he hire Poles instead of Jews. General Government labor officials charged that Madritsch was "a saboteur of the Jewish transfer [into the ghetto] and could encounter difficulties with the Gestapo". This apparently did not deter Madritsch, who hired an increasing number of Jews, claiming that they were "important to the war effort". At one point Madritsch was arrested but soon released due to his close connections with certain SS officers. At the end of August 1944 Płaszów commandant Amon Göth liquidated the Tarnów ghetto, the largest one remaining in West Galicia. Madritsch was assured that nothing would happen to "his people". Madritsch's Jews were sent to a slave labor camp in Silesia, attached to a synthetic oil factory. They were put to work building new workshops for the SS. Madritsch undertook this construction job so that his workers would be kept alive. Furthermore, some of his workers were smuggled out of the ghetto in trucks and made their way to Hungary and Slovakia. On 14 September 1943, Madritsch was authorized to move his factories to Płaszów. He employed two thousand Jews as workers and provided them with food, clothing and shoes. Madritsch had to pay the SS for the food and other supplies. When Göth learned that nearly a quarter of Madritsch's workers were over the maximum age for slave laborers, he tried to reduce the workforce accordingly. However, Madritsch successfully insisted that the older workers "were the most valuable ones". By 1944 the Red Army was approaching Kraków, and Płaszów was being liquidated. The Jews were to be deported to death camps like to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen. Madritsch had no factories further west, and therefore could no longer protect his Jewish workers. However, he and Oskar Schindler had become friends. Schindler was about to open a munitions factory in Brněnec, Czech Protectorate which would employ Jews. When it came time to compile the famous list of Schindlerjuden in 1944, Schindler agreed to add sixty of Madritsch's Jews. After the war, however, their friendship soured because of a dispute over the transfer of some of Madritsch's Jews to Schindler's factory and related matters. In 1964 Madritsch was honoured as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem. He was portrayed in the 1993 film Schindler's List by Hans-Jörg Assmann. Julius Madritsch died on 11 June 1984. He is buried at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna. Bibliography David M. Crowe. Oskar Schindler: The