Goofs for
Schindler's List (1993) More at IMDbPro »

• Continuity: Placement of Stern's arm around one-armed worker at Schindler Warehouse.
  
  
• Factual errors: Schindler was never awarded the Golden Nazi Party Badge, and thus couldn't have sold it to save more Jews. In any event, all but a few of the badges were made of gold-plated brass.
  
  
• Factual errors: The Golden Party Badge (Goldenes Parteiabzeichen) that Schindler is holding is the 'large' military version and not the civilian type that he would have had, if he had been awarded one.
  
  

• Continuity: When Schindler goes to kiss the Jewish girl, he puts his hands on her shoulders. In the next shot, he pulls his hands away from her cheeks.
  
  
• Continuity: When the boy is caught by the Nazi troops, he drops his case next to his feet. When we cut back to him, the bag is a meter away.
  
  
• Continuity: When Schindler is reprimanded for kissing the Jewish girl by the SS officer, the SS officer picks up his cup twice in the same sentence.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: At the train station, when Schindler saves Itzhak Stern from being sent away, an officer is seen flipping through pages of names, but all the pages are exactly the same.
  
  
• Continuity: The position of Amon Goeth's arms as he is talking to Helen in the basement before he beats her.
  
  
• Continuity: when Schindler is in bed with his wife and talking, his head is resting on her. But in the next shot, when she leans up/turns over to talk to him he is a lot further away from her.
  
  
• Anachronisms: Yerushalayim shel Zahav was not written until twenty years after WWII
  
  
• Continuity: When the kid is painting the letters "DIREKTOR" for the first time, a serif font is used. In a subsequent shot the word is shown in a san-serif, bolder, almost stencil-like font. The size of the word is also much larger than before.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The bottle of Hennessy cognac as seen in the movie is the new shape released in 1990s. The original bottle shape was taller and had different label.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: Just after the little boy is held up to pull down another icicle from the roof of the train, the camera angle switches to the exterior and pulls back to show the train going by with no trace of snow or ice anywhere else on the train except right over that one doorway.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: When Schindler and Stern negotiate with the Jewish investors outside the ghetto, Steven Spielberg is reflected on the rear window (his jacket is blowing in the wind)
  
  
• Continuity: In the opening sequence when Schindler is preparing for the party (dressing up, getting money) the shape of his hands (and nails) differs from shot to shot.
  
  
• Continuity: When the train of women is pulling into Aushwitz, ramps are already in place next to the track. They then disappear, and are put in place when the train stops.
  
  
• Audio/visual unsynchronized: In the scene were Amon is picking a servant, he moves to a Jewish girl that does not raise her hand and asks her to get in his car. When he tells her to speak up, his voice is heard but his lips are not moving.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: The scene inside the cellar between Oskar and the maid, when she faces the camera head on, there is no light coming from the right, yet as the scene progresses and the shot tightens, somebody turns on a light which becomes visible as they cut to her left and her head tilts forward.
  
  
• Continuity: When Oskar first meets Amon over lunch, there is an officer who pours water twice, from two different angles.
  
  
• Continuity: Oskar sits down at Amon's table for lunch, getting ready to eat, with the camera looking from behind Amon. When they change angles you can see him already chewing the food.
  
  
• Continuity: The opening sequence in the train station, one can clearly see that there is no metal cover where the guy is setting up the table, yet as they begin to take names, it seems that the action is happening in a different place.
  
  
• Miscellaneous: When the doctor goes into his secret stash of fine liquors, there seems to be a ray of light inside. How is that possible since it must be inside a wall?
  
  
• Continuity: The sequence of Oskar interviewing for a secretary position opens with a wide shot showing furniture in the room that is covered while the walls are being painted. Once it cuts to a close shot, the furniture is gone.
  
  
• Anachronisms: The Billie Holiday song heard from a radio is not the wartime recording stated on the end credits. It's a later version from the 1950s.
  
  
• Factual errors: When Oskar Schindler takes his meal he uses his fork with the right hand and his knife with the left. Not being left-handed this would be a very unusual thing for a German man to do.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When one train of the male Jews were taken to "Czechoslovakia" (wrong name for that history period) we can see some electric columns for electric rail tracks. That could be impossible because till the end of War there was no electric tracks in that area. Even all locomotives were steam-engine.
  
  
• Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): After the little boy takes the saddle out of the car and after Schindler says thank you - he passes on some cigarettes to an SS personnel at the camp and Schindler calls him "Rottenführer", but the rank/insignia of the SS man responds to a different rank called Sturmmann which is one rank lower than the Rottenführer rank.
  
  
• Crew or equipment visible: The first time Amon Goeth shoots a Jewish prisoner, the large dirt squib is clearly visible in the background before it detonates.
  
  
• Factual errors: The hanging of Amon Goeth looks absolutely nothing like the actual film footage of the execution. Place, clothing, procedures, number of people involved and the graphic events that took place are all wrong.
  
  
• Continuity: In the beginning of the film when the Jews are being registered at Krakow, there is a woman who calls herself Helena Zucker, later on in the film when the Schindler Jews are being taken to Brinnlitz the same woman identifies herself as Jetti Zuckerman.
  
  
• Continuity: When the men use a little boy to get ice from the roof of the train while they're going to Schindler's factory, the barbed wire on the window is in a zig-zag pattern, but the exterior shot reveals a line pattern.
  
  
• Anachronisms: "Der fröhliche Wanderer" or "Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann," known in English as "The Happy Wanderer" was written after WII. This is the song being lead by Schindler in the cabaret at the beginning of the movie.
  
  
• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: In the scene where they are separating the healthy from the sick, one of the men running naked is clearly not circumcised. However, many of the Jewish prisoners were not Torah observant but in fact had been assimilated into Gentile society, and thus may not have been, in fact, circumcised.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: During the era depicted, almost all European women did not shave any of their armpits, legs, or pubic areas, especially work or death camp women who were not allowed even the basics. All but one of the women in the film are trimmed and groomed.
  
  
• Continuity: In the scene where Goeth attempts to shoot the Rabbi for producing too few hinges, he first draws his military issue Luger and it repeatedly misfires. He then pulls a semi-automatic pistol out of his pocket, and it too misfires. As he walks away disgusted he drops the automatic pistol on the ground, but amazingly it has morphed into a revolver when it hits the ground and is picked up by his subordinate officers.
  
  
• Anachronisms: When the Nazis are separating healthy and sick prisoners, they play two shellac records. The second disc is labeled "Fogg Records", but Mieczyslaw Fogg founded his record company after the war; moreover Fogg recorded mostly (if not only) Polish performers at his studio, and that song doesn't resemble a Polish song.
  
  
• Revealing mistakes: When Goeth attempts to shoot the Rabbi for producing too few hinges, his semi-automatic pistol fails to fire. In order to re-cock the pistol, he racks the slide (pulls back the slide) several times. When the gun still fails to fire, he tries the same thing with a second semi-automatic pistol. Each time the slide is pulled back, we should see an unfired round being ejected from the gun, but this does not happen.
  
  

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