To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, “the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable.” In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power—“The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower,” as the first announcement of the Budapest Council phrased it. We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments of murder—like captains “whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of their precious cargo”; like saviors who “with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand.” The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims. In order not to leave the selection to “blind fate,” “truly holy principles” were needed “as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the unknown person and with this decides his life or death.” And whom did these “holy principles” single out for salvation? Those “who had worked all their lives for the zibur [community]”—i.e., the functionaries—and the “most prominent Jews,” as Kastner says in his report.
No one bothered to swear the Jewish officials to secrecy; they were voluntary “bearers of secrets,” either in order to assure quiet and prevent panic, as in Dr. Kastner's case, or out of “humane” considerations, such as that “living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be the harder,” as in the case of Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin. During the Eichmann trial, one witness pointed out the unfortunate consequences of this kind of “humanity”—people volunteered for deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried to tell them the truth as being “not sane.” We know the physiognomies of the Jewish leaders during the Nazi period very well; they ranged all the way from Chaim Rumkowski, Eldest of the Jews in Lódz, called Chaim I, who issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his portrait, and who rode around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage; through Leo Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who believed Jewish policemen would be “more gentle and helpful” and would “make the ordeal easier” (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them); to, finally, a few who committed suicide—like Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who was not a rabbi but an unbeliever, a Polish-speaking Jewish engineer, but who must still have remembered the rabbinical saying: “Let them kill you, but don't cross the line.”
That the prosecution in Jerusalem, so careful not to embarrass the Adenauer administration, should have avoided, with even greater and more obvious justification, bringing this chapter of the story into the open was almost a matter of course. (These issues, however, are discussed quite openly and with astonishing frankness in Israeli schoolbooks—as may conveniently be gathered from the article “Young Israelis and Jews Abroad—A Study of Selected History Textbooks” by Mark M. Krug, in Comparative Education Review, October, 1963.) The chapter must be included here, however, because it accounts for certain otherwise inexplicable lacunae in the documentation of a generally over-documented case. The judges mentioned one such instance, the absence of H. G. Adler's book Theresienstadt 1941-1945 (1955), which the prosecution, in some embarrassment, admitted to be “authentic, based on irrefutable sources.” The reason for the omission was clear. The book describes in detail how the feared “transport lists” were put together by the Jewish Council of Theresienstadt after the S.S. had given some general directives, stipulating how many should be sent away, and of what age, sex, profession, and country of origin. The prosecution's case would have been weakened if it had been forced to admit that the naming of individuals who were sent to their doom had been, with few exceptions, the job of the Jewish administration. And the Deputy State Attorney, Mr. Ya‘akov Baror, who handled the intervention from the bench, in a way indicated this when he said: “I am trying to bring out those things which somehow refer to the accused without damaging the picture in its entirety.” The picture would indeed have been greatly damaged by the inclusion of Adler's book, since it would have contradicted testimony given by the chief witness on Theresienstadt, who claimed that Eichmann himself had made these individual selections. Even more important, the prosecution's general picture of a clear-cut division between persecutors and victims would have suffered greatly. To make available evidence that does not support the case for the prosecution is usually the job of the defense, and the question why Dr. Servatius, who perceived some minor inconsistencies in the testimony, did not avail himself of such easily obtainable and widely known documentation is difficult to answer. He could have pointed to the fact that Eichmann, immediately upon being transformed from an expert in emigration into an expert in “evacuation,” appointed his old Jewish associates in the emigration business Dr. Paul Eppstein, who had been in charge of emigration in Berlin, and Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, who had held the same job in Vienna—as “Jewish Elders” in Theresienstadt. This would have done more to demonstrate the atmosphere in which Eichmann worked than all the unpleasant and often downright offensive talk about oaths, loyalty, and the virtues of unquestioning obedience.
The testimony of Mrs. Charlotte Salzberger on Theresienstadt, from which I quoted above, permitted us to cast at least a glance into this neglected corner of what the prosecution kept calling the “general picture.” The presiding judge did not like the term and he did not like the picture. He told the Attorney General several times that “we are not drawing pictures here,” that there is “an indictment and this indictment is the framework for our trial,” that the court “has its own view about this trial, according to the indictment,” and that “the prosecution must adjust to what the court lays down”—admirable admonitions for criminal proceedings, none of which was heeded. The prosecution did worse than not heed them, it simply refused to guide its witnesses—or, if the court became too insistent, it asked a few haphazard questions, very casually—with the result that the witnesses behaved as though they were speakers at a meeting chaired by the Attorney General, who introduced them to the audience before they took the floor. They could talk almost as long as they wished, and it was a rare occasion when they were asked a specific question.