Oskar Schindler Joined the Naz Party in 1936 |
by Valerie Sobel
What if Oskar Schindler had been a greedy, philandering, two-faced Nazi-sympathizing profiteer who stood to make fortunes from the slave labour of Jews in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia?
Well...it looks as though he was! Schindler joined Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, Abwehr, in 1936. After witnessing the wide-spread horrors of Kristallnacht against the Jews, he joined Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1939.
Let’s set the record straight: My research shows that Schindler wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer. He was a Nazi.
Furthermore. Prior to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (Schindler’s country of birth), he spied on his country by collecting information on railways and troop movements for the Nazi government. He was arrested for espionage by the Czechoslovak government but released under the terms of the Munich Agreement.
Did Schindler stop his spying activities for Hitler after the arrest? Hardly. He continued to provide information to the Nazis, spying in Poland in 1939 to aid Hitler’s invasion at the start of World War II.
Yet we know Schindler as a champion of human rights, a man of courage and tenacity, a beacon of exemplary morality in time of colossal darkness. History books and Hollywood blockbusters deem him a hero for having shielded between 1000-1200 Jews from death camps in his factories as slave labour. And rightfully so. Because saving one life, never mind 1200, no matter the circumstances, agenda, character, history or ideology of the saviour ...is all that matters. He saved. While millions stood by and didn’t. He’s a hero. End of story.
Actually, there lived another Czech nationalist who, in the 1940s, saved as many as 300,000 Ashkenazi ews of Europe, without ever exploiting them or actively working to spy for and benefit the greatest evil on earth...and you’ve never even heard of him.
That no one ever heard of him is downright criminal. But this huge void of history is pinpoint strategic and quite explicable, if we take human nature into account.
Before divulging the details of one of the grandest rescue efforts on the planet, and biggest for European Holocaust Jewry, let’s poke and see why museums have buried this event from our view. (“museums” are human rights organizations, social justice causes, governments and academia en masse).
Shouldn’t history books, school curricula and Spielberg productions jump at the chance to expose this mammoth reclaim of human life and liberty for hundreds of thousands Hitler-terrorized souls?
THANKS SO MUCH,, IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US IN THESE DIFFICULT TIME