The Judenrat Collaborated So Jews Share Responsibility

The Judenräte (Jewish councils, plural Judenräte) existed. The Germans established them in every ghetto across occupied Europe, beginning in 1939 with the Heydrich Schnellbrief of 21 September 1939, which instructed the formation of Jewish councils to manage the Jewish population on behalf of the German occupation authorities. The councils did, under coercion, perform some of the administrative tasks the Germans assigned to them, including in some cases the preparation of deportation lists. The denier framing converts this into “collaboration” in the moral sense and uses it to spread responsibility from the perpetrators to the victims. The framing collapses on contact with the actual operational record: the councils were under continuous death threat, had no military power, faced impossible choices among uniformly bad options, and in many cases were themselves killed when the Germans decided their administrative function was complete.

What the Judenräte were

The Heydrich Schnellbrief of 21 September 1939 instructed the establishment of Councils of Jewish Elders (Ältestenräte), composed of “the remaining authoritative personalities and rabbis”, in all Jewish communities across occupied Poland. The councils were given the formal status of receiving and executing German occupation orders relating to the Jewish population. The instruction was repeated and extended across the occupied territories as the German occupation expanded. By 1942 the Judenräte existed in approximately 1,000 communities across occupied Europe, ranging from small village councils of three or four members to the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat under Adam Czerniaków with approximately 24 members and a substantial bureaucracy.

The councils’ functions varied by location and period but typically included: maintaining the Jewish civil registry; organising labour drafts as required by the occupation; collecting taxes and “contributions” demanded by the Germans; running the social welfare system within the ghetto (such as it was, given the German-set food rations); maintaining the Jewish police force (Ordnungsdienst), which was responsible for internal ghetto order under German oversight; and, in the deportation phase, executing the German instructions about which residents would be assembled at the Umschlagplatz on which dates. The councils also, in some cases and as far as they were able, attempted to mitigate the German demands: to reduce the labour drafts, to protect specific individuals, to negotiate over specific deportation quotas. The space for mitigation was very limited and shrinking.

The impossible choices

The councils faced impossible choices that no analytical framework can render moral. The Germans presented them with quotas: deliver X number of people for “resettlement” by Y date, or the Germans would conduct the round-up themselves with greater violence and a higher number of deaths. The councils sometimes complied, in the (often false) belief that compliance would save the remainder. Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat, was given a quota in July 1942 (the start of the great deportation to Treblinka): 6,000 people per day, then 7,000, then 10,000. He met repeatedly with the German authorities to try to exempt specific categories (the orphanages, the medical staff, the teachers). The exemptions were progressively withdrawn. On 23 July 1942, when the Germans demanded that he include the children of the orphanage of Janusz Korczak (the orphanage Czerniaków had been particularly trying to protect), Czerniaków committed suicide in his office. His diary, discovered after the war, records the impossibility of the position he had been forced into. The diary is at Yad Vashem and has been published in multiple editions.

Czerniaków’s suicide is one extreme. At the other end, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Łódź Ghetto Judenrat, attempted to make the ghetto economically essential to the German war effort by turning it into a vast forced-labour factory; he believed that if the ghetto could be made economically valuable, the Germans would not destroy it. The strategy bought the Łódź Ghetto more time than any other (it was the last to be liquidated, in August 1944), but ultimately failed: the entire surviving population was deported to Auschwitz when the Germans decided the labour was no longer needed. Rumkowski himself was deported on the same transport and killed at Auschwitz. His position has been the subject of intense ethical and historical debate (Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem of 1963 was particularly harsh on the Judenräte, including Rumkowski; Yehuda Bauer and others have argued for a more contextualised reading); no serious historian treats Rumkowski as a “collaborator” in the moral sense.

The variation across the network

The Judenräte across the occupied territories varied widely in their conduct. Some council members refused German demands and were executed: the original Vilna Judenrat under Saul Trotzky was executed in 1941 for refusing to provide a deportation list; the Lublin Judenrat under Mark Alten faced repeated executions of its members. Some councils actively resisted: the Minsk Judenrat under Eliahu Mushkin maintained covert contact with the Soviet partisans and helped smuggle Jews out of the ghetto into the partisan units. The Białystok Judenrat under Ephraim Barasz was in close contact with the resistance and helped the Białystok Uprising of August 1943. The Theresienstadt Council of Elders, given the unusual situation of running a propaganda showpiece while knowing that its inhabitants were being deported to Auschwitz, faced its own specific moral disasters. The pattern across the network was not one of uniform collaboration but of a wide range of responses to impossibly constrained choices.

The post-war historical assessment

The historical assessment of the Judenräte has gone through phases. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) was severely critical of the councils, arguing that without their administrative cooperation the killing would have been substantially more difficult. Arendt’s criticism was challenged at the time by Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg and others, and the subsequent literature has substantially modified her position. Isaiah Trunk’s Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (1972) is the standard scholarly treatment, based on detailed case studies of councils across the occupied territories; Trunk found that the councils had operated under coercion, with diminishing real choices, and that their conduct ranged from active resistance to compliance under threat. Aharon Weiss, Dan Michman and other Israeli historians have continued the historical work; the conclusion across the literature is that the “collaboration” framing is morally inappropriate and historically inaccurate.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it is the redistribution of moral responsibility from the perpetrators to the victims, on the basis that some victims were forced under death threat to perform administrative tasks for the perpetrators. The framing requires the listener to forget that the council members were themselves victims, that their compliance was coerced, that their refusals were punished by execution, that their administrative function was always temporary (the councils were liquidated when their work was done), and that the moral choice they faced was between unbearable options. The Germans designed this structure deliberately: forcing the victims to participate in their own destruction was both efficient and corrosive to victim solidarity. The deniers’ continuation of this framing, eighty years later, perpetuates the German design. The councils were not collaborators; they were victims with administrative roles.

What was the Judenrat? Why did the Germans establish them? What happened to council members who refused German demands?

See also

• The Judenrat
• Reinhard Heydrich
• Adolf Eichmann
• Hannah Arendt
• Raul Hilberg
• The Eichmann Trial 1961

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Sources

• Reinhard Heydrich, Schnellbrief on the establishment of Jewish councils, 21 September 1939, Nuremberg Document PS-3363
• Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation, Macmillan, 1972, the standard scholarly treatment
• Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, edited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron and Josef Kermisz, Stein and Day, 1979
• Yisrael Gutman and Cynthia J. Haft (eds.), Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe 1933 to 1945, Yad Vashem, 1979
• Aharon Weiss, “The Relations Between the Judenrat and the Jewish Police”, in Patterns of Jewish Leadership, Yad Vashem, 1979
• Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, 2011
• Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, with the chapter “The Holocaust and Memory”, on the Judenrat question
• Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition, Yale University Press, 2003
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking, 1963; revised edition Penguin, 2006
• Lucjan Dobroszycki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941 to 1944, Yale University Press, 1984
• Hermann Adler-Rudel, Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime 1933 bis 1939, Mohr Siebeck, 1974
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Jewish Councils (Judenräte)” and “Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org