Judenrat

The building of the “Judenrat” in the Warsaw ghetto after the suppression of the uprising by the SS ; Recording: “ Stroop Report ”,
May 1943

Ghetto Litzmannstadt poster: Clean child healthy, dirty child sick

Judenrat is the term that was used for the compulsory Jewish corporations established during the time of National Socialism in the areas occupied and controlled by the German Reich . The term was created by the SS and the Gestapo . The Jewish councils were forcibly appointed by them and other occupation authorities. The structure and tasks of the Jewish councils under National Socialist rule varied depending on whether they were used for a single ghetto , a region or a country.

Anti-Jewish legislation

In one shortly after the seizure of power of the NSDAP report submitted commissioned in early April 1933 on the "Jewish fighting" the establishment was a legally recognized "Association of Jews in Germany," where all the Jews of Germany were forced to join recommended. This should be subordinate to a German "Volkswart" appointed by the Reich Chancellor . A 25-member “Judenrat”, elected by the members every four years, was planned as the leading organ of the forced Jewish organization. The government commission's report was not officially implemented. The historian Dan Michman considers it likely that the commission, which has demonstrably dealt with the legal relations between Jews and non-Jews in Germany before emancipation, resorted to the term "Judenrat", which was used for the Middle Ages, for example for Augsburg and Nuremberg. Michman said that this would shed light on the Commission's aims, "namely to reverse emancipation and assimilation and to throw the Jews back to their medieval status."

Occupied Territories

The first Jewish councils came into being on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich on September 21, 1939 shortly after the attack on Poland . They were supposed to enforce the anti-Jewish measures of the occupiers in the western and central part of the country and had no powers of their own. If possible, they should be composed of rabbis and other influential members of existing Jewish communities so that they would obey their instructions under German control. At the same time, this involvement was intended to undermine the credibility of the previous leaders towards their fellow Jews.

Hans Frank , head of the newly formed General Government, ordered the formation of further Jewish councils in eastern Poland on November 18, 1939. These should consist of 12 for places with up to 10,000 Jewish inhabitants and 24 for larger proportions. They should be elected by their parishes by the end of the year and then elect a first and second chairperson from among themselves. The result had to be presented to the respective German city or district chief and recognized by him. The election was therefore only formally democratic; in fact, the occupiers dictated the composition of the councils. However, they only interfered to a limited extent in the selection of candidates. People named by them refused to join the council so as not to allow themselves to be abused by the occupiers. As a rule, the traditional spokesmen for the Jewish communities were elected and appointed so that the continuity of leadership from both sides was ensured.

tasks

The National Socialists strove to starve out the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and to systematically weaken their powers and possibilities of resistance. Above all, the first Jewish councils had to count the Jewish population of their place for them, have apartments vacated and handed over to them, provide forced laborers, confiscate valuables, collect tributes and pay them out.

These measures by the occupiers, which also canceled and prevented all state services, created enormous supply problems in the Jewish communities. Therefore, the Jewish councils also took part in setting up their own substitute institutions. They tried to organize the distribution of food, to set up hospitals, old people's homes, orphanages and schools. At the same time, they tried to use whatever options they had to counteract the coercive measures and to gain time. To do this, they delayed the implementation of the orders and tried to weaken them by trying to exploit rivalries between various occupation positions. They presented their workers as indispensable as possible for the Germans in order to improve their supply situation and to induce the Germans to withdraw some collective sentences.

However, this was only possible to a very limited extent. The forced emergency often led to personal advantages, favoritism and protectionism for the relatively wealthy. This led to fierce criticism and, in some cases, rejection of the Jewish councils in the Jewish communities.

Ghetto situation

The Judenrat was responsible for the local administration of the ghettos and stood between the Nazi occupying power and the ordinary population of the ghettos. A Jewish police force was under him . In general, the Jewish councils are composed of the respective elites of the Jewish community. They were forced to deliver Jews to the Germans as slave laborers and to help them deport Jews to concentration camps . Those who refused to obey orders were shot themselves or deported to concentration camps and immediately replaced by other inmates.

Persons forced to work as Judenrat

Examples:

• Abraham Asscher and David Cohen , both in the Amsterdam Jewish Council
• Adam Czerniaków (1880–1942), engineer, member of the Senate, Warsaw Ghetto , there is a diary, suicide before mass deportations
• Anna Feingold (d. 1940), in the city of Przemyśl
• Jacob Gens (1905–1943), in the so-called Vilna Ghetto
• Benjamin Murmelstein (1905–1989), who had a doctorate in rabbi, was appointed by the National Socialists after the dissolution of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Vienna as a department head of the compulsory organization "Jewish Community" in the "Emigration Department", which together with Eichmann's " Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna " had to cooperate in the exploitation of the Jews who were forced to leave the country. Murmelstein was also used by the SS as a Jewish elder in the Theresienstadt ghetto concentration camp .
• Chaim Rumkowski (1877–1944), who had been an insurance agent before this activity, was appointed by the National Socialist authorities in Łódź on October 13, 1939 as the “Jewish elder” of the so-called Jewish residential district they established and commissioned to found a Jewish council. The members of this first Judenrat were arrested, deported and, for the most part, murdered on November 11, 1939. Rumkowski was severely mistreated and forced to form a new Judenrat to draw up a list of around 50,000 people who were to be deported to the territory of the Generalgouvernement .

