Berlin - The widow of German industrialist Oskar Schindler has laid claim to a recently found cache of his papers, including a copy of one of the lists of 1 200 Jewish factory workers he saved from the Holocaust, a magazine reported on Tuesday.
"These documents belong to me, since I'm the widow and the legal heir," Emilie Schindler, who lives in Argentina, told the weekly Stern, adding that she planned to travel to Germany in the next few days to claim them. "Those who found them have nothing to do with them."
The papers were found in the attic of the house near Hanover where Schindler died while staying with friends in 1974. Relatives of the house's owners, who died recently, discovered the documents in a suitcase and donated them to their local newspaper, the Stuttgarter Zeitung.
The paper is using them for a series on Schindler's life that it began publishing on Sunday, the 25th anniversary of his death.
Chief editor Uwe Vorkoetter said on Tuesday that the only member of Schindler's family to have contacted the newspaper was a niece, who asked if there were any photos from her childhood among the documents.
He said the paper put her in touch with the couple who found the papers, whom the newspaper's lawyers have determined to be the legal owners.
Vorkoetter said the newspaper was sticking by its intention to donate the papers to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. They include an apparent copy of one of the lists Schindler compiled for the Nazi SS of workers at his enamelware factory in Poland, as well as a speech, letters and other documents.
Schindler and his wife emigrated to Argentina in 1949. He left his wife in 1958 and returned to Germany, where he died in 1974.
Mrs Schindler told Stern she did not speak to her husband after he returned to Germany.
The story of how Schindler saved his Jewish employees by drawing up lists with fictitious jobs to convince the Nazi SS they were vital to the war effort was told in Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List." - Sapa-AP