JUDENRAT Collaboration Condemned Schonfeld

The Holocaust Victims Accuse, by Moshe Schonfeld. 1977

1933 Boycott. Questionable Zionist Actions. JUDENRAT Jewish-Nazi Collaboration Unequivocally Condemned

Rabbi Moshe Schonfeld has written a hard-hitting book, one that inadvertently undermines many of the canons of modern Holocaust education. While he does repeat stereotyped criticisms of Christians, the Vatican, etc., Schonfeld’s harshest comments are directed at fellow Jews, specifically the Zionists and secular Jews.

Never one to use euphemisms for the main murderers, he always calls Nazis by their correct name–the Germans. He attributes the low levels of anti-Semitism in the Scandinavian countries not to some uniquely Scandinavian virtue of tolerance, but to the smallness of their Jewish communities (p. 14).

THE 1933 BOYCOTT ONLY HELPED RADICALIZE THE NAZIS

Schonfeld attacks certain world Jewish organizations for what he considers unwise actions that needlessly inflamed Hitler. He depicts the 1933 boycott of German goods as a provocation against Hitler concocted by Jewish nationalists and Zionists “from their safe, convenient dwellings” (p. 7). In the same vein, he condemns Rabbi Stephen Wise and the World Jewish Congress in New York for their declaration of war against Germany. Schonfeld sees this as the very trigger of the Wannsee Conference, which detailed and implemented the plans for the Final Solution itself (p. 43).

PROMINENT JEWS, AND ZIONISTS, FAIL TO AID EUROPE’S DYING JEWS

Schonfeld repeatedly condemns Jewish organizations for failing to ameliorate the Final Solution once it actually became full-blown. He condemns Yitzchak Greenbaum for preferring a future Jewish state to the rescue of European Jewry. He attacks Nathan Schwalb for rejecting the efforts of Czech Jewry to have a sum of money paid to halt the transports of Jews to Auschwitz (pp. 26-27). He states that the extermination of Slovakian Jews had been delayed by two years as a result of Jewish bribes (p. 77), thereby demonstrating that the German Nazis were amenable to bribery in exchange for Jewish lives. Furthermore, western Jewish organizations refused to pay the bribe that would have saved 70,000 Romanian Jews (pp. 100-101). Most interesting of all, he claims that the Germans were willing to accept bribes from Jewish organizations to spare Hungarian Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz, allowing them to emigrate to some other nation except Palestine (pp. 75-77). But the Zionist organizations rejected these offers, even claiming that the extermination accounts given by East European Jews were exaggerations (p. 76)! He chides the German Jewish leader Sali Mayer for refusing to accept the accounts of genocide directed against Jews because of his high regard for the Germans as a civilized people “who would never do such a thing” (p. 78).

Moshe Schonfeld condemns Jewish Zionist organizations, and the World Jewish Congress, for their refusal to support the delivery of overseas food to the Jews in the ghettoes (pp. 44-46). He argues that at least some of the food did reach the intended recipients, and rejects the notion that such aid was tantamount to breaking of the boycott against Hitler. He rejects the common argument that such aid was tantamount to an interference with the Allied war effort.

POLISH BISHOPS HIDE PROMINENT RABBIS

Moshe Schonfeld touches on some Polish efforts to rescue Jewish leaders (pp. 34-35) in the context of rabbis’ refusal to accept deliverance while their fellow Jews were dying. He mentions the fact that the Archbishop of Warsaw offered an escape, to the bishop’s palace, to rabbis Menachem Zemba, Shimson Stockhamer, and Dovid Shopirobut. A similar offer was rejected by Rabbi Y. Pinner from the bishop of Lodz.

THE JUDENRAETE AND JEWISH GHETTO POLICE: JEWISH COMPLICITY IN THE HOLOCAUST

In common with many other writers, Schonfeld elaborates on the Jewish collaborationist police (the Jewish ghetto police) and their dealings with their fellow Jews, and doing so at a level of zeal and cruelty exceeding that of the Germans (pp. 