Oskar Schindler

Schindler grew up in Moravia and joined Nazi military intelligence in 1936, collecting information on railways and troop movements before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939 and acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków that year, which employed about 1,750 workers at its peak in 1944, including 1,000 Jews. His intelligence connections allowed him to shield his workers from deportation, trading ever-larger bribes and black market goods for their safety. In July 1944, as the SS began liquidating camps and sending prisoners to Auschwitz, Schindler convinced the commandant of Kraków-Płaszów to let him relocate his factory to Brněnec; a list of 1,200 names was compiled, and those workers were transported there in October. He bankrupted himself keeping them alive until Germany's surrender in May 1945. After the war he moved to Argentina with his wife Emilie, failed at farming, left her in 1958, and returned to Germany where he lived on support from the people he'd saved. He died in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem - the only former Nazi Party member honored on Mount Zion.