Trivia: The scene with the hinge-maker almost getting shot has a hidden meaning, when several guns that are used misfire. The Nazis used forced labor to produce their wargoods, including officers' pistols. The prisoners manufacturing the guns were known to file down the hammer on the pistols so that they would not fire properly, in an effort to thwart the Nazi regime.
Trivia: This movie took in only $3 million on its opening weekend, but went on to earn more than $320 million world-wide.
Trivia: During filming, Ralph Fiennes, who played Amon Goeth, was introduced to actual Holocaust survivors who remembered the nightmare of their lives. When he approached to greet them, hand outstretched, some survivors cowered back in fear; so convincing was his appearance that he reminded them of the real Amon Goeth.
Trivia: Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation in 1994, after filming Schindler's List. Shoah is the Hebrew word for "destruction" and is used instead of the word "holocaust" by many people. The Shoah Foundation was established with a critical and pressing task - to videotape and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. At that time, numerous survivors were elderly and many more had died before ever having had the opportunity to share their own painful recollections. Yet even with the 52,000 testimonies that have thus far been collected, there is an abundant number of survivors, who still to this day, cannot speak of the atrocities that they were witness to. http://www.vhf.org/vhfmain-2.htm.
Trivia: Stellan Skarsgård was considered for the role of Oskar Schindler. Ironically, Skarsgård claims that he is often mistaken for Liam Neeson.
Trivia: During filming, Steven Spielberg once stated, 'SS marksmen, for fun, would throw babies in the air and shoot them like skeet. I wouldn't do that, even with dolls' (on why he would not film such a scene).
Trivia: Steven Spielberg built a mirror-image replica of the camp outside the gates of Auschwitz Birkenau, rather than filming inside.
Trivia: Near the close of the war, when Oskar Schindler left the camp for the last time, he wasn't competely broke; witnesses remember he had suitcases full of jewels in the trunk of his car.
Answer: Most likely the movie was deliberately cast this way to make the German soldiers look more physically powerful, brutal, and fearsome in comparison to their weakened and emaciated Jewish captives, who barely are surviving the harsh treatment inflicted on them.
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