The formation of the Judenräte in the Ghettos, the creation of Nazi-controlled national Jewish organizations in various countries as well as the Kapo system in the concentration camps was all an essential part of the Nazi plan for the so-called Final Solution and the camp system. The insidiousness of the Germans in creating a system that involves the very victims of systematic persecution and murder in their own horrible fate was a clear marker of the Nazi administrative system of the events that we know today as the Holocaust.

It can not be overemphasized how this was one of the most nefarious characteristics of how the Nazis operated: To force their victims into certain kinds of complicity in the crimes perpetrated against them. The Jewish councils or "Judenräte" are the perfect example of that. The Jewish councils were established in Ghettos by the Nazis and functioned function like a municipal administration. When the Nazis established the Ghettos, out of a variety of reasons but foremost to minimize the contacts between Germans and Jews and because of the ease of their own bureaucracy, they put a Jewish administration in charge of running the Ghettos from the inside. The members of the Jewish councils were imprisoned in the Ghettos like anyone else but they were charged with making sure operations were running, i.e. food was given out, the police force patrolling the streets, that everybody showed up for work, the water was running etc. For this purpose they became the primary spokespeople of the Ghetto inhabitants vis a vis the Nazi administration.

They were also forced to implement Nazi policy within the Ghetto. Mostly, this came down to compiling the lists for deportations to the camps, i.e. deciding who was to be deported and who was to remain in the Ghetto. This, of course, makes the whole history of the Jewish councils a rather delicate and sensitive subject. This basic approach had been pioneered by the Nazis in Germany where the Jewish administration was forced to basically assist in their own discrimination and the theft of Jewish property. When the first Ghettos were institutionalized by the Nazi occupation in the General Government, this model of administration was taken over.

Members of these Jewish councils found themselves in very difficult moral situations that for us as people who have not experienced them first hand are incredibly difficult to asses. They knew that when Nazi officials requested lists of who was to be deported, this meant that people were sent to their deaths in many a case. At the same time, a refusal to cooperate could mean the entire Ghetto was killed outright. Rather than the wish to protect themselves or fellow officials within the Jewish administration, one of the prime motives of basically all the Jewish councils was to try to save as many people in their Ghetto as was possible.

Put by the Nazis in a position that presented itself as "give up some of your people, so you can save many more of your people" is an impossible situation in terms of what choice to make. And of course responses to this varied: Some were killed for their refusal to cooperate such as Joseph Parnes in Lvov. He refused to hand over Jews for deportation to the Janowska forced-labor camp and was killed by the Nazis for his refusal. Others committed suicide like the head of the Jewish council in Warsaw, Adam Czerniakow, who ended his life because the Nazis ordered him to hand over orphans in the Ghetto for deportation. Others like Elchanan Elkes in Kovno assisted in the resistance and organized an uprising (an option that was only open to him because there were Soviet Partisans operating near Kovno and that many others chose too where it was an option). And again, others believed that the inhabitants of their Ghetto could be saved by making them economically indispensable. Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz worked very hard to get the Wehrmacht to use the Jews from the Ghetto as cheap labor because he believed that would save them from deportation; a strategy that ultimately failed.

And as the responses by various members of the Jewish councils varied strongly, so did how they were viewed by the people under their care. Rumkowski is a good example: Remembered for the "Give me your children" speech when he promised the inhabitants of the Ghetto to save people if they would only hand over their children, which resulted in the eventual deportation and murder of 20.000 Jewish children in the Chelmno concentration camp. When he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 after the Germans liquidated the Ghetto, the members of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz beat him to death for his complicity.

Similarly, Rudolf Kastner who negotiated with Eichmann in Hungary on the fate of the Hungarian Jews, who were eventually deported and largely killed in Auschwitz in 1944 was shot dead after the war in Israel by the Lehi for having been a Nazi collaborator.

Generally – overlooking such examples as the aforementioned Elkes – members of the councils were widely hated after the war and condemned by various authors. Hannah Arendt for examples basically issued a blanket condemnation of all the councils as having been responsible for the Jews letting themselves lead to the slaughter like sheep. However, by now, a more differentiated view has prevailed.

In virtually all cases, whether it was the Reichsvereinigung in Germany, which started out as an administrative tool in assisting the forced emigration program in Germany or whether it was the Judenräte in the Ghettos, the prime motive of people in charge was a policy intended to save people – and that means a whole lot of people, not just their own members and officials – from discrimination, deportation or death. That in many a case, they were not very successful with their strategies is, however, due to the insidious politics of the Germans. They couldn't know how it ended in most cases that are known clung to the hope of enabling survival as well as the unbelief that it was actually a possibility for the Nazis to kill every last one of them. And constructing an ex-post argument that is brought against them because we know how the story ends is, in my opinion, a very difficult position to take.

While post-war trials especially in Israel saw members of the councils and Ghetto police sentenced to death even for their complicity, the extremely difficult moral and political positions these people were placed in by their tormentors, the Germans, can not be overemphasized. We know today how the story ends but for the vast majority of them, the idea of the systematic murder of all Jews in all of Europe was something unthinkable at the time and so, if they didn't chose to end their own lives over their situation like Czerniakow, they like most of the inhabitants of the Ghettos clung to the faint hope that they would be able to save people from death and deportation if they went along with some of the German demands while trying desperately to make the inhabitants of their Ghetto indispensable in a variety of ways.

And while they were ultimately an important part of the German administrative system of the Holocaust, assigning moral or criminal blame to them instead of the Germans is only justifiable in my opinion in very, very few cases. As already mentioned, those drafted in the Jewish Councils found themselves in what was basically an impossible situation both morally and politically not just because they couldn't know how the story would end but also because – unlike for Germans where there is no evidence for even one case of a German being executed for refusing to participate in the Holocaust – they were indeed under the threat of having to go along or being killed. That some of them tried their best to undermine German policies under the threat of being killed or indeed took their own life just goes to show how difficult their situation was.

At the same time, the impulse of e.g. those members of the Jewish Sonderkommando that beat Rumkowski or the Jewish Partisans in the USSR that would murder some members of Jewish councils are also understandable on the level of following the impulse of hatred towards those who they viewed as massively complicit in a system designed to murder them all.

However, for us as historians to make the judgements Arendt and others made is in my view not the right way to go for we have the comfort of sitting atop the perch of viewing their actions with almost total knowledge of the Nazis' plans and actions and having never experienced a situation such as this I find we are ill-equipped to make moral judgement calls here. In the end, both the historical responsibility as well as the moral blame for the murder of Europe's Jews lies squarely with the Germans and not with the Jewish councils.

Sources:

• Dan Michman: 'Jewish "Headships" under Nazi Rule: The Evolution and Implementation of an Administrative Concept', in: Dan Michman: Holocaust Historiography, a Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues, London, 2003, pp. 159–175.

• Dan Michmann: '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.

• Aharon Weiss: Jewish Leadership in Occupied Poland. Postures and Attitudes. In: Yad Vashem Studies. 12, 1977, S. 335–365.

• Revital Ludewig-Kedmi: Opfer und Täter zugleich? Moraldilemmata jüdischer Funktionshäftlinge in der Shoah, Gießen 2001.