Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SCHOLL, HANS AND SOPHIE
he was not a German national, and working for the Abwehr (German military intelligence).
In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, Schindler purchased a factory in
Krakow, southeastern Poland, near the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, from its Jewish
owner Nathan Wurzel, at a substantially reduced price in accord with Nazi “ayranization”
policies, which enabled him to engage Jewish slave labor at extremely exploitative
rates (payable to the SS) with the assistance of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern
(1901–1969). Schindler went to great lengths to ensure the survival of “his Jews,” or
Schindlerjuden, as they came to be called. With the Soviet advance in 1944, he transferred
eleven hundred of his laborers to a new factory in Brenec-Brünnlitz, which was liberated
by the Russians on May 8, 1945.
After the war, Schindler and his wife went to Argentina where he again failed in business,
returning to Germany in 1958, and repeating his pattern of business bankruptcy. He
and his wife were sustained economically during those years by various Jewish organizations
in gratitude for his lifesaving work. He died in Germany on October 9, 1974, and
was later reinterred on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. In 1963 he was honored by Israel’s
Holocaust Memorial Authority, Yad Vashem, as a “Righteous Gentile.” Australian novelist
Thomas Keneally’s (b. 1935) book Schindler’s Ark (1982) was later adapted for the
movie screen in 1993 by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) and renamed Schindler’s List, winning
an Academy Award for Best Picture. Controversy continues to surround Oskar Schindler
as a man of contradiction whose motives may have been suspect (e.g., money, power), but
whose deeds were life-affirming.
Schindler’s List. Directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) in 1993, winning a Best Picture
award from the American Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences and starring
Liam Neeson (b. 1952), Ben Kingsley (b. 1943), and Ralph Fiennes (b. 1962), this major
commercial film was based on the 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark by Australian writer Thomas
Keneally (b. 1935). Schindler’s List tells the dramatic story of (real-life) Sudeten-German
businessman and Nazi Oskar Schindler (1908–1974), adulterer, morally corrupt, “games
player,” opportunist, and profiteer, who operated a slave labor factory (that produced
enamelware cookery for military use) and, in the process, saved more than eleven hundred
Jews (Schindlerjuden, or “Schindler Jews”).
The style of the film in the manner of an actual black-and-white documentary (with the
exception of its opening and closing sequences), along with its superb acting and an outstanding
musical score composed by John Williams (b. 1932), made this three-hour-long
epic an award-winner and a favorite among moviegoers. Like Gerald Green’s (1922–2006)
problematic television drama in the late 1970s titled Holocaust, Schindler’s List engendered
controversy, additional historical research, Jewish-Christian dialogues, and served to place
an immense refocusing by the U.S. public on the Holocaust.
Scholl, Hans (1918–1943) and Sophie (1921–1943). Brother and sister who were at
the forefront of organizing a resistance movement within Germany against the Nazi
regime during World War II. The movement, known as the Weisse Rose (White Rose), was
largely centered at the University of Munich, where the Scholls were students. With a
group of friends and their professor, Dr. Kurt Huber (1893–1943), the Scholls published
and distributed a series of numbered handbills that campaigned for the overthrow of
Nazism and the revival of a new Germany dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and
founded on the purest of Christian values. In mid-February 1943, the White Rose
arranged a small anti-Nazi demonstration in Munich, their ideals inspiring them to more
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