstorfer told the investigators that he had seen Pemper type defense plans for a possible partisan attack against the camp. Landstorfer was providing evidence for one of the principal SS charges against Göth: that he had shared some of the camp’s secrets with prisoners. Pemper was able to convince Judge Tauer that he did not have access to such secret plans, though the SS investigator said Pemper knew of other camp defense secrets.¹⁵⁰

For the next two weeks, the SS placed Pemper in solitary confinement in the camp’s small jail in the “Grey House,” one of the few original buildings still standing at Płaszów. This was a frightening place and even today, standing alone as it does on the edge of the former camp site, has an ominous look about it. Joseph Bau, a draftsman at Płaszów, has provided us with the only detailed look at the principal buildings at Płaszów in his memoirs, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? The camp’s jail was in the basement of the “Grey House,” which he described as a “chamber of horrors.” There were only a few cells in the basement. One was just large enough for a man to stand in; another was just long enough “for shoving a prone person in headfirst, as in a grave.” There were several other isolation cells, which had small slots for water. Nearby was a bench for whipping prisoners with thick leather whips “made from dried-up bulls’ genitalia.” Few prisoners came out of the “Grey House” alive.¹⁵¹

Two weeks after his detention, an elderly SS judge questioned Pemper. During the two-hour interrogation, Pemper gave all the details he knew about Göth’s illegal black market deals. He also told him where he could find the correspondence relating to Göth’s illicit activities. Pemper went into details about Göth’s theft of food from the camp and about the goods he had taken from Jews after the closing of the ghetto that were supposed to be sent to the Reichsbank. When he had completed his testimony, Pemper was released back into the prisoner population. Two weeks later, he was among the seven hundred men selected for transport to Brünnlitz. But this was not the end of his dealings with the SS over Amon Göth’s crimes. In late February or early March 1945, he was taken to Groß Rosen and again interrogated by an SS judge from Munich. For the most part, the judge asked Pemper the same questions that he had been asked by the SS court investigators in Płaszów.¹⁵²

In his testimony in Göth’s trial in Kraków in 1946, Pemper told the judges that based on the questions asked him by the SS judges in Płaszów and Groß Rosen, he surmised that they were investigating a number of charges against the former Płaszów commandant. This included his theft of valuables from prisoners, which he failed to turn over to the SS, his luxurious lifestyle, and his failure to supply prisoners with adequate nourishment. Pemper told the Kraków court that he also thought the SS was investigating charges against Göth that he had violated concentration camp regulations, particularly when it came to abuses in the penalty company.¹⁵³ Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, who also testified against Göth in 1946, went into some detail about one of Göth’s favorite ways to abuse prisoners. It was called the Mannschaftszug (crew train) and was devised by Göth and SS-Untersturmführer Anton Scheidt. The Mannschaftzsug was used in the quarry, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Only women were permitted to work there. Polish women worked in the quarry in twelve-hour shifts during the day; Jewish women worked at night. Thirty-five women were attached to each side of a train of small cars on which were loaded 9,000 kilograms (19,800 lbs) of stone for road work at the upper end of the camp. The women involved, who hauled from twelve to fifteen loads per shift, had to move each load up a very steep incline. Göth was proud of the Mannschaftszug and, on Christmas Eve 1943, he decided to display his unique form of torture to a group of prominent SS officers gathered at his villa for a party. Needless to say, most of the Germans at the party were disgusted by Göth’s display. To counter the negative response, Ruth was able to convince Göth to let the female workers return to their barracks for the night.¹⁵⁴

Pemper said that one SS judge told him that such work was a “synonym for death” because it meant “very hard work along with beating and often with death.” The SS drew a fine line between what it justified as politically approved killings and “selfish, sadistic, or sexual punishment.” In fact, in the fall of 1942, the SS legal department (Hauptamt SS-Gericht) asked Heinrich Himmler about these very issues. The Reichsführer SS responded that “if the motive is purely political there should be no punishment unless such is necessary for the maintenance of discipline. If the motive is selfish, sadistic, or sexual, judicial punishment should be imposed for murder or manslaughter as the case may be.”¹⁵⁵ Pemper said that the SS also charged Göth for the Chilowicz murders and that one SS judge told him that Göth had killed Chilowicz and the other OD men because they knew too much.¹⁵⁶ In the end, Göth’s brutal mistreatment of his prisoners came to haunt him, though the SS never charged him with the mass murder of thousands more because Himmler’s organization approved of such crimes as politically motivated.

