Eichmann's Jews E-Book

Doron Rabinovici

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 508

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up their own people for deportation, manage the 'collection points' and supervise the people being deported until the last moment? This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more specifically the 'Judenrat' or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna. It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of destruction. Drawing on recently discovered archives and extensive interviews, Doron Rabinovici explores in detail the actions of individual Jews and Jewish organizations and shows how all of their strategies to protect themselves and others were ultimately doomed to failure. His rich and insightful account enables us to understand in a new way the terrible reality of the victims' plight: faced with the stark choice of death or cooperation, many chose to cooperate with the authorities in the hope that their actions might turn out to be the lesser evil.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

DEDICATION

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

PREFACE

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1: PROLOGUE

Survivor guilt

Breaching taboos

No mass murder without victims

Notes

2: THE VIENNA KULTUSGEMEINDE BEFORE 1938

Securing evidence – at the scene of the crime

Jewish strategies to counter anti-Semitism

The corporate state – in the shadow of the Third Reich

Notes

3: PERSECUTION

The German invasion and the Austrian response

Expropriation through the deprivation of rights

The hunt for booty

Notes

4: STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL AND ESCAPE

The decapitation of the Jewish Community

The attempt to escape or ‘Get rid of the Yids and keep their money here!’

Notes

5: THE VIENNA JEWISH COMMUNITY UNDER NAZI CONTROL

The reorganization of the Kultusgemeinde

Jewish self-help and welfare

‘Emigration’ – mass expulsion

Illegal escape

Notes

6: NOVEMBER POGROM – OVERTURE TO MURDER

Notes

7: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AFTER THE POGROM

Escape as a last resort

Functionaries: victims and messengers of terror

Administration during the terror

Benjamin Murmelstein

The employees in the system

Lateral entrants

Notes

8: BEGINNING OF THE END

Nisko or the dress rehearsal for deportation

Segregation, concentration and theft

Notes

9: DEPORTATION AND EXTERMINATION

Notes

10: THE ADMINISTRATION OF EXTERMINATION

Segregation and identification or a Jewish star for ten pfennigs

Liquidation – expropriation to the last

Designation and handing over of the victims

Welfare and burial service – administration in the shadow of destruction

Notes

11: THE KULTUSGEMEINDE – AUTHORITIES WITHOUT POWER

Individual stories

The victims' perspective

The administration and its employees

The conditioning of leading functionaries

Questions of character – individual Jewish functionaries before and after 1945

Notes

12: DISCUSSION OF THE JEWISH COUNCILS AND THE SITUATION IN VIENNA

Notes

GLOSSARY

INDEX

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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In memory of Franzi Löw-Danneberg and Willy Stern

First published in German as Instanzen der Ohnmacht. Wien 1938–1945. Der Weg zum Judenrat © Jüdischer Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2000

This English edition © Polity Press, 2011

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4682-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9468-9 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9375-0 (mobi)

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PREFACE

The subject of this book has haunted me for years. Discussion of the Jewish councils touches the post-1945 Jewish identity and more than anything else shows how the Nazi extermination policy even managed to rob the victims of their dignity. I have never been able to make light of this and have therefore attempted to make an academic study of the material, although realizing at the same time that words alone are inadequate to do justice to the subject.

In the Jewish youth organization I belonged to in Vienna, called Hashomer Hatzair, we sometimes carried out mock trials. The issue in dispute was fixed and there were guidelines for each of the protagonists but we usually improvised as we went along. One of us was the judge, another the defendant; there was a defence lawyer and a plaintiff, speeches and pleas and witnesses to be cross-examined. I recall one case – I must have been eleven years old – that particularly marked me. One of us, barely older than seventeen, was on trial as head of the Jewish community. ‘Partisans’ testified against him and other ‘survivors’ spoke in his favour: in other words, a reconstruction by a group of young people in Austria in the mid-1970s of the unofficial Jewish courts that were set up after 1945 in various countries, particularly in the displaced person camps. Some of our parents might well have taken part in proceedings of this type. We spectators were the jury and had to reach a decision. Without knowing much about it, we quickly found the defendant guilty. After the Holocaust, young Jews sought a new identity, and could only see themselves as members of the resistance. It was impossible to imagine what it had been like as a member of the Jewish councils.

This book, by contrast, attempts to understand the situation of Jewish functionaries under the Nazis. By looking at the point of view of the victims, we can see how unfathomable and absurd everything that was done to them must have appeared. Their despair and their powerlessness reflect the extent and nature of the crime. A critical study can possibly shed light on aspects that the victims were unable to see or to comprehend at the time and might also draw attention to some of our own weaknesses and blind spots.

Considerable research has been carried out on Jewish councils in other parts of Europe, but the Jewish administrative bodies in the German Reich have long been extensively ignored. In Germany and Austria, a study of the Jewish community leaders and the involvement of Jews with the Nazi regime that organized their expulsion and extermination has been just too sensitive an issue.

Consideration of the situation in Vienna is, however, of vital importance. To understand how the Jewish councils came about, it is essential to consider the developments in Austria. It was here that department II-112 of the Security Service under Adolf Eichmann developed the model for the Nazi Jewish policy. The Vienna model was then copied in other cities like Berlin, Prague or Paris. Eichmann set up the first Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna as the Nazi authority responsible for organizing the mass expulsion and later the deportation to extermination camps. The Jewish organizations were completely at the mercy of the regime. The Jewish administration was restructured in its entirety. The Vienna Jewish Community authorities (Kultusgemeinde) under Nazi rule can be regarded as a prototype for the future Jewish councils.

