The Jewish collaboration with Nazis were the activities before and during World War II of Jews working, voluntarily or involuntarily, with the anti-Semitic regime of Nazi Germany, with different motivations. The term and history have remained controversial, regarding the exact nature of collaboration in some cases.
During the Nazis' ascent to power, some Jewish organizations, such as the Association of German National Jews and The German Vanguard supported nazism until being outlawed in late 1935. Motivated by anticommunism, conservative nationalism, Zionism, and anti-liberalism, these groups had initially believed that Nazi antisemitism was merely rhetorical hyperbole or a tactic to "stir up the masses". [1] [2] [3]
In German-occupied Europe during World War II, Jews, Romani, and some other minorities, were destined for removal, first through ghettoization and exile, and finally through extermination. To streamline the process of excluding Jews, and to ease the burden of management, Germans established Jewish institutions in the ghettos. These included, first and foremost, Jewish administrative boards, usually called Judenräte, and the Jewish Ghetto Police, responsible for maintaining order in the ghettos. Formally, the Jewish police were subordinate to the Judenrats, but in most ghettos they quickly became independent of them and even gained a higher position, reporting directly to the Germans. [4]
According to Aharon Weiss's research, the activities of the first wave of Judenrat leaders were primarily aimed at improving the well-being of the communities they headed. Only their successors, chosen by the Germans from among the most corrupt, were blind executors of German orders and acted mainly for their own self-interest. [5] In some of the larger ghettos, the Judenrats were forced to prepare lists and hand over people to the Germans for deportation. More often, only the Jewish police took part in deportations. In most places this never happened. [6] The Jewish police were widely hated among other Jews, [7] and their members were far more likely to be corrupt and self-interested than the Judenrat leaders. [8] In 14 ghettos, Jewish police cooperated with the resistance movement. [7]
A separate form of collaboration was the activity of Jewish agents and informers of the German secret services and police. In most cases, they acted voluntarily, for monetary reward, power and status. [8] They also believed collaboration increased their chance for survival. [9] In Berlin, the Gestapo mobilized Jewish informants under threat of death. [10]
Witold Mędykowski assesses this phenomenon as marginal; in a population of 15-20 thousand people in the Kraków ghetto, the number of informers is estimated at between a dozen and several dozen people. [11] Informers were fought by the Jewish resistance, and by the Polish resistance if their activities harmed the Polish underground. [12] The "Group 13" from the Warsaw ghetto, led by Abraham Gancwajch, was the only organized group of Jewish collaboraters with the Germans on the basis of ideology. [13]
The Nazis also used agents who were Jewish to arrest Jews hiding outside the ghetto or trying to escape from it. These agents also helped find people involved in smuggling, producing illegal documents or having contacts with the underground. [14] They were widely regarded as influential people who could get things done with the Germans. [15] They often took advantage of their position by taking bribes or helping selected individuals. [16] Nazi agents who were Jewish include Stella Goldschlag, Ans van Dijk and Betje Wery.
During the Hotel Polski affair, Jewish agents working for the Gestapo-operated Żagiew agent provocateur network helped to spread rumors that Jews could buy foreign passports and other documents, and then as foreign citizens, leave territories occupied by Nazi Germany. Approximately 2,500 Jews fell for this trap, with most subsequently arrested and murdered.
Operating in Palestine since 1940, the Zionist Lehi group of about 100 members, led by Abraham Stern, regarded the British Empire as its main enemy. In January 1941, they offered an anti-British partnership to Germany in exchange for allowing European Jews to emigrate to Palestine. [17]
A 1950 Israeli law passed by the First Knesset criminalised Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. Under this law, around forty alleged Jewish collaborators were put on trial between 1951 and 1972, of whom two-thirds were convicted.
