Schindler's List" opened across Germany last Thursday, after a gala premiere in Frankfurt attended by Steven Spielberg and President Richard von Weizsacker, who said its lesson for his compatriots was the need for vigilance and open-mindedness as the best defense against intolerance.

Mr. Spielberg, who had received an anonymous death threat during the Vienna premiere last month, was given tight security, though a bomb threat forced one theater in Karlsruhe to delay the opening half an hour. Forty-eight theaters began showing the film Thursday, most to sellout crowds, according to the producers.

In Frankfurt, where Oskar Schindler lived in obscurity until his death in 1974 and where some of the Jews he saved from the concentration camps still remember him in their prayers, city authorities said they were considering sending all schoolchildren to see the film.

The director also shepherded openings last week in Cracow, where much of "Schindler's List" took place and was filmed, and in Israel. Most German theaters show the film as Mr. Spielberg made it, though voices are dubbed in German.

While elsewhere the film had been criticized for making a German the hero of a story about the Holocaust, in the country responsible for it the central point was this: Why only Schindler? Why did so few other Germans try to stop the death machinery? As Dieter Trautwein, a German Protestant minister who befriended him in the 1960's, asked after seeing the picture, "Where was everybody else?"

Perhaps because that question is so difficult to answer, Germans have shied away from dramatizing the subject themselves and, as with the "Holocaust" television series in the 1980's, are once again eagerly hearing and seeing how others see it, and them. CRAIG R. WHITNEY