Oskar Schindler is the factory owner credited with saving more than 1,000 Jewish people during the Holocaust in Schindler’s List.
The film, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993, dramatizes Schindler’s transformation from a profit-seeking German industrialist into a protector of Jewish workers. He employed people in his enamelware and munitions factories, arguing that their labor was essential to the German war effort.
Schindler used money, influence, bribery, and personal risk to keep his workers from deportation and murder. The people he protected became known as Schindlerjuden, meaning “Schindler’s Jews.”
A common mix-up is confusing Schindler with Amon Göth, the commandant of the nearby Płaszów concentration camp. Göth is portrayed as Schindler’s brutal antagonist, not the rescuer.