Oskar Schindler in front of his factory with his workers, Poland.
During the 1930’s the political state of Europe began to change dramatically due to the rise of Hitler. In late 1936 Oskar was invited to a New Year’s celebration party to meet friends who were said to be high-ranking officers. At this party, one of the men Oskar had encountered was a man by the name of Wilhelm Canaris, who was the chief of Abwehr, the German Intelligence Agency. Oskar had officially joined them on July 1st, 1938. However, his first stint as a spy didn’t last long due to his arrested on 18th of July that year. He was sentenced to two years in jail by the Czech State. In October of that same year, he was released from prison now that Germany now occupied Czech and had ordered all political prisoners be released. Oskar then returned to his Abwehr duties upon being released.
Almost a year later in September 1939 once World War II had begun, Schindler had left his wife and went to Krakow, hoping to try to profit from the impending war. Once there he had begun looking for business opportunities to jump-start his business, however, he quickly became involved in the black market. He used his money to buy “gifts of gratitude” to bribe high-ranking officials. Feeling the need to expand his business in the area, Schindler had Jewish enamelware factory to produce goods for the German military. He originally started with a small staff of 45 people but grew to as many as 1,700 in the peak of the factory in 1944. He had hired the Jewish workers merely because they were a less expensive Polish workforce. However, as the atrocities to the Jews from the Nazi’s continued, his attitude began to change. He began to shift the purpose of the factory not to create goods for the Germans, but to save as many Jews as possible from them.