German Man Who Typed ‘Schindler’s List’ Dies at 91

Mietek Pemper was responsible for typing famous list that saved 1,000 Jews during Holocaust; will be buried in Jewish cemetery in Germany.

Mietek Pemper, the man responsible for typing Oskar Schindler’s famous list that saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust, died Tuesday in Augsburg, Germany, at age 91.

Pemper is to be buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery, and local officials plan to order flags to be lowered to halfmast, the Agence France-Presse reported.

RELATED: 'NY judge allows Schindler's original list to be sold' The fight for Schindler's list

During his imprisonment in the Plaszow concentration camp, Pemper served as the personal typist of Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, from 1943 to 1944.

At one point, he secretly read a letter sent to Goeth from Berlin announcing that all factories not producing goods for the Nazi-war effort would be closed down. Pemper was subsequently able to convince Schindler, a Nazi-party member – who initially hoped to profit from the Germany’s invasion of Poland – to switch his plant’s focus from enamel production to anti-tank grenade rifles.

Pemper then, at great personal risk, gave Schindler a typed list of more than 1,000 fellow prisoners who could work in the plant.

Schindler famously saved more than 1,200 lives through a mixture of work opportunities and bribes to Nazi officers.

Though he died in anonymity in 1974, Schindler’s story was famously adapted by director Steven Spielberg in the 1993 film Schindler’s List, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Pemper served as a consultant on the film, and in 2005 published his memoir, The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List.

In the book, Pemper pondered what the world would have been like if there had been no war, or Nazi extermination effort.

“Goeth would probably not have been a mass murderer, nor Schindler a saver of lives. It was only the extraordinary circumstances of war and the immense power granted to individual men that revealed the nature of these men to such an impressive and terrifying degree,” he wrote. “Fate had placed me between the two of them, and it was like having an angel on one side and a demon on the other.”

To anyone interested, you can place virtual flowers and/or write something at Find a Grave:

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Birth: Mar. 24, 1920
Krakow, Poland
Death: Jun. 7, 2011
Augsburg
Bavaria (Bayern), Germany

Holocaust Figure. Born Mieczyslaw Pemper, during World War II he was a Jewish Polish citizen, when he was arrested in 1943 and sent to the Nazi concentration camp in Plaszow, Poland. Because he spoke German, he became the personal orderly and typist for the camp's brutal and feared German SS Commandant Amon Goeth. It was there that he befriended German industrialist Oskar Schindler and informed him that he secretly read in mail from Berlin, that all factories which were not producing goods for the Nazi war effort would be closed.

He convinced Schindler a member of the Nazi party, to abandon enamel production at his plant and start making war ordinance. At great risk to his own life, Pemper supplied Schindler with a typed list of fellow prisoners to be recruited for work at the revised facility.

Together with Schindler, he is credited with saving the lives of some 1200 Jews through work schemes and bribes paid to German officers. After the war, Pemper testified to the Polish Supreme National Tribunal at the trials against war criminals, where Amon Goeth was found guilty and hanged in September, 1946.

Pemper remained a close friend of Oskar Schindler until he died in 1974. In 1993, Pemper served as an adviser to director Steven Spielberg on the film "Schindler's List", which won seven Oscars. He also is the author of best seller "The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List" (2005), a book of his memoirs. (bio by: John "J-Cat" Griffi

I’d like to think G-d would have seen those 600-1200 Jews who achieved safety as having the potential to seed an uprising.

I’d like to think when we say never again, that includes turning out backs and letting our neighbors die...or worse, trading fine art, and jewels alongside the names of our neighbors in order to live.

I’d like to think the teachings of Hannah and her Seven Sons still resonates. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0008_0_08365.html

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