How did the Jews invest in Schindler’s factory?
Did they have cash in suitcases in the ghetto, or did they still have access to their bank accounts and funds?
I thought when the Germans purged the jews from their society and shoved them in the ghettos, they took everything from them except the clothes on their backs and what they could carry into the ghetto with them?
I understood that Schindler was just a guy that owned some factories, no investment needed. The Germans offered him free labour same as other industries, and he chose to help rather than exploit those workers.
Oscar Shindler was penniless-to start his factory, he needed money (mostly to bribe German officers, so as to secure contracts). For this he had to borrow money from the local Jewish businessmen. Why were these guys not in concentration camps? The movie never explained this.
I don’t have a for-sure correct answer for Oscar Schindler himself. However…
The Jews were not stripped of all possessions and shipped off to concentration camps overnight. Calling it a “purge” is probably a misnomer. They went through a whole decade of increasingly restrictive laws and increasingly hostile treatment. Even when the ghettoes were first formed, many Jews took their portable possessions with them and some ghettoes ran for years. In fact, even those shipped off to concentration camps still had some valuables smuggled in.
So it makes sense that some Jews would see an opportunity; investing in a factory and getting a promise from someone like Schindler gets assets out of their own name, and provides some hope to receive those assets back at a future date.
Perhaps the movie does a poor time line for this. But if I remember correctly, Schindler seeks out Stein to be his manager at his plant, and then gets him to line up investors to meet Schindler at the Ghetto. Perhaps they weren’t at the Ghetto then, but they were not living in their own homes. They met in his car, and he offered as a return on the investment pots and pans so they could use them to barter inside the ghetto. I distinctly remember him saying “Look at where you live now. Money is not what you need. Goods are what you need to survive in there.”
And the next day, he go the cash to buy the shutdown metal works factory. Am I mistaking? Was this not the ghetto, but some forced labor camp before the trip to the ghetto?
Does any know the history about this period in Germany with regards to Jews being purged away from German society? I know they did this in stages, but did they permit the jews to access their money in their private bank accounts before going to the ghetto? Schindler would have needed A LOT of money, not easily carried.
I’m going to bump this once to see if anyone else has anything to add.
I’m still curious as to how this played out. It must be Nazi month or something, as I’ve seen shows like “Hitler’s Bodyguard”, Stalingrad, and a bunch of WWII ETO footage.
There must have been a plan or schedule put together to make sure the Nazis remained in control of the Jews. Perhaps they moved the people to the ghettos first, and then took their money away.
I don’t know much about this part of german history. From the information that has been presented to me, it’s been more or less condensed into "Germans stripped Jews of wealth and possessions, and put all into ghettos before moving to “the final solution” But perhaps this wasn’t the case, and jews lived in the ghettos with access to their personal funds at first.
Note that Schindler’s factory was in Krakow, and the Jewish workers he was protecting were almost all Polish.
Schindler opened the enamelware factory in 1939.
The Jews of Krakow were not formally ghettoized until 1941.
The (as I recall it) extremely compressed timescale of the movie might have left you confused about this.
After the Germans invaded Poland, they froze Jewish bank assets. One of the former owners of the Rekord plant, a guy named Abraham Bankier, knew that it was only a matter of time before the assets were seized completely, so he met with Schindler, and he and a bunch of Jewish investors made an off the books deal with Schindler. They’d give him the money to buy the plant, and in exchange, he promised to provide them with enamelware, which they figured they could hide and still have something of value even after the Germans took all their hard currency.
I visited the factory a couple of years ago, on a walking tour of the ghetto area; it seems lots of local people then used assets in hard currency, gold, diamonds, antiques etc. The guide said they paid to work in the factory. At about the same time I visited the camp nearby and the guide said it was not just a place for Jews to go to; he said there was also a genocide of Poles and other Europeans.