Watching first half hour of Schindler's List, confused?

So I already know that the gist of the movie is that Schindler works to liberate Jews off this list he has. And so far, I've seen him bribing a lot of people, and right now he's sitting a car outside a ghetto and bribing more people, and I can't tell if he's bribing them for this list that he works off of or what. Also, just to check, he IS German, right?