"The persecution of Jews in occupied Poland meant that we could see horror emerging gradually in many ways. In 1939, they were forced to wear Jewish stars, and people were herded and shut up into ghettos. Then, in the years '41 and '42 there was plenty of public evidence of pure sadism. With people behaving like pigs, I felt the Jews were being destroyed. I had to help them. There was no choice."

The concept of blitzkrieg was formed by Prussian military tactics of the early 19th century, which recognized that victory could come only through forceful and swift action because of Prussia’s relatively limited economic resources. It had its origins with the Schwerpunktprinzip (“concentration principle”) proposed by Carl von Clausewitz in his seminal work On War (1832). Having studied generals who predated Napoleon, Clausewitz found that commanders of various armies had dispersed their forces without focused reasoning, which resulted in those forces’ being used inefficiently. So as to eliminate that wasteful use of manpower, he advocated for a concentration of force against an enemy. All employment of force should have an effective concentration in a single moment, with a single action, Clausewitz argued. Clausewitz called that concentration the Schwerpunkt (“centre of gravity”) where it was most dense, identifying it as the effective target for attack.
During this period, all the war's major combatants developed mechanized force theories. Theories of the Western Allies differed substantially from the Reichswehr's. British, French, and American doctrines broadly favored a more set-piece battle, less combined arms focus, and less focus on concentration. Early Reichswehr periodicals contained many translated works, though they were often not adopted. Technical advances in foreign countries were, however, observed and used in-part by the Weapons Office. Foreign doctrines are widely considered to have had little serious influence.
The first gas chamber at Birkenau was in what prisoners called the "little red house" (known as bunker 1 by the SS), a brick cottage that had been converted into a gassing facility. The windows were bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said "Zur Desinfektion" ("to disinfection"). It was operational by March 1942. A second brick cottage, the "little white house" or bunker 2, was converted and operational by June 1942.[45] When Himmler visited the camp on 17 and 18 July 1942, he was given a demonstration of a selection of Dutch Jews, a mass killing in a gas chamber in bunker 2, and a tour of the building site of the new IG Farben plant being constructed at the nearby town of Monowitz.[46]
The mass killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories were assigned to four SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), which were under Heydrich's overall command. Similar formations had been used to a limited extent in Poland in 1939, but the ones operating in the Soviet territories were much larger.[242] The Einsatzgruppen's commanders were ordinary citizens: the great majority were professionals and most were intellectuals.[243] By the winter of 1941–1942, the four Einsatzgruppen and their helpers had killed almost 500,000 people.[244] The largest massacre of Jews by the mobile killing squads in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev,[245] where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on 29–30 September 1941.[246][n] A mixture of SS and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police, carried out the killings.[248] Although they did not actively participate in the killings, men of the German 6th Army helped round up the Jews of Kiev and transport them to be shot.[249] By the end of the war, around two million are thought to have been victims of the Einsatzgruppen and their helpers in the local population and the German Army. Of those, about 1.3 million were Jews and up to a quarter of a million Roma.[250]
In the 1930s, Hitler had ordered rearmament programs that cannot be considered limited. In November 1937 Hitler had indicated that most of the armament projects would be completed by 1943–45.[129] The rearmament of the Kriegsmarine was to have been completed in 1949 and the Luftwaffe rearmament program was to have matured in 1942, with a force capable of strategic bombing with heavy bombers. The construction and training of motorised forces and a full mobilisation of the rail networks would not begin until 1943 and 1944 respectively.[130] Hitler needed to avoid war until these projects were complete but his misjudgements in 1939 forced Germany into war before rearmament was complete.[131]



“I suddenly see Steinlauf, my friend aged almost fifty, with nude chest, scrub his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) [He] sees me and asks me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off than I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day longer?…. Does Steinlauf not know that after half an hour with the coal sacks every difference between him and me will have disappeared?….

As some needed to point out, this is a fictionalized account of historical events and a genuine hero. Some historical persons were combined to make one character in the book and some time frames were condensed. Oskar Schindler was a deeply flawed man, brought to greatness by living through a time of horror in a position where he could make a small, but real difference. The condensations of those true events in this book are masterful. A great book!
Under Laks' more positive leadership, the orchestra began to increase in size again.  His efforts won his musicians easier work assignments and a dispensation not to play outdoors in bad weather.  By the end of 1943, there were about forty members, including many Jews, from France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Greece.  They included Henry Meyer, Louis Bannet, and Jacques Stroumsa.
The group raced to the English Channel, reaching the coast at Abbeville and cut off the BEF, the Belgian Army and some of the best-equipped divisions of the French Army in northern France. Armoured and motorised units under Guderian, Rommel and others, advanced far beyond the marching and horse-drawn infantry divisions and far in excess of that with which Hitler and the German high command expected or wished. When the Allies counter-attacked at Arras using the heavily armoured British Matilda I and Matilda II tanks, a brief panic was created in the German High Command. The armoured and motorised forces were halted by Hitler outside the port of Dunkirk, which was being used to evacuate the Allied forces. Hermann Göring promised that the Luftwaffe would complete the destruction of the encircled armies but aerial operations failed to prevent the evacuation of the majority of the Allied troops. In Operation Dynamo some 330,000 French and British troops escaped.[87]
Schindler grew up in Svitavy, Moravia, and worked in several trades until he joined the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of Nazi Germany, in 1936. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939. Prior to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he collected information on railways and troop movements for the German government. He was arrested for espionage by the Czechoslovak government but was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement in 1938. Schindler continued to collect information for the Nazis, working in Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. In 1939, Schindler acquired an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, which employed at the factory's peak in 1944 about 1,750 workers, of whom 1,000 were Jews. His Abwehr connections helped Schindler protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. As time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.