Judenrat

"There is always a discussion and emphasis in films and in various kinds of public conversation about the role of the Germans: What did Hitler order? Why was Hitler obsessed with the Jews? Why did the Third Reich do what it did in the way of anti-Semitism? What was the logic of their racial policy? Why did they create death camps, Einsatzgruppen [see below] and ghettos? But the story is only partially a German story. The victims of the tragedy are the Jews and, therefore, it’s a crucial thing in studying the Holocaust to be able to see the response of the victims. Now, this comes in many places and in many forms and one of the most controversial was in the ghettos. The ghettos lasted from early 1940, when the first ghetto was enclosed, till the last ghetto, the Lodz ghetto, was dismantled in August of ’44. And there were hundreds of ghettos spread all over Europe. So for five years, millions of Jews lived and died in these enclosed spaces, and to some degree they had the ability to control aspects of their life. The Germans would give an order, a work order, food requirements, issues about health, deportations, whatever it was, and it was the Jews themselves who had to pass these orders on and implement them to a large degree. Now the people who were in power to do that were the members of Jewish councils. One of the first things the Nazis did when they established a ghetto was to establish a Jewish council – big ghettos had bigger councils, small ghettos also had councils. The Nazis directly appointed the leaders of the ghetto councils and they were the crucial mediators between the German overlord, German policies and the Jewish people. Now after the war, there was tremendous debate about their role, about how they acted, about the morality of some of them, about the fate of many of them. It became especially heated during the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s in Israel, when Hannah Arendt published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem , which is still widely read and very well known. She essentially accused them of being collaborators, and said that had there been no Jewish councils, had there been no Jewish leadership, more Jews would have survived, there would have been less mass murder. So this subject is at the very centre of the study of the Holocaust. And Isaiah Trunk, who is a survivor, undertook this study of the various councils and investigated the question of collaboration and of cowardice , of heroism, of support for resistance or lack of support. And his book has become one of the really great classics of Jewish Holocaust literature. The bottom line is that firstly, the councils had very, very limited influence, very limited autonomy or freedom. Secondly, especially early on, they were largely unaware of what was happening: the Nazis took extraordinary measures to try to mislead them and to keep them ignorant of the genocidal plan that had been formulated. Thirdly, that even had the councils not existed, there would have been no difference. There were people in the council who saved their own lives, who tried to exploit the situation, who were not always moral paragons. But the bottom line of the evaluation of this behaviour is that it really made no difference. The Nazis were so intent, so obsessed with freeing the world of Jews, of committing genocide, that the policies and practices of the Jewish councils were not a major factor in the outcome. So it’s a very important book. If people want to know about the Jewish side of the tragedy, this is a fundamental book they have to read."