Jewish Kapos Were as Brutal as SS Guards

The Jewish kapos existed and were sometimes brutal. The SS deliberately structured the camp system to delegate violence to selected prisoner functionaries (kapos in the labour Kommandos, block elders, room elders, prisoner-doctor assistants, and so on), drawing them from the prisoner population and giving them limited privileges (better rations, better clothing, individual sleeping space, longer life expectancy) in exchange for enforcing camp order on the SS’s behalf. Some of these functionaries, including Jewish ones, became brutal collaborators in the violence the SS required. The denier framing converts this into “Jewish brutality equivalent to SS brutality” and uses it to spread responsibility. The framing collapses on contact with the operational reality. The kapo was a prisoner with a stick, choosing between brutality to fellow prisoners and execution by the SS for failure to enforce. The SS guard was an armed soldier with a gun, with a salary, leave, family at home, and a future after the war. The two roles were not equivalent and the moral category of their actions cannot be made equivalent.

The kapo system

The kapo system originated in the early concentration camps of 1933 to 1934, where the SS realised that delegating internal camp order to selected prisoners would reduce the SS’s own labour, fragment prisoner solidarity, and provide a layer of cruelty that the SS could deploy without having to administer directly. The system expanded across the camp network and reached its most developed form at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and the other major labour camps. The hierarchy ran from the Lagerältester (camp elder) through the Blockältester (block elder), the Stubenältester (room elder), the Schreiber (clerk), and the various Kapos and Vorarbeiter (foremen) of the labour Kommandos. The functionaries were appointed by the SS and could be removed by the SS at any time, including by execution.

The first wave of kapos at most camps was drawn from non-Jewish prisoners: German criminals (Berufsverbrecher, with green triangles), German political prisoners (red triangles), and others. The Jewish prisoners, when they arrived in the labour camps from 1942 onwards, were generally not appointed to senior kapo positions; the SS preferred non-Jewish kapos to maintain the racial hierarchy. Jewish kapos did exist, particularly in the Jewish-only sections of the camps and in the Sonderkommando complexes; but the proportion of Jewish kapos was substantially smaller than the proportion of Jewish prisoners. The standard scholarly treatment by Nikolaus Wachsmann (KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 2015) and the earlier work by Hermann Langbein document the proportions in detail.

The position of the kapo

The position of the Jewish kapo was structurally impossible. The SS required the kapo to maintain order in the labour Kommando: to ensure the work was done at the SS-required pace, to punish prisoners who fell behind, and to deliver a dead body at the end of the day if the SS had quotas to fill. Failure to do so meant the kapo’s own removal and probable execution. Compliance meant the kapo had to inflict violence on his fellow prisoners. The space for moral conduct was very limited; the men who were appointed to these positions were chosen by the SS for, among other things, their willingness to do what the role required.

The actual conduct of Jewish kapos varied widely. Some were extremely brutal, in some cases more brutal than was strictly required to satisfy SS expectations; their post-war accounts (where they survived) often emphasise the dynamics of corruption that overcame them once they had been given limited power over their fellow prisoners. Some were minimally brutal, doing only what the SS required and no more. Some used the position to protect specific prisoners, to allocate the slightly better work assignments to those who needed them most, to share rations they had access to. The literature on prisoner-functionary behaviour (Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, 1986; Langbein’s People in Auschwitz; the various survivor memoirs) documents the full range. The framework of “grey zone” (Levi’s term) is the standard way to think about the moral position of these prisoners.

The post-war Jewish prosecutions

The post-war Jewish community in Israel and elsewhere recognised the moral problem and prosecuted some Jewish kapos through the Jewish Honour Court system in the displaced persons camps from 1945, and subsequently through the Israeli Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law of 1950. Approximately forty Jewish kapos were tried under the 1950 law in Israel; some were convicted, with sentences ranging from probation to several years’ imprisonment. The most prominent case was that of Hirsch Barenblat, a Polish Jewish musician who had served as a Jewish police chief in the Będzin Ghetto and was tried in Israel in 1963 to 1964; he was initially convicted but acquitted on appeal. The Israeli legal system, in handling these cases, generally applied a context-specific moral analysis that distinguished between conduct under impossible coercion and conduct that exceeded the requirements of survival; the convictions were for the latter category. The proceedings have been documented in detail by Dan Porat in Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators (2019).

The asymmetry with the SS

The framing of equivalence between Jewish kapo and SS guard requires the listener to ignore the structural asymmetry. The SS guard was a soldier of the German state, in uniform, armed, paid, with leave, with family at home, with a future after the war and the option of refusing his duties at the cost of a reassignment but no threat to his life (as documented in the Browning research and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial findings). The Jewish kapo was a prisoner of the same camp, dressed in the same striped uniform with a coloured triangle, on a slightly better ration than the regular prisoners, with the position revocable by the SS at any moment, with execution as the standard penalty for failure to enforce, with no option to leave the camp, and with the prospect of being killed in the next selection if his usefulness ended. The two positions were not equivalent in any morally significant sense.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it spreads moral responsibility from the SS to the Jewish prisoners on the basis that some Jewish prisoners did terrible things under impossible conditions. The framing requires the listener to forget that the kapos were victims of the same operation, that their conduct was forced by the structure the SS designed, that the SS deliberately created the structure to corrupt the victim community and to spread moral discredit, and that the kapos who acted brutally were generally either immediately killed by the SS when their usefulness expired or were prosecuted by the surviving Jewish community after the war. The Germans designed the kapo system to do exactly the moral work the deniers now ask it to do. Recognising the design is the first step in not being deceived by it.

What was the kapo system, and who designed it? What proportion of kapos were Jewish? What did the Israeli courts find when they prosecuted Jewish kapos after the war?

See also

• The Kapos
• Political Prisoners
• Primo Levi
• The Displaced Persons Crisis

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Sources

• Primo Levi, “The Grey Zone”, in The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988 (original Italian 1986)
• Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, English edition, University of North Carolina Press, 2004
• Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015
• Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, Princeton University Press, 1997
• Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, Belknap Press, 2019
• Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005
• Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999
• Falk Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft: Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager, Hoffmann und Campe, 1978
• Israeli Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law (Hok le-Asiyat Din ba-Natzim ve-Ozreihem) of 1950, Israeli Knesset
• Hirsch Barenblat case files, Israel State Archives, Jerusalem
• Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt, 1993
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Concentration Camp System: In Depth” and “The Grey Zone”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org