I am grateful to a large number of people and institutions for their indispensable aid in researching this subject. This book could not have been written without the support of the staff of the following archives, listed here alphabetically: Archive of the Republic of Austria, Vienna; Archive of the Landgericht, Vienna; Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem; Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance, Vienna; Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime, Vienna; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. I should like to thank them for helping me with my research. Hadassah Assouline, director of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, not only gave me access to the Kultusgemeinde archive in her institute but also referred me to the private archive there of Benjamin Murmelstein. Elisabeth Klamper from the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance helped me to locate documents.

Dolfi Brunner, Walter Fantl, Marcel Faust, Gerda Feldsberg, Paul Gross, Franz Hahn, Mares Prochnik, Herbert Schrott and Martin Vogel, along with Willy Stern and Franzi Löw-Danneberg, who have both died in the meantime, allowed me to interview them for hours and gave me the benefit of their recollections.

I should also like to thank Evelyn Adunka, Leonhard Ehrlich, Pierre Genée, Herbert Rosenkranz and Hans Schafranek for discussing problems with me, referring me to source material, recommending literature or providing me with copies of unpublished documents and interviews. I am grateful to Jacques Adler, Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, John Bunzl, Abraham Hodik, Yaacow Lozowick, Dan Michman, Jonny Moser, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Bertrand Perz, Dinah Porat, Herbert Rosenkranz and Simon Wiesenthal for their ideas and suggestions.

Gabriele Anderl, Florian Freund and Hans Safrian offered technical help and friendly support. Günther Kaindlsdorfer and Tessa Szyszkowitz took the time to proofread parts of my work. I am also grateful to many friends for their patience, questions and suggestions. I would like to express my profound gratitude to the translator of this abridged version of the text, Nick Somers, for his enthusiasm and commitment. I am particularly grateful for all the help and advice I have received from Peter Goodrich.

I thank Nadine Meyer, my editor at the Jüdischer Verlag, for her collaboration and her attentive and critical editing of my manuscript.

I owe a particular debt of thanks to Karl Stuhlpfarrer, my academic mentor at the University of Vienna. He encouraged me for years and spurred me on with advice, criticism and praise.

I am extremely grateful to my parents, Shoshana and David Rabinovici, for their sincere support.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A/WArchive of the Vienna Kultusgemeinde in the CAHJPCAHJPCentral Archives for the History of the Jewish PeopleCZACentral Zionist ArchivesDÖWDocumentation Archive of Austrian ResistanceIKGKultusgemeinde (Jewish Community authorities)PPrivate archive of Benjamin Murmelstein in the CAHJPYIVOYidisher Visenshaftlicher InstitutYvSYad Vashem

1PROLOGUE

When I was teaching in Cleveland, a young Jewish political scientist, engaged to a German woman, said to my face, without flinching: ‘I know what you survivors had to do to stay alive.’ I didn't know what we had had to do, but I knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say: ‘You walked over dead bodies.’ Should I have answered: ‘But I was only twelve’? Or said, ‘But I am a good girl, always have been’? Both answers implicate the others, my fellow prisoners. Or I could have said, ‘Where do you get off talking like that?’ and gotten angry. I said nothing, went home to my children, and was depressed. For in reality the cause of survival was almost pure chance.

Ruth Klüger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered1

Survivor guilt

The mass murder of millions of Jews was a collective crime. Although it was organized centrally, the work was split up and carried out by different authorities. Not just the police and the judiciary, but also the railways and banks, universities and industry offered their services to help isolate and rob the Jews, expel and exterminate them. What happened in the concentration camps and behind the front was officially kept secret, but here, too, quite a few people were involved in the misdeeds, and many were aware of some of the things that were going on. Only a few might have had an idea of the full magnitude of the crimes, but practically everybody knew that it was something not to be talked about.

A study of the files reveals the zeal, speed and thoroughness with which the anti-Jewish measures, decrees and laws were passed in Vienna in 1938 – a far cry from the proverbial sluggishness of Viennese bureaucracy. The crime was a social phenomenon: its progress was acclaimed in the newspapers and the plundering, beatings and pogrom that took place in November 1938, the deaths, arson and rape, were hailed triumphantly.

The mass murder would not have been possible without the indulgence and tacit consent of the population. One aspect of the misdeed was that the victims were deprived of any support. They were betrayed and at the mercy of everybody, completely defenceless in the face of the crimes committed. Before the physical annihilation, the victims were destroyed socially and psychologically.

On 15 October 1945, the head of the Vienna State Police filed charges with the public prosecutor's office against Wilhelm Reisz. During the Nazi era, Reisz had been subordinate to SS-Scharführer [squad leader] Herbert Gerbing. He was involved in the Aushebung, as it was called, of the Jews (literally ‘lifting out’) – finding out where Jews listed for deportation lived, noting their names and helping them to pack the few things they were allowed to take with them. Reisz's actions, remarked the Austrian head of the State Police, were ‘particularly reprehensible’ because he ‘brought misfortune on his compatriots in order to gain advantage for himself’.2

Why was Reisz exceptional? Was he ‘particularly reprehensible’ because otherwise Austrians did not bring misfortune on their compatriots in order to gain advantage for themselves? Not at all: the National Socialist Jewish policy in Austria was not imposed from without, by the Old German Reich against the will of the people. Austrian anti-Semites went to work with great fervour in 1938, proceeding with a fanatical sense of duty that was as yet unimaginable in Berlin. Was Wilhelm Reisz then unexceptional in a country that after 1945 styled itself merely as Hitler's ‘first victim’? No, he was an exception: Reisz was a Jew – and he survived. He ‘brought misfortune’, as the Vienna State Police put it, ‘on his compatriots’, Jews persecuted by the Nazis.