Finally, Pemper testified, the SS charged Göth with allowing his prisoners to see “the secret acts, correspondence, which is unavailable for prisoners.” What the SS considered most important in these documents was the personal information, particularly the personnel evaluations of the SS men in the camp. These reports included negative comments that were only supposed to be seen by officers. Even noncommissioned officers could not see these reports. The fact that prisoners who worked in the camp’s offices had seen these reports was considered a serious crime by the SS.¹⁵⁷

In his 1964 statement to Gosch and Koch, Schindler said that after Göth’s arrest on September 13, 1944, he “blamed everything on Oskar.” Göth, for example, claimed that Schindler had given him the RM 80,000 ($32,000) found on his person when they arrested him. He also told the SS Court investigators that all of the contraband that they had found at Płaszów had come from Schindler. As a final part of their investigation, Dr. Morgen’s SS team of lawyers and judges decided to detain Schindler, who at this time was at Brünnlitz preparing for the move of part of his factory from Emalia. On October 14 or 15, the twenty-four Jews unloading the huge wagon loads of goods from Emalia saw SS men snooping around the camp. They quickly hid some of Göth’s personal possessions, thinking they belonged to Oskar. They poured the illegal alcohol into the small river that ran beside the factory’s grounds, and hid the priceless cigarettes under a large transformer. This would later become the hiding place for Schindler’s storehouse of illegal arms. Oskar, who had not seen the SS men, was driving into the factory to eat lunch with his Jewish workers. As he approached the factory gate, two men in civilian clothes approached him and ordered him to get out of his car. They said, “We want to question you.” Oskar responded, “This is my factory—if you want to talk to me you can come to my car or else come over to my office.” The plainclothesmen then followed Oskar into his office.¹⁵⁸

When they got to Oskar’s office, the SS men asked questions about “Göth’s loot.” Oskar told them that he knew nothing about the matter. He did admit that he had several of Göth’s suitcases, which Göth had asked him to take down, and that they could open them. The suitcases contained only dirty laundry. Oskar quickly surmised that several of his interrogators were SS judges and he knew that he was in a lot of trouble. His first thought was to contact the Abwehr and Wehrmacht friends who had helped him in the past. At this point, Emilie walked into the office and wanted to know why her husband was under arrest. When the SS men refused to give her an answer, Oskar told her to stay out of it, that it was “not her affair.” He did get word to Emilie to contact “Columbus,” Schindler’s secretary, Viktoria Klonowska, in Kraków; she, in turn, would contact someone who could arrange his release.¹⁵⁹

At this point, the SS judges had Oskar handcuffed and taken by train to Kraków. As he got off the train, Oskar saw an old friend, Herr Hut, who walked up to him and shook his hand. One of the SS escorts chastised Hut for this: “You still dare to shake hands with this man, who is a prisoner?” Hut replied, “Well, under our law he’s innocent until proven guilty. As far as I’m concerned, he is a fine man, a man that I always knew, Oskar Schindler—a fine gentleman, and Herr Direktor, not a prisoner.” Schindler was then taken to Gestapo headquarters on Pomorska Street and put into one of the small, dark cells in the basement.¹⁶⁰

That night, Hut came to see Oskar and brought him a good meal with wine. He also told Schindler that Emilie had contacted “Columbus” and that his secretary had begun contacting members of the “rescue network.” Ths next day, Oskar was taken into a interrogation room where he was questioned by twelve SS officers and judges. Oskar’s defense was fairly simple: “I don’t know anything about this. I didn’t give any bribes to Goeth—why should I? I didn’t need anything from him—I’m on my way to Brünnlitz. I don’t need any more Jews, I have all the workers I need. If I gave him this money, which he said I did, I gave it to him as a loan and there was no other reason.” He also testified, “I’m not a fag,” indicating that there was not a homosexual relationship between them.¹⁶¹