In Poland after the war, 1,800 people were convicted by the courts for anti-Semitic persecution during the war. Among them, 44 were Jews; in their proceeding Central Committee of Polish Jews participated actively. [18] In Western Europe, Jews accused of collaboration faced honour courts. [18]
In the Soviet Union, Jewish collaborators, such as police officers, were initially[ clarification needed ] tried like any other collaborator for "treason to the motherland." [19]
There is debate as to whether one can speak of Jewish collaboration at all. If one defines collaboration as voluntary cooperation based on an ideological premises then by definition Jewish collaboration could not exist. [8]
After World War II started in 1939, according to Yehuda Bauer, the only Jewish collaborationist group in occupied Europe was the "Group 13" that existed in the Warsaw Ghetto, whose collaboration was based on the belief in the inevitability of German victory. [17] According to Bauer, in the case of other Jewish groups, one should speak rather of "forced cooperation," although, as he points out, some groups came close to collaboration. [20] According to Evgeny Finkel, defining "cooperation" in this way is problematic with regard to the activities of some Judenrat leaders and Jewish police, who were corrupt and despotic, and whose actions were guided primarily by the desire for profit and their own survival. [8] Finkel proposes defining cooperation as activity aimed at the survival of the community and its individual members, while collaboration would be activity to the detriment of the community or the survival of individual Jews. [21] Finkel stresses that cooperation was always open and visible, while collaboration could be public or private, often secret. [22]
In most cases, Jews who chose to collaborate did so to guarantee their personal survival, as did other ethnic groups who collaborated with Nazi Germany. [22] The phenomenon of Jewish collaboration was often exploited by nationalist apologists from groups deeply implicated in the Holocaust, who used it to minimize their own groups' role in the extermination of the Jews. [8]
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi), with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the prisoners of the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the ghetto.
A Judenrat was an administrative body established in German-occupied Europe during World War II which purported to represent a Jewish community in dealings with the Nazi authorities. The Germans required Jews to form Judenräte across the occupied territories at local and sometimes national levels.
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Situated in the city of Łódź, and originally intended as a preliminary step upon a more extensive plan of creating the Judenfrei province of Warthegau, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht. The number of people incarcerated in it was increased further by the Jews deported from Nazi-controlled territories.
The Kraków Ghetto was one of five major metropolitan Nazi ghettos created by Germany in the new General Government territory during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It was established for the purpose of exploitation, terror, and persecution of local Polish Jews. The ghetto was later used as a staging area for separating the "able workers" from those to be deported to extermination camps in Operation Reinhard. The ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, with most of its inhabitants deported to the Belzec extermination camp as well as to Płaszów slave-labor camp, and Auschwitz concentration camp, 60 kilometres (37 mi) rail distance.
Following the establishment of the Second Polish Republic after World War I and during the interwar period, the number of Jews in the country grew rapidly. According to the Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; by late 1938 that number had grown by over 16 percent, to approximately 3,310,000, mainly through migration from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War of 1919 and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic grew by nearly half a million, or over 464,000 persons. Jews preferred to live in the relatively-tolerant Poland rather than in the Soviet Union and continued to integrate, marry into Polish Gentile families, to bring them into their community through marriage, feel Polish and form an important part of Polish society. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.
The Lwów Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto in the city of Lwów in the territory of Nazi-administered General Government in German-occupied Poland.
Szmalcownik ; in English, also sometimes spelled shmaltsovnik) is a pejorative Polish slang expression that originated during the Holocaust in Poland in World War II and refers to a person who blackmailed Jews who were in hiding, or who blackmailed Poles who aided Jews, during the German occupation. By stripping Jews of their financial resources, blackmailers added substantially to the danger that Jews and their rescuers faced and increased their chances of being caught and killed.
The Białystok Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto set up by the German SS between July 26 and early August 1941 in the newly formed District of Bialystok within occupied Poland. About 50,000 Jews from the vicinity of Białystok and the surrounding region were confined into a small area of the city, which was turned into the district's capital. The ghetto was split in two by the Biała River running through it. Most inmates were put to work in the slave-labor enterprises for the German war effort, primarily in large textile, shoe and chemical companies operating inside and outside its boundaries. The ghetto was liquidated in November 1943. Its inhabitants were transported in Holocaust trains to the Majdanek concentration camp and Treblinka extermination camps. Only a few hundred survived the war, either by hiding in the Polish sector of the city, escape following the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising, or by surviving the camps.
