In the waning days of World War II, Oskar Schindler—a former Czech German spy for Abwehr, a Nazi Party member, and owner of two German factories in Kraków and Brnenec (a small village near his hometown in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia)—fled westward with a handful of his Jewish workers dressed in concentration-camp garb. Schindler was well aware that as soon as the war ended, the restored Czech government would be looking for him because of his alleged wartime crimes. But he also feared that if the Soviets captured him and discovered that he had not only been a Nazi spy but also owned factories that used Jewish slave laborers, they would execute him. In many ways, Schindler ostensibly represented, stereotypically, the type of Sudeten German that Czech authorities sought to punish as severely as possible after the war. Both Timothy Snyder, in Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin...

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