The man who typed up Oskar Schindler’s list which helped save more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis, Mietek Pemper, has died in Germany aged 91, the Bavarian city where he lived said yesterday.

Pemper died on Tuesday in Augsburg, southern Germany, and is to be buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery today, when municipal authorities will order flags to be lowered to half-mast in his honour.

Born Mieczyslaw Pemper in 1920 in the Polish city of Krakow to a Jewish family, he was imprisoned at the Nazi concentration camp of Plaszow, where he worked as the personal typist for its feared commandant Amon Goeth from March 1943 to September 1944.

It was there that he linked up with German industrialist Schindler.

Pemper secretly read in Goeth’s mail from Berlin that all factories that were not producing goods for the Nazi effort should be shuttered.

He convinced Schindler, an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia and a member of the Nazi party who first sought to profit from Germany’s invasion of Poland, to abandon enamel production at his plant and make anti-tank grenade rifles.

Then Pemper, at great risk to his own life, supplied Schindler with a typed list of the names of more than 1,000 fellow prisoners to be recruited for work.

Schindler is credited with saving the lives of some 1,200 Jews through such work schemes as well as bribes paid to German officers.

Pemper later testified against Goeth and other war criminals in trials in Poland after the war. Goeth was hanged in 1946.

Schindler died in anonymity in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66, although he and Pemper remained close friends, but his story was later unearthed by Australian writer Thomas Keneally.