The Dzyatlava Ghetto, Zdzięcioł Ghetto, or Zhetel Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto in the town of Dzyatlava, Western Belarus during World War II. After several months of Nazi ad-hoc persecution that began after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the new German authorities officially created a ghetto for all local Jews on 22 February 1942. Prior to 1939, the town (Zdzięcioł) was part of Nowogródek Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic.
Abraham Gancwajch (1902–1943) was a prominent Nazi collaborator in the Warsaw Ghetto during the World War II occupation of Poland, and a Jewish kingpin of the ghetto underworld. Opinions about his ghetto activities are controversial, though modern research concludes unanimously that he was an informer and collaborator motivated chiefly by personal interest.
ŁachwaGhetto was a Nazi ghetto in Łachwa, Poland during World War II. The ghetto was created with the aim of persecution and exploitation of the local Jews. The ghetto existed until September 1942. One of the first Jewish ghetto uprisings had happened there.
The Będzin Ghetto was a World War II ghetto set up by Nazi Germany for the Polish Jews in the town of Będzin in occupied south-western Poland. The formation of the 'Jewish Quarter' was pronounced by the German authorities in July 1940. Over 20,000 local Jews from Będzin, along with additional 10,000 Jews expelled from neighbouring communities, were forced to subsist there until the end of the ghetto history during the Holocaust. Most of the able-bodied poor were forced to work in German military factories before being transported aboard Holocaust trains to the nearby concentration camp at Auschwitz where they were exterminated. The last major deportation of the ghetto inmates by the German SS – men, women and children – between 1 and 3 August 1943 was marked by the ghetto uprising by members of the Jewish Combat Organization.
The Sosnowiec Ghetto was a World War II ghetto set up by Nazi German authorities for Polish Jews in the Środula district of Sosnowiec in the Province of Upper Silesia. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, most inmates, estimated at over 35,000 Jewish men, women and children were deported to Auschwitz death camp aboard Holocaust trains following roundups lasting from June until August 1943. The ghetto was liquidated during an uprising, a final act of defiance of its Underground Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) made up of youth. Most of the Jewish fighters perished.
Moshe (Mosheh) Merin was the head of the Jewish Community Council, or Judenrat, in the Sosnowiec Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II. It is believed that he was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. As with most Jewish Council leadership of the time, his actions or lack thereof during the Holocaust in occupied Poland are highly controversial.
The Słonim Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established in 1941 by the SS in Slonim, Western Belarus during World War II. Prior to 1939, the town (Słonim) was part of the Second Polish Republic. The town was captured in late June 1941 by the Wehrmacht in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa. Anti-Jewish measures were promptly put into place, and a barb-wire surrounded ghetto had been created by 12 July. The killings of Jews by mobile extermination squads began almost immediately. Mass killings took place in July and November. The survivors were used as slave labor. After each killing, significant looting by the Nazis occurred. A Judenrat was established to pay a large ransom; after paying out 2 million roubles of gold, its members were then executed. In March 1942, ghettos in the surrounding areas were merged into the Słonim ghetto.
Jacob Gens was the head of the Vilnius Ghetto government. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked at several jobs, including as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
The Kraków Ghetto Jewish Police were a law enforcement service in the Kraków Ghetto, part of the system of the Jewish Ghetto Police. The OD were subordinated to the Judenrat of each ghetto. The Kraków OD, unlike many other Jewish Police forces, served as willing enforcers of Nazi policies and the Gestapo. Among other duties, they oversaw the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto and helped transport Jews to Bełżec extermination camp.
During the German occupation of Poland, citizens of all its major ethnic groups collaborated with the Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary. Collaboration in Poland was less institutionalized than in some other countries and has been described as marginal, a point of pride with the Polish people. During and after the war, the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance movement punished collaborators and sentenced thousands of them to death.
Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland is a 2013 book about the Holocaust in Poland by Jan Grabowski. The 2013 English edition followed a 2011 Polish-language edition and was in turn followed by a 2016 Hebrew edition.
Symcha Spira, also known as Symche Spira, served as the head of the Krakow ghetto Jewish police during the Holocaust.