The screenplay of Schindler's List (written by Steven Zaillian) closely follows the historical story constructed by novelist Thomas Keneally. Although some scenes and dialogue are fictitious, the author relied on interviews and oral histories of survivors, including the widows of Oskar Schindler and Izthak Stern, as well as historical documents. The novel and the movie are remarkably accurate about historical details.

Although Nazi attacks on Jews had begun before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, German military expansion provided a wider opportunity to pursue policies of enslavement and extermination. The exploitation of Jewish labor had obvious advantages for the Nazi state, especially when such work supported the war effort. Many German corporations, most notoriously the I.G. Farben chemical conglomerate, used slave labor to produce war materials. Indeed, as Schindler's List indicates, Oskar Schindler's profiteering was not exceptional, nor particularly flagrant. What distinguished Schindler was his reversal and adoption of a non-profiteering position.

Despite the value of slave labor to Germany's war economy, Hitler and other Nazi leaders were obsessed with eliminating all Jews from Europe and decided that the "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem was their extermination. Indiscriminate killing of Jews was an integral part of German militarism, but by early 1942 the Nazis were designing well-managed death camps to expedite the annihilation of Jews and other "sub-humans," such as gypsies and mentally and physically handicapped people. In some cases, as shown in Schindler's List, Jews served as industrial workers until they were deemed unproductive and sent to death camps.

The behavior of Nazi officers is typically explained as insane, as Schindler's List depicts Amon Boeth. Such extreme cruelty is pathological. But most participants in the death camps were not clinically insane. Rather, the system of concentration camps, slave labor, and war production required cooperation from many segments of society. The participation of non-Jews in this system reflected racial hatred, opportunism, fear of Nazi retribution, and innumerable motives that blinded individuals to the moral issues. .

The system also obliged Jewish leaders to participate through the Jewish Councils (Judenrate), shown in Schindler's List in the work of Itzhak Stern. The councils were responsible for distributing inadequate rations, housing, clothing, medical care, and work responsibilities. These tasks always involved ultimate choices, decisions that determined life or death. Yet Jews like Stern struggled to save as many people as they could.

For Jews and other inmates of labor camps, living conditions were seldom adequate. With insufficient nutrition, clothing, and shelter, prisoners succumbed to starvation, disease, and brutality. As the movie indicates, prisoners resorted to a multitude of techniques to survive, sometimes at the cost of other victims. At the same time, inmates showed compassion for each other, often at great peril and with fatal consequences.

The most rare were those like Oskar Schindler, described after the war by Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority (Yad Vashem) as "righteous" people. Among populations of millions, they are counted by the thousands, perhaps one-tenth of one percent who cared for Jewish children, hid Jews in attics or stables, forged documents, tricked police, and chanced death because of their moral character. That is why audiences are so often moved to tears at the gratitude Schindler's Jews express at the grave of their savior.

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