In Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally writes, “Duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.” As a leading paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, the SS was brilliant at enforcing compliance in their ranks by appealing to a sense of duty, even when this meant committing atrocities. All of the antagonists in the book, which takes place in Poland during the Holocaust, are on some level motivated by a sense of duty. The Nazi Party is arranged according to a strict hierarchy, and even impulsive men like Commandant Amon Goeth restrain themselves when duty requires it. Duty overrides other moral questions, too, at one point turning the SS officer Albert Hujar into a reluctant executioner (since refusing to kill people would be to disobey a direct order, which he won’t do). But even righteous characters wrestle with questions of duty. Emilie Schindler, for example, considers it her duty as a Catholic wife to be faithful to Oskar, even though he has a much laxer interpretation of Catholic marital duty. This may be what ultimately leads to her save the lives of several prisoners as a nurse at Brinnlitz (a camp Oskar establishes near his home in Moravia to rescue the Jewish prisoners who worked for him in Cracow). Schindler’s List thus explores how duty motivated a wide variety of historical figures during this time, showing that duty can serve as an excuse for monstrous acts, but also that it can motivate positive change.
Duty, in Schindler’s List, is frequently the motivation behind atrocities, and characters manipulate the language of duty to make violent actions seem reasonable. The Einsatzgruppen, known even within the SS for their brutal execution methods, were specifically organized around the concept of duty. A loose translation of their name is “special-duty groups.” In German, the name also recalls the language of medieval knights. The brutal extermination campaigns that the Einsatzgruppen carried out were therefore reframed as “Special Chivalrous Duty” in order to make them more palatable. Julian Scherner, the SS police chief in Cracow, provides another interesting example of duty in action. Keneally writes that Scherner “had reached that happy point in his career at which duty and financial opportunity coincided,” meaning that his orders from above to take wealth away from Jewish people—including money, land, jewelry, and other personal property—also personally benefit Scherner himself. Duty becomes a way for Scherner to justify his actions, both externally and to himself. Schindler himself notes the role that duty played in motivating German soldiers during a famous speech on his factory floor in Brinnlitz near the end of the war. He argues that “the little man who has done his duty everywhere” is not ultimately responsible for the worst war crimes of Nazi Germany. Others take up similar arguments to Schindler, suggesting that it was duty, more than malice, that led to the worst actions of the Holocaust. Keneally seems to treat Schindler’s statement with skepticism (particularly since a garrison of SS members is in the audience when Schindler gives the speech), but the book does acknowledge that duty leads to complicated moral situations.
Not all duty in Schindler’s List is negative, however—the morally ambiguous nature of duty means that it can also motivate positive change. One of the most dutiful people in the book is Oskar’s wife, Emilie Schindler. Despite her husband’s long absences and many affairs, she remains committed to him because she believes this is her duty as a wife. Perhaps even more so, she remains committed to her Catholic faith. In Brinnlitz, she hangs a picture in her apartment of Jesus with an open, flaming heart—Keneally writes of how this symbolizes her own “ideological commitment” to opening her heart to Jewish victims of the war, which she does as a nurse while working at Brinnlitz. Oskar Schindler himself refers to duty during his famous speech at the end of the war. He says that he and his former Jewish prisoners have a duty to remain humane, rather than going out to plunder or seek vengeance. Schindler’s concept of duty is different from the Nazis’ concept, because it isn’t based on any sort of military hierarchy. Instead, he appeals to a basic human moral duty that transcends government and religion. This shared sense of duty helps all the residents of Brinnlitz unite around a positive goal, and ultimately, it helps them make it through the perilous final days of the occupation.
Keneally, then, shows in Schindler’s List how duty is not a virtue on its own but how it can be made to serve virtuous causes. By doing so, he seems to argue that duty should not be allowed to act as an excuse for committing atrocities. Not all duties are equal, and Keneally places a higher value on the sort of altruistic duties favored by Schindler and his allies.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Duty Quotes in Schindler’s List
Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings. “Special-duty groups” is a close translation. But the amorphous word Einsatz was also rich with a nuance-of challenge, of picking up a gauntlet, of knightliness. These squads were recruited from Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Wilhelm Keitel that “in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints.” In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.
The councilmen of Artur Rosenzweig’s Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of ’41.
The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa Górka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine.
When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of ’43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi. You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.
The orders, labeled OKH (Army High Command), already sat on Oskar’s desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL Płaszów and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to Płaszów, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin.
Oskar later estimated that he spent 100,000 RM.—nearly $40,000—to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”
This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity.
Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.
For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing.
To call either of them a speech, however, is to demean their effect. what Oskar was instinctively attempting was to adjust reality, to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty, he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith Liebgold among them, that they would last the war. He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their morning of arrival the previous November, and told them, “you’re safe now; you’re with me.” It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a demagogue of the style of Huey Long of Louisiana or John Lang of Australia, whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil devised by other men.
Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in German at night on the workshop floor to the assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand to attention. He looked around at the mute faces of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he thought. And then everything will fall apart.
He was mourned on every continent.
