The Judenrat

The Judenrat, the Jewish Council, was the body of Jewish men, almost always men, that the Germans installed in every ghetto and most occupied Jewish communities to act as the local administration. The councils registered the population, distributed food rations, organised forced labour, ran the ghetto police, collected the taxes the Germans demanded, and from 1942 onwards drew up the lists of who would be on the next deportation transport. The councils were the most contested institution of Jewish life under Nazi occupation and they remain, eighty years on, the most contested subject in the postwar literature.

The system was set up by Reinhard Heydrich’s Schnellbrief of 21 September 1939, the rapid letter sent to the SS Einsatzgruppen commanders in occupied Poland a week after the German victory. Heydrich’s letter required every Jewish community to form a Council of Elders of up to twenty four men, with full responsibility for executing German orders. The councils existed at the German pleasure. The chairmen and members were personally accountable, on penalty of death, for the compliance of their communities. The Germans chose, in most cases, to install the existing prewar Jewish community leadership: rabbis, lawyers, businessmen, members of the kehillah board. These were men who in 1939 still believed that some kind of accommodation with the occupiers was possible and that their experience of community administration would be useful in the worst case.

The first phase of council work, between 1939 and the start of the Final Solution in summer 1941 in the east and 1942 in the west, was about survival in the ghettos. The councils negotiated with the German authorities for food, fuel, medical supplies and work permits. They ran soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages, schools and theatres. The work in this phase was not collaboration in the moral sense; it was administration of a community under siege. Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw kept a diary that records the daily round: meetings with German officials, allocations of bread, attempts to keep the typhus epidemic in check, the registration of births and deaths. The councils kept the ghettos functioning at a level that allowed the great majority of inmates to live, and in some cases to work and learn and pray, until the deportations began.

The second phase began in summer 1942. The Germans demanded that the councils select the people for deportation. The councils were told that the deportees were going to labour camps in the east. The chairmen knew, in most cases by autumn 1942 at the latest, that this was a lie. Some refused. Czerniakow was ordered on 22 July 1942 to provide six thousand Jews a day for deportation from the Warsaw ghetto. He returned to his office and took cyanide. Joseph Parnas in Lvov refused to provide deportation lists in autumn 1941 and was shot. Other chairmen complied. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski in Łódź, the most controversial, gave his Give Me Your Children speech on 4 September 1942, asking the parents of the ghetto to surrender their children under ten and the elderly over sixty five, on the argument that the ghetto’s productive workers had to be saved if the community was to have any future. Around twenty thousand were deported in the September 1942 action. Rumkowski’s argument did not save the ghetto, which was liquidated in summer 1944. Rumkowski himself was deported on the last transport.

The historiography on the councils is divided. Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg argued in the early 1960s that the councils’ compliance had eased the German task and that more Jews would have survived without the councils than with them. Yehuda Bauer, Isaiah Trunk and the later Yad Vashem school argued that the councils faced impossible choices in conditions the postwar critic could not reproduce, that some chairmen worked actively to slow the deportations and shield the underground, that judging the councils by the standards of free choice was an anachronism, and that the cases varied so widely between communities that no general moral verdict was possible. Trunk’s Judenrat, published in 1972, remains the standard study and reaches no general verdict. The argument continues. Most historians today would say that the councils were neither heroic nor traitorous as a class, that the cases varied, and that the men in the chair faced choices that no human being should ever have to face.

What is settled is that the councils did not save the communities they were created to administer. Around ninety per cent of the Jews in occupied Poland were murdered. The Germans did not spare the council chairmen. The men who had complied and the men who had refused were almost all dead by 1944.

See also

Sources

  • Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, Macmillan, 1972
  • Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, edited by Raul Hilberg et al., Stein and Day, 1979
  • Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking, 1963, on the Judenrat controversy
  • Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, on the historiographical debate
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, on council operations 1939, 1942
  • Reinhard Heydrich, Schnellbrief of 21 September 1939, Nuremberg document PS-3363