Judenrat, the city’s Jewish administrative body, looking for a Jewish accountant named Itzhak Stern to run finances at a new factory he’s acquired. Their meeting is immediately tense; Schindler is looking for a way to get richer, while Stern is faced with the administrative deportation of his community. Schindler sees financial opportunity in the future, while Stern lives in the present. Schindler is a salesman; Stern is not.
But Stern reconsiders after local Jewish people are evicted from their homes and forced into ghettos. He introduces Schindler to two wealthy merchants who could provide the capital he needs upfront. Schindler drives a hard bargain, taking advantage of the Jews’ underclass status; when the potential investors splutter, “Money’s still money!” to reject a lowball offer, Schindler coolly replies, “No, it’s not. That’s why we’re here.” But there’s no question he has a heart of gold somewhere deep down. When the investors note that they won’t be able to trust him since contracts between Jews and Germans are unenforceable, Schindler firmly yet comfortingly counters: “I said what I’ll do. That’s our contract.”
In the same vein, Schindler maintains a hard exterior while beginning to help Jewish people. He justifies his decision to hire Jewish workers to Stern based on cost alone, dismissively saying, “Poles cost more. Why should I hire Poles?” while nonetheless actively helping forge papers for older Jews, academics, and children, designating them as “essential workers” and saving them from the day-to-day misery of the ghetto.
Soon, though, we confront the overt and savage violence of the Nazi regime in the person of Amon Göth. An SS officer, Göth runs Płaszów, a forced labor camp, with psychopathic cruelty. Schindler must enter an uneasy alliance with Göth to use his Jewish workforce, while continuing small acts of kindness to oppressed Jews. This approach works until 1944, when as the war becomes more obviously unwinnable and the prisoners are scheduled to die, Schindler’s heart of gold realizes what must be done. Despite huge financial losses and business inconveniences, he relocates more than 1,000 of his Jewish workers to a new factory in his hometown, saving them from certain death. Although it’s not good business, it’s the right thing to do.
In the film, business is a powerful, if ambiguous, source for good. The negative side of business professionalism is undeniable, though, and takes two forms: control and euphemism. First, it is a conduit for control. Nowhere is this clearer than in forced labor camps, which Göth pitches to Schindler as a valuable addition to the normal private sector. In fact, the Nazi explains, “The SS will manage certain industries itself inside Płaszów, but it’s private industry like yours that stands to benefit the most.” The profiteering motive of the forced labor camps is even a justification for Jewish extermination; when Schindler complains about one of his workers being murdered, Amon laughs: “We are going to be making so much money that none of this is going to matter!”
The role of business is also one of euphemism and over-administration. As discussed at length during our FASPE trip, professionals often couch difficult topics in euphemisms9. At Auschwitz, Schindler asks Commandant Rudolf Höss10 to release workers sent there accidentally. Sitting in a darkly lit room, Höss obscures his words just as much as his shadowed face and defers responsibility to another officer, using words like “tasks” and “processes” to obfuscate shared meaning. Schindler himself adapts euphemisms when speaking with other Nazis, such as when he outlines the rules at his factory in Czechoslovakia to SS officials. This approach cuts both ways. “There will be no interference of any kind in production,” he shouts—using “interference” as a stand-in for the arbitrary killing of Jews that plagued Płaszów.
For much of the film, euphemism makes it easier for Schindler to focus on “business as usual” and excuse Nazi violence. In an early conversation between the two men, as Schindler lends a sympathetic ear to Göth, the SS man complains at length:
You’ve got to build the fucking thing, getting those f... permits alone is enough to drive you crazy; then the engineers show up, they stand around, they argue about drainage, foundations, codes, exact specifications, parallel fences four kilometers long, 1,200 kilograms of barbed wire, 6,000 kilograms of electrified fences, ceramic insulators, three cubic meters of air space per prisoner! I’m telling you, you want to shoot somebody. I’ve been through it, I know11.
Of course, we know Göth has shot many “somebodies,” and it’s not because he needs to fill out so many purchase orders. But in defending the SS officer to Stern, Schindler sighs exasperatedly and explains as if defending the outburst of a colleague at work to a junior employee:
You have to understand. Göth is under enormous pressure. He's got this whole place to run. He's got a lot of things to worry about. And he's got the war, which brings out the worst in people; never the good, always the bad. But in normal circumstances he wouldn't be like this; he'd be all right.
These euphemisms reach their peak when the Nazis begin shipping everyone to concentration camps, and words don’t adequately describe the process. Stern notes to Schindler how “preferential” and “special” treatment mean different things—one safe, one deadly—to which Schindler asks, half-jokingly, “do we have to invent a whole new language?” Stern answers solemnly, “I think so.”
On the whole, however, the arc of Schindler’s List demonstrates the belief that business professionals can do more good than harm, sometimes just as a lifeline. Schindler and Stern, for example, argue after a one-armed factory employee gratuitously thanks Schindler for saving his life; Schindler fears that the implication that his factory is
a charity, rather than a “real” business, will put him in danger and, as a result, reprimands Stern.
In part to demonstrate business’ potential ethical value, Spielberg has Schindler meet with the only other character who is explicitly identified as a businessman. The man is also an “industrialist with a heart of gold,” and although he’s based on Julius Madritsch (who really did help his Jewish employees)12, it’s not representative; as we FASPE fellows learned at the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center in Berlin, businessmen who treated workers well were an infinitesimally rare exception, not the norm.
The film’s most full-throated defense of business as an avenue for good comes after Schindler’s factory has been relocated. Now independent of Nazi management, Schindler suggests that the factory close early on Fridays so the workers can celebrate the Sabbath; he ensures that the military does not have oversight of the factory floor; and he tells his workers that no functional weapons should be produced by the factory, lest they actually help the German war effort. Schindler, in other words, can heroically use business to do good for Jewish people only by running an intentionally nonproducing business, a fundamental tension that we are left pondering even as the Schindlerjuden walk into freedom.
Schindler’s List, excellent as it is, showcases
a celebratory view of the role of business and professionalism during the Holocaust that may not be representative of history. Its moral world is relatively black and white. This simple picture has been complicated by the Holocaust films that followed.
The Professional as Victim and Perpetrator: Son of Saul
The fact that Son of Saul is director László Nemes’ feature directorial debut comes as a triple shock. First, it enjoyed immense success, winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Second, it shows substantial formal vision. The movie is shot on 35mm film with
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9. Perhaps most infamously, “headcount reduction” for “mass layoffs.” Some particularly memorable academic material on the subject from our coursework was found in the session on language and ethical fading.
10. Who will appear as the main character in Zone of Interest thirty years later!