Oskar told Koch and Gosch that he was scared during the eight days he was in SS custody. He was no longer certain that his contacts could get him out of jail because the charge of corruption was so serious. He had been brought to Gestapo headquarters instead of Montelupich prison (where he had been incarcerated earlier), which also frightened him because “only the [word of a] top Nazi, Himmler, could save you.” So even though Schindler was treated well by the SS, he feared for his life. One of the Nazi officers who entered his cell spit on him and called him “a Jew-lover, king of the Jews.” Later, after his release, Oskar met this SS officer in public and got into a fight with him. Schindler knocked the SS man unconscious.¹⁶²

On the fourth or fifth day of his imprisonment, Hut, “pale, unshaven, drunk,” visited Oskar and told him that Płaszów’s new commandant, SS-Obersturmführer Arnold Büscher, refused to send the three hundred women initially selected to go to Brünnlitz via Auschwitz. According to Schindler, Büscher thought that Oskar was shipping these women to his new camp “for his own special reasons, and that he wasn’t sufficiently anti-Jewish.” Büscher wanted to take the Schindler women off the list and replace them with a different group of women. Oskar, who was becoming increasingly worried about the length of his detention, now had even more reason to try to find a way to get out of the Gestapo jail.¹⁶³

He asked Hut to contact General Schoen, who was evidently in charge of concentration camps in the region, and to tell him that Oskar wanted to see him. More than likely, Koch and Gosch got the name wrong. If this part of the story is true, and there is no reason to doubt Schindler on this point because other sources verify his imprisonment at this time, he probably asked Hut to contact General Schindler, who oversaw concentration camp labor for the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government. Regardless, the general did visit Schindler and told him, “Now don’t worry, we’re going to get you out of here, and we’re going to see that the whole blame is placed on Goeth.” The next morning, October 21 or 22, Oskar was released. But instead of returning to Emalia, he drove immediately to Płaszów to find out what had happened to the women.¹⁶⁴

As luck would have it, Oskar arrived as 2,000 women were being loaded onto train cars for the transport to Auschwitz. When Schindler drove through the camp’s gate, his women saw him and began to cry out, “There’s Schindler… Schindler.” Oskar told Koch and Gosch that Büscher had a separation order for the Schindler women, though it is unclear what he meant by this. When Oskar got out of his car, Büscher asked, “What are you doing here? You have no business here, you are under arrest.” Oskar replied, “You’d be surprised, I have lots of things to do here. I spoke to your boss and do you know what you are doing? You are sabotaging production. Eight days of production for these 300 women. I want you to refer to your list and then separate these 300 women, then take them out of the 9,000 [2,000]—it’s an order, and this must be complied with, as I have this word from the head of the War Production in Berlin.” Büscher, who doubted what Schindler had just told him, decided to separate the three hundred Schindler women from the rest of the group, though they were all going to Auschwitz.¹⁶⁵

But this did not end the matter because Büscher “was still determined to get his revenge on Schindler.” Büscher wrote Auschwitz’s commandant, Richard Baer, to send three hundred other women to Brünnlitz instead of the three hundred original Schindler women from Płaszów. Oskar stated that Büscher did this “just to harass Schindler and out of his hatred for him, because he felt that he was befriending Jews.” Then, according to the notes from Martin Gosch and Howard Koch’s meeting with Schindler in Paris in November 1964, Oskar went to Baer and said, “Look, if you give me 300 other women, I have to begin training them again, and this is pretty late to do this—the war effort needs the things that we are going to make, and you take away from me the women who are already skilled, the women I’ve already trained, and this is going to hurt our production down there, so it doesn’t make any sense.” Baer finally agreed to release the 300 original Schindler women to Oskar in return for a payment of six RM ($2.40) a day for each woman for the time they were in Auschwitz. Baer then pocketed this money.¹⁶⁶

Unfortunately, as will be seen in the next chapter, the story about how Oskar got his three hundred women out of Auschwitz is fictitious. Schindler did not go to Auschwitz to save them. So how did Gosch and Koch come up with this tale? In 1955 and 1963, Schindler gave Yad Vashem and the West German criminal police a full account of how he had saved these women. This account is also backed up by testimony from Itzhak Stern, Emilie Schindler, and Mietek Pemper, though each account has slight variations. So Schindler either lied to Koch and Gosch in 1964 or fell prey to their continual editorializing during the lengthy interviews. But the story became part of many of the Hollywood myths that arose during this time about Schindler, and some of them ultimately made their way into Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Schindler’s List.¹⁶⁷

