Oscar Schindler, a German who saved roughly 1100 Jews by putting them in his factory to work during the Jews' darkest time in Germany. Although Schindler's initial intention was to make money out of them, he realizes he could do something greater with his actions - to save these innocent Jews. Thanks to Itzhak Stern, his administrator, who was also a Jews, falsified documents to retain all the Jews in the factory.
If I were to put a meaning in "war", it would be something that allow you to see the downside of human's behavior, that you would not see in daily life. During that time, the Germans were being extremely cruel and ruthless towards Jews even though the Jews had done nothing wrong.
Talking alongside with Milgram's experiment that was inspired by Nazis' act, it was indicated that the army detached the responsibility as they were merely following order. However, going in deeper, most of them in the army, truly believed that what they were doing was for justice. But how? How did they believe that it was right to kill people? How did they sleep well at night after torturing all these innocent people? And for this, I would attribute this "honor" to the leader, Hitler, of what he had done to "brainwash" his army. According to Reicher, Haslam and Rath (2008), they proposed a social identity model of how people who commit great wrongs actually know what they are doing, choose to do it and celebrate what they did, which explained the background of the movie of why the Nazis committed such crimes without mercy. There were five steps of making a virtue out of evil.
1. Identification: At this stage, they construct and generate an in-group identity, by seeking common ground of interest, which would become a source of empowerment to their acts later.
2. Exclusion: They start to define who and what would be counted as "one of us". "What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?...Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrad [Volksgenosse] as your self." (Koonz, 2003). This was the narrow definition they made about them and this stage of exclusions and inclusion would bring about a whole different set of behaviors.
3. Threat: While many groups that do not share identity, they do not necessarily hate each other. The conflict only arises when certain groups are seen as threats to their hosts. From internet, I actually found that Jews were perceived as having too much wealth and power by Germans, which was a justifiable threat. However, it slowly developed to "Jews are a convenient group to single out and blame for our troubles" and "We hate Jews because they are different from us", which I could never understand the hate in it.
4. Virtue: At this stage, Nazis presented themselves as a moral project. They wanted to "clean up" their nation from the "unwanted influences". They no longer mention Jews, but mention more of German supremacy. Reicher et al. (2008) mentioned that the higher the ingroup virtues, the more serious the outgroup threat becomes, and when this happens, their "cleaning" to defend themselves would become more acceptable.
5. Celebration: When virtues are clearly defined, when group boundaries are clear, the stage is set for further problems. If "they" represent "evil", then it would be a necessity for the destruction to take place.
Back to the movie, Schindler, on the other hand, was being very kind to the Jews, to the extent of allowing them to even celebrate Sabbath. At that point, his factory did not produce even one working shell, as he bribed officials and sold shells from other companies to keep his workers alive. The amount of empathy and responsibility that Schindler was having could be observed during the scene of how he was mortified at how he could have save more lives. The "what if"s, "what could have been"s, and "what should have been"s. This is something I would appreciate the most, to see the light in such darkness, to feel the warmth in such coldness, to see the humanity of inhumanities.
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