Jewish Collaborators in the Holocaust

by

Rivka Brot

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0252

Introduction

There is no issue in the history of the Jews during and after the Holocaust that has provoked stronger emotional reactions than the phenomenon of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis, which remains a controversial subject today. The phrase “Jewish collaboration” generally refers to Jewish functionaries in the ghettos and camps: the Judenräte (Jewish councils) and the Jewish police in the ghettos, and various functions exercised by Jewish prisoners in the camps, such as a head of block (Blockältester) or Kapo (originally, this term meant for head of a working group, but as time went by it became a generic term for all kind of functionaries). The various functionaries greatly influenced the lives of “ordinary” Jews because of the temporary power and the benefits accompanying the job, which often made the difference between life and death. It should be noted that both Jews and non-Jews collaborated with the Nazis. However, while Jewish councils, Jewish police in the ghettos, and the Sonderkommando in the camps were intended to Jews only, in camps both Jews and non-Jews were positioned in various roles such as Blockaelteste, Kapos, doctors, clerks. and so on. Both groups challenged familiar norms of normal life. However, only the Jewish collaborators faced the “Final Solution”—only Jewish collaborators were part of an atrocious decision: to make Jews involved in their own destruction. Collaborators who survived the war were sometimes subject to violence by other survivors if they were identified. Postwar Jewish leadership in various places sought to “translate” the bitter and harsh feelings into rational-legal categories by establishing community tribunals. The young state of Israel enacted the 1950 Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. Despite its title, it was supposed to prosecute Jews and not Nazi criminals, since in 1950 no one imagined that a Nazi might arrive in Israel. A sense of socio-moral emergency that something must be done to rectify the harm caused by collaborators appears in many diaries, memoirs, and personal accounts of the Holocaust. As was the case in many European countries, Jews felt compelled to come to terms with collaborators, who were perceived as traitors to the Jewish people. Over the years, especially with developments in research on Jewish responses to the Holocaust and its horrors, a more complex and nuanced picture of Jewish collaboration has emerged. Micro-histories of various ghettos and camps present more diverse images, including of Jewish collaborators’ behavior. The general perception of these Jews as “traitors to the Jewish people” has become more nuanced; however, this change affects research more than public discourse. Underlying the unprecedented nature of Jewish collaboration was a systematic and organized Nazi bureaucratic apparatus whose purpose was to involve the Jews—the victims—in their own extermination. It worked through a dense network of lies and deceptions designed to disguise its actual goals. A careful reading of firsthand accounts and research literature, especially of the last three decades, shows that most Jewish collaborators were ordinary people caught up in unprecedented circumstances, seeking ways of survival. A position in the ghettos or the camps offered such a possibility. A negligible minority among them were sadists who behaved with deliberate brutality toward their Jewish brethren. It is precisely the fact that most collaborators were ordinary people that makes the discussion painful and fascinating, as it involves how a destructive reality affects people and how they struggle with their circumstances.

General Overview

The research literature on Jewish collaboration and especially on the Jewish organizations in the ghettos is divided into two opposite types of overview. The first of these relies on contemporary Jewish sources to understand the mindset and thought of the Jews at the time of the events. Thus, Trunk 1972 and Weiss 1973 claim that the Judenrat and the Jewish police should be studied within the context of the inner life in the ghettos, to try and understand all the different roles they played and how they interacted with ghetto residents. They represent the only comprehensive research, until the present day, that presents a diverse portrait of this unprecedented Jewish phenomenon while refraining from stereotypes and generalizations. Hilberg 2003 and Arendt 1965 offer the opposite position, which criticizes the behavior of Jewish leadership in the ghettos. Using German sources, Hilberg emphasizes the institutional obedience of the Judenrat, which he sees as a continuation of the traditional Jewish cooperation with the authorities. Arendt also criticizes Jewish leaders’ behavior and accuses them of collaborating with the Nazis, resulting in many victims. Between these two poles, one can find a distribution of different approaches. Levi 1989 coined the term “gray zone,” which became the most meaningful understanding of the specific situation in which Jewish collaborators with the Nazis were situated: between the two camps of oppressors and oppressed. Bauman 2000 discusses the manipulative way the Nazis assigned these roles to their Jewish prisoners, leading them to believe that following rules would provide a chance to survive. Diner 1992 suggests that historians adopt the point of view of the Judenrat, from which one can begin to understand how Jewish leaders used practical calculations to understand the intentions of the Nazis. No specific study has explicitly focused on Jewish functionaries in the camps, distinguishing these functionaries from others in the administration. Diaries, memoirs, personal accounts, and legal testimonies remain the best sources to learn about the survivors’ attitudes toward these Jews and the role of Jewish collaboration in people’s daily lives in the ghettos and camps.

• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1965.

  Based on Arendt’s reports of the Eichmann Trial for the New Yorker, this book caused a great deal of controversy, especially among Jews and especially in Israel. The book raises pointed and innovative questions about the “bureaucratic” perpetrator and about the legal proceeding itself. Arendt accused the Israeli prosecution of disregarding Jewish collaboration, offering arguments about Jewish leaders’ collaboration with the Nazis, which have not withstood historical scrutiny.

• Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

  The first chapter of Bauman’s book, “Soliciting the Cooperation of the Victims,” discusses the role of collaboration during the Jewish genocide. Jewish collaborators were integrated into a more general power structure and given an extensive array of missions. Bauman provides unique insights into the principles of bureaucratically administered oppression (pp. 117–150).

• Diner, Dan. “Historical Understanding and Counter Rationality: The ‘Judenrat’ as Epistemological Vantage.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Edited by Saul Friedländer, 128–142. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

  The author analyzes how the Jewish councils were deceived by the Nazi system of forced labor, which provided some “economic rationality” and thus failed to judge its aims and means. Historians, according to Diner, are in the same position, trying to reconstruct historical reality based on assumptions of rationality inherent to the ordinary civilized world.

• Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

  Provides essential and brief scholarly explanations of Judenrat, the ghetto Jewish police, and the Kapo.

• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3d ed. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2003.

  First published in 1961, this is the first comprehensive historical study of the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis. Hilberg’s research is based on German documents, including new materials from archives in Eastern Europe. The 2003 edition is a revised and expanded edition of Hilberg’s original and classic work.

• Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Sphere Books, 1989.

  In chapter 2, “The Gray Zone” (pp. 37–69), Levi presents his innovative term “gray zone,” describing a sphere that is hard to define, where the two parties, the oppressors and the victims, both diverge and converge. Levi’s new idea undermines previous assumptions about the clear distinction between perpetrators and their victims, and therefore is essential to any discussion about Jewish collaboration.

• Trunk, Isaiah. Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

  Trunk’s book is the most important study to date on the Judenräte in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. The author analyzes ample examples of Jewish councils, refraining from popular judgmental attitudes. His main enlightening and innovative (at the time) notion was that each Jewish council should be examined according to the specific circumstances in which it operated and the different ways of behavior of its members.

• Weiss, Aharon. “Hamishtara Hayehudit Bageneral Guvernament Uveshlezia Hailit Betkufat Hashoa.” PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1973.

  Weiss’s innovative and meaningful work on the ghetto Jewish police remains the only comprehensive study. Like Trunk, Weiss refrains from generalization and stereotypes while analyzing each Jewish police as a part of the ghetto management in the actual circumstances it operated.