Schindler's+List+-+Historical+Context

Film Context In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party assumed power in Germany and began plans for war. The party wanted to rid Germany, and eventually the world, of “impure” groups: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped, among others. Thus began a period of genocide. In 1935, the German government passed the Nuremberg Laws, which defined individuals as Jews based not on their religious practices but on bloodlines. In other words, a person raised Christian who had at least three Jewish grandparents was considered Jewish and therefore impure. These laws also called for the separation of the “pure” Aryan race from the Jews. In 1938, in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the Nazis broke windows and tore apart Jewish businesses and synagogues, foreshadowing the eventual attempt at comprehensive destruction of the Jewish race. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the policies of racial hatred already in place in Germany were adopted in the new German-occupied territories. Jewish people could no longer own businesses in Poland and other German-occupied territories and eventually were forced to wear armbands or patches emblazoned with the Star of David so they could be easily identified as Jews. They were forced out of their homes in the city and countryside and into ghettos, concentrated and separated from rest of the population. The Kraków ghetto, featured in //Schindler’s List//, covered sixteen square blocks and was populated by approximately 20 , 000 Jews. In time, Jews were forced to work in labour camps, and some were murdered by mobile killing units. Around 1941, the “Final Solution” was implemented in order to exterminate all the Jews, Gypsies, and other “impure” groups in Europe. Today, it stands as one of the darkest periods in human history. The Nazis evacuated Jews violently from the ghettos, sending them to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps to face the gas chambers. Bodies of the murdered were cremated in large ovens, often making the sky above the death camps and surrounding towns black with smoke, with human ashes raining down like snow. During this bleak and terrifying period in Kraków, Oskar Schindler, a war profiteer and womanizer, saved the lives of about 1, 100 Jews who worked for him. These people would come to call themselves Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews). Given that the Nazis killed millions of people during the Holocaust, 1, 100 might seem an insignificant number. However, this number represents 1, 100 unique human lives, all of which would have ceased to exist if not for Schindler, and those 1 , 100 produced some six thousand descendants. Despite the overwhelming scale of the Holocaust as a whole, the powerful story of the Schindlerjuden and the man who risked his life and wealth to save their lives has endured.