There is one - and only one - former Nazi buried on Mount Zion in Israel: Oskar Schindler. Within days of his death on October 9th, 1974, the man who had joined the Nazi Party in 1939 and who had conducted espionage for the German government in Czechoslovakia and Poland, was interred at the cemetery in Jerusalem. By the time of his death, he was not considered a war criminal, but someone Righteous Among the Nations, responsible for saving the lives of 1200 Jews.
Schindler, the owner of an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, employed approximately 1000 Jews. When he witnessed the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto, he was shocked by the brutality, and his workforce went from employees to people, from Ghetto dwellers to a part of humanity. He tapped all his resources to save them.
Schindler’s most remarkable feat was cajoling Amon Goth, a sadistic SS officer in charge of the Płaszów concentration camp, to keep his factory outside the camp and house his workers in a safe sub-camp where they could eat well and observe their Judaism. His extensive contacts within the Nazi Party and his considerable wealth underwrote his courageous life-saving project. He also secured funds and provided information about Nazi atrocities to the Jewish resistance movement.
In 1944, with the help of several Jewish contacts, Schindler was provided a list of names. He set out to save every person on the list by moving his factory, which was now making munitions, to the Sudetenland — an area beyond the clutches of the Nazis. However, when his workers were sent to death camps instead of to their new homes in the Sudetenland, Schindler had to once again exert his powers of persuasion and bribery to rescue them. He was successful.
After the war, having spent all his money on saving lives, Schindler endured business failures in Germany and Argentina. He survived on the financial assistance of the Jews he had saved, several of whom he had stayed in touch with during the post-war period. He was invited to Yad Vashem in 1962 and died in West Germany, at the age of 66, in 1974.
