15. Schindler sought reimbursement for his expenditures
After the war, Oskar Schindler claimed to have spent over a million dollars of his own money in his efforts to protect the workers he employed, as well as others. Most of his expenses came, according to his own claims, from the building of the sub-camp at Plaszow and the expenses of the black market and bribery. During his escape to the west, Schindler used diamonds to bribe Soviet officials, and he still held some in his possession when he arrived in Switzerland, as well as gold. In 1948 Schindler presented his claims to the New York based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, requesting that he be reimbursed for personal expenses of just over $1 million. Included in his request were supporting documents from various Zionist groups and some of the workers he had protected.
Schindler was awarded $15,000. Many of the expenses he had listed were unsupportable. Travel for the purpose of being awarded war contracts (he was undeniably a profiteer, originally leasing the factory for that purpose) was not considered as being protective of the Jews he employed. The fact that he employed Jewish workers at all being because they were less expensive, with their wages as well as their rations set by the German government, was also a factor. As Schindler struggled to recover from the war and the loss of his factories and fortune, several of the workers he had protected rebuilt their lives. They became known collectively as Schindlerjuden (Shindler’s Jews). One of them was a former officer of the Polish Army who had worked for Schindler since the earliest days of the enamelware factory, Poldek Pfefferberg.