See also

• Berthold Storfer . The NS- Reichsstatthalter Arthur Seyß-Inquart delegated to the international refugee conference in Évian on July 6th 1938 for the " Jewish community Vienna " next to the leader, the community chairman Josef Löwenherz , and Heinrich Neumann von Héthárs also Storfer. After their failure, Seyß-Inquart obliged this delegation to buy Jews who would soon be deported to concentration camps free for a ransom and to organize their departure.
• Corresp. Paragraph in the article Oberjude in the German so-called ghettos, or "Jewish camps" or forced labor camps in Poland.

• The designation of the following specific and so-called prison functionaries in the German concentration camps :
  • Camp elder - he was marked with a black band with the Gothic letters LA (abbreviation for "camp elder") or, depending on the size of the concentration camp, with the numbers I or II (LA I - camp elder, II - the deputy of the camp elder) on the left upper arm.
  • The block elders - as supervision of the concentration camp prisoners in a concentration camp barrack .

literature

• Dan Diner : memory times. About Jewish and other stories. Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-50560-0 .
• Dan Diner: Beyond the imaginable - The “Judenrat” as a situation. In: Hanno Loewy , Gerhard Schoenberner (eds.): “Our only way is work.” The Ghetto in Łódź 1940–1944. Löcker, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-85409-169-9 .
• Marian Fuks: The problem of the Jewish councils and Adam Czerniak's decency. In: Stefi Jersch-Wenzel : Germans - Poles - Jews. Your relationships from the beginning to the 20th century. Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-7678-0694-0 , pp. 229-239 ( individual publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin 58).
• Dan Michman : 'On the Historical Interpretation of the Judenräte Issue: Between Intentionalism, Functionalism and the Integrationist Approach of the 1990s', in: Moshe Zimmermann (Ed.), On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime. Essays by Three Generations of Historians. A Festschrift in Honor of Otto Dov Kulka (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), pp. 385–397.
• Dan Michman : Judenrat. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 236–242.
• Doron Rabinovici : Instances of Powerlessness. Vienna 1938–1945. The way to the Judenrat. Jewish publishing house at Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-633-54162-4 .
• Isaiah Trunk : Judenrat. The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation. Stein & Day, New York NY 1977, ISBN 0-8128-2170-X ( A Scarborough Book ).
• Verena Wahlen: Select Bibliography on Judenraete under Nazi Rule. In: Yad Vashem Studies. 10, 1974, ISSN  0084-3296 , pp. 277-294.
• Aharon Weiss: Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland. Postures and Attitudes. In: Yad Vashem Studies. 12, 1977, pp. 335-365.

Web links

Commons : Judenrat  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Wolf Murmelstein: The Judenrat question: tragically overwhelmed or forever guilty?
• Yad Vashem: Judenrat (PDF file; 95 kB)
• Aharon Weiss: The Relations Between the Judenrat and the Jewish Police (PDF file; 92 kB)
• The Vienna Jewish Councils under the Nazi regime, Doron Rabinovici, lecture on February 14, 2002 in Ebensee ( memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Council of Elders The Theresienstadt Lexicon
• Mark Paul (October 2009): Patterns of Cooperation, Collaboration and Betrayal: Jews, Germans and Poles in Occupied Poland during World War II (PDF; 2.0 MB)
• Hans-Dieter Arntz: Jupp Weiss from Flamersheim, the Jewish elder from Bergen-Belsen (shoa.de)
• Hans-Dieter Arntz: Josef Weiss, a hero in the time of the Holocaust
• Documents on the Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague

Individual evidence

1. ^ Shmuel Spector: The Encyclopedia of Jewish life before and during the Holocaust ; New York University Press, New York 2001 ISBN 0-8147-9356-8 , Volume 1, p. 61 (English).
2. ↑ Dan Michman: "Judenräte" and "Judenvereinigungen" under National Socialist rule. Build and apply an administrative concept. In: The Historiography of the Shoah from a Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, terminology, views, basic questions ; Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 2002 ISBN 3-935549-08-3 , p. 106, first in: ZfG , 1998.