Mimi Reinhard, Who Typed Up Schindler’s List That Saved 1,200 Jews From Nazi Germany, Dies At 107

Mimi Reinhard was a secretary in the office of German businessman Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 Jews by bribing the Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories.

Mimi Reinhard, who typed up the list of Jews Oskar Schindler saved from extermination by Nazi Germany, died in Israel on Friday. She was 107.

Reinhard was laid to rest Sunday in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, news agency AP quoted her son Sasha Weitman as saying.

Reinhard, a secretary in German businessman Schindler’s office, was one of 1,200 Jews saved by the latter after he bribed the Nazis to let him keep them as workers in his factories.

It was this record that Mimi Reinhard helped prepare that was made into director Steven Spielberg’s award-winning 1993 film 'Schindler’s List'.

According to the AP report, Reinhard was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915. She moved to Krakow in Poland before World War II broke. She was confined to the Krakow ghetto after Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and was then sent to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942, the report said.

Reinhard knew shorthand, which got her work in the camp’s administrative office. Two years later, the report said, she was asked to type up a handwritten list of Jews who were to be transferred to Schindler’s ammunition factory.

“I didn’t know it was such an important thing, that list,” she said in 2008 during an interview to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. “First of all, I got the list of those who were with Schindler already in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list.” 

She added her own name, and that of two friends, to the list, the AP report said.

In the film, ‘Schindler’s List’, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, Irish actor Liam Neeson played the role of Oskar Schindler. The film went on to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, seven Baftas and three Golden Globes.