The only other time Oskar mentioned this particular detention was in his 1955 report to Yad Vashem. He said that a “recent arrest for several days by the Gestapo and my being turned over to the SS-Court Krakau because of Jewish interests (bribery of officials) cost much local [Sudeten] prestige.”¹⁶⁸ Oskar, of course, had been a major contributor to Göth’s illegal financial empire and had a lot to worry about. And though Emilie Schindler did not mention his third arrest in her memoirs, Itzhak Stern said it was Emilie who got Oskar released after eight days “due to connections and [a] great bribe.”¹⁶⁹

The arrest, detention, and questioning of Mietek Pemper and Oskar Schindler did not seem to help the SS in their investigation of Göth, who was ultimately released on his own recognizance from prison in late October 1944. The SS, though, continued to investigate the charges against him through the early months of 1945. One reason that Göth was never brought to trial by the SS was Himmler’s decision in the spring of 1944 to limit Morgen’s investigations to the Koch case. Morgen, who had set up investigative commissions in most of the concentration camps, evidently pursued the case against Göth against Himmler’s wishes. The Morgen investigations had caused quite a stir in the SS, which oversaw the mass murder of millions of Jews and others during the war. Moreover, given the widespread corruption in the SS, an aggressive investigator such as Morgen could create all sorts of problems for any number of officers in the large SS network of camps. In the end, the SS dropped the charges against Göth, though there was enough evidence to convict him of various crimes. Unfortunately, politics and the end of the war kept Morgen from adding Amon Leopold Göth’s name to his list of legal victories.¹⁷⁰

Mietek Pemper told me that when Schindler got permission to open his new armaments factory in Brünnlitz, Göth, who at one point had thought of joining Oskar there, contacted Schindler and asked whether he could send his clothes and other personal belongs to Brünnlitz for storage. Oskar agreed, though it is uncertain whether he realized how much Göth planned to send him. Göth sent two large truckloads of goods to Brünnlitz that he ultimately wanted sent to his home in Vienna.¹⁷¹ Oskar explained in 1964 that once he got approval for the move, Göth made an arrangement with him to move his personal goods to Brünnlitz in return for some trucks that Oskar needed to help move machinery and other items to his new factory. Included in Göth’s shipment were 200,000 Polish cigarettes, jewelry, and other valuables.¹⁷² Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein remembered seeing these goods in storage in Brünnlitz. One day, he approached Schindler about the need for a bed or couch for the factory’s small sick room. Oskar told Dr. Bieberstein to go to the storage area and tell Adolf Elsner, the inmate in charge, to give him a bed. The storage area was filled with all types of furniture. As Bieberstein looked around, he noticed that many of the items were carefully wrapped. These, Elsner said, were owned by Amon Göth.¹⁷³

The arrest of Amon Göth and his removal as commandant of Płaszów, particularly when combined with the murder of Wilhelm Chilowicz and his top OD aides, set the stage for one of the most dramatic moments in the Schindler story, the creation of the famous “Schindler’s List.” Göth’s replacement, SS-Obersturmführer Arnold Büscher, had his hands full evacuating the large number of Jews and Poles at Płaszów, helping the Kommando 1005 unit disinter and burn bodies, and breaking up the camp. Consequently, Büscher had little time to worry about names on transport lists. This task was left to Franz Müller, the overseer of the Jewish labor details. Müller was not particularly interested in what names went on a particular list, and the most important figure in all this, Oskar Schindler, was struggling to overcome resistance to his move to the Sudetenland from local Party figures and business interests. Schindler, too, had more on his mind than the names that went on his famous “list of life” and he had no contact with Müller about it. The only person privy to Oskar Schindler’s general wishes about the list was an undistinguished, greedy OD man who would become the author of a list of 1,000 names made famous by Thomas Keneally and Steven Spielberg. This was Marcel Goldberg, Franz Müller’s Jewish assistant.