Abstract
Reviewed by: Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
The difficult experience of collaboration with the Nazis has either been discussed or sometimes placed under taboo in all communities who were placed under German occupation during World War II. In no other community, however, has this subject been experienced as painfully, nor has it led to such intense and emotional reactions as in the Jewish one, especially in the first years after the war or even before its end. The volume Jewish Honor Courts, edited by Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder, collects articles that shed light on the various responses to the Jewish collaboration in Israel and several European countries.
Jews were intentionally turned by the Nazis into collaborators. They helped deport other Jews to extermination camps through such organizations or groups as the Judenräte, the ghetto police or as informers, or they watched and mistreated other Jews in the concentration, labour, or death camps as kapos. Without their help, the Germans could not have annihilated the Jewish communities across Europe as quickly and efficiently as they did. They would have had to organize other networks of helpers, and in the case of organized resistance, would have needed more police forces to facilitate the Holocaust. But did the Jewish collaborators, who were the victims of the Nazis themselves, have a choice, and did they behave unethically or act against other members of their communities? These questions have been debated by Jewish communities in presumably all liberated countries. To deal with them Jews have created internal Jewish courts known as Ehrengericht, ern-gerikht or sąd obywatelski. In addition, some Jewish collaborators were prosecuted by the state courts, which unlike the internal Jewish courts had the power to sentence the defendants if they found them guilty.
The subject attracted the attention of not only victims who recognized their tormentors on the street, but also intellectuals whose explanations differed dramatically. When Hannah Arendt blamed the Jewish leaders for helping the Germans to murder other Jews, historians such as Isaiah Trunk, a survivor himself, used the Jewish sources to present a more complex picture. His explanation resembled in many ways the concept of the ‘gray zone’ presented by Primo Levi, who knew that ‘victims could also be collaborators but still be victims’ (13).
The articles of the volume show both similarities and differences in dealing with the Jewish collaboration in various European and non-European Jewish communities, and the paradoxes of trying to understand the motives and actual behaviours of the collaborators and their accusers. In many cases, as Laura Jockusch shows with the example of Jewish honour courts in West Germany, the defendants initiated the investigations themselves to clear their names (57, 107). Frequently, collaborators were recognized by other Jews who claimed to have been mistreated by the particular policeman or kapo, while the defendants and sometimes other witnesses questioned these accusations. All this made the cases complicated and puzzled the judges. Sometimes the same case could have been judged differently depending on the members of the court community. In some cases the Jewish honour courts decided to transfer the cases to the military or official state courts, while in others they tried to avoid this so as to not cause further harm (73, 119). In France, where between 8000 and 9000 people were executed for collaboration after World War II, several Jews were tried by the courts as well (139, 142). In Belgium, the post-war state courts also sentenced to death two Jewish policemen amongst 242 collaborators (214).
One of the most interesting aspects presented in the volume are the voices of the collaborators, or their explanations and justifications. The collaborators believed that they were acting in the interests of the community (124), or they styled themselves as being the saviours of as many Jews as possible (169). To other Jews they appeared to be more powerful than they had been, because the survivors did not understand the mechanism behind the collaboration (167). Sometimes the debates about the actual actions or intentions of the accused collaborators divided communities, as in the case of Josef Löwenherz, the head of the Council of Elders of the Jews in Vienna. Hannah Arendt and many others saw in Löwenherz an efficient Nazi collaborator, but his supporters saw a leader who saved two-thirds of the Viennese Jews (174–9). Emil Tuchman, the head of the Jewish health service in Vienna, was even perceived as the ‘Jewish Hitler’ (182), and Simon Wiesenthal was, in the eyes of Bruno Kreisky, a ‘Gestapo collaborator’ (188). Denunciations were used to settle scores or to empower the accusers. They caused furious counteractions by individuals who claimed to be wrongly accused and classified. In some cases the attorneys of the defendants discredited the testimonies of the accusers, as happened in Poland (239), or they did not take them seriously, as in Israel in the 1950s (350–1). A woman was accused of ‘collaborating with her [kapo] husband’, and kapos of sending Jewish women to the ovens if they refused to have sex with them (248, 262).
The spectrum of behaviours that could have been classified as being collaboration was broad, and their forms manifold. The articles in this volume present numerous of such cases, and provide them with nuanced theoretical explanations. The readers are confronted with both the difficult choices of the victims, who were turned into collaborators, and with empirically founded explanations of the ‘gray zone’, the concept without which the understanding of this complex subject can only fail.