Literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[Rev. Rye]

I don't think that it was sugar coated much at all. You had a businessman who was a member of the Nazi party who built a factory with Jewish slave labor, and later became disgusted at the treatment of the Jews and decided to save as many as he could. The Nazis are not portrayed as anything other but inhumane monsters who enjoy conducting summary executions whenever possible. The scenes where the Nazis were clearing out the Warsaw ghetto and later on digging up the bodies & burning them certainly didn't sugar coat the events of the Holocaust.

Quite honestly, I think that's part of the problem. On the one hand, that's pretty much true that they're bloodthirsty monsters. On the other hand, I think that the fact that they're percieved as just that just serves to distance the audience from the events. Spielberg is afraid to confront his audience with the truth that, while Oskar Schindler is clearly an admirable person, if we're ever confronted with a similar scenario, we're more likely to either step back and ignore it, or actively join in (either out of fear for our own safety or the allure of being a part of something bigger than ourselves). I'm willing to acknowledge that the Nazis (and Amon Goeth in particular) are utterly reprehensible for their attempt to kill the Jews of Europe. But the fact is that Amon Goeth was an aberration; for just one example, when Rudolf Hoess (Commandant of Auschwitz) wasn't on duty in Auschwitz, he was a devoted family man, and no-one in his family found any problem with the fact that his job was to help orchestrate the slaughter of millions of innocent people. This does not in my mind, excuse anything they did. In fact, this little factoid makes everything more terrifying, because it gives the lie to the assumption that anyone who takes part in genocide must simply be the kind of person who gets their kicks by hurting people. Anyone can become a part of it, even if they're normally not sadists. Look at the stock response the Nazis gave at Nuremberg: "An order's an order." It's what Hannah Arendt called "The Banality of Evil," and it's something that, as crucial as it is to understanding why the Holocaust occurred, is something that is flat-out ignored in almost every Holocaust movie.There's a flipside to the tragedy of the Holocaust that so many Hollywood films ignore; The Holocaust is not just the time when millions of people got slaughtered by the Nazis. It's the time when millions of people got slaughtered by the Nazis and over 60 million Germans just didn't care (when they didn't actively encourage it.)