Jewish collaboration with Nazi Germany

Jewish collaboration with Nazis refers to the activities before and during World War II of a number 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.

History
In Nazi Germany, Jews, Romani, and other minorities, were destined for removal, first through ghettoization and exile, and finally through extermination. Because of that, 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.

However, during the Nazis' ascent to power, organizations of Jews for Hitler such as the Association of German National Jews and The German Vanguard were already in support before being outlawed in late 1935. Motivated by anticommunism, conservative nationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-liberalism, these groups had initially believed that Nazi antisemitism was merely rhetorical hyperbole or a tactic to "stir up the masses."

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. 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. 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. 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. Finkel stresses that cooperation was always open and visible, while collaboration could be public or private, often secret.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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. The Jewish police were widely hated among other Jews, and their members were far more likely to be corrupt and self-interested than the Judenrat leaders. In 14 ghettos, Jewish police cooperated with the resistance movement.

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. They also believed collaboration increased their chance for survival. In Berlin, the Gestapo mobilized Jewish informants under threat of death. They took part in organizing provocations and arresting Jews hiding outside the ghetto or trying to escape from it, they also helped find people involved in smuggling, producing illegal documents or having contacts with the underground. They were widely regarded as influential people who could get things done with the Germans. They often took advantage of their position by taking bribes or helping selected individuals.

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. Informers were fought by the Jewish resistance, and by the Polish resistance if their activities harmed the Polish underground. 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.

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.

In post-war Israel, many Jewish policemen were brought to trial. 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. In Western Europe, Jews accused of collaboration faced honour courts. In the Soviet Union, Jewish collaborators, such as police officers, were initially tried like any other collaborator for "treason to the motherland."