A copy of the list compiled by German businessman Oskar Schindler which saved hundreds of Jewish workers during the Holocaust has been discovered by a researcher at an Australian library.

Oskar Schindler's grave.
Photo: Courtesy

Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list containing the names of 801 Jews, as they sifted through boxes of manuscripts of Australian author Thomas Keneally.

The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was discovered between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said Monday, according to AFP.

Pryke said the list was "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century."

"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she added. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."

She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark" and which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1993 film, Schindler's List.

Pryke said that Schindler actually compiled a number of lists as he urged Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.

She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg - named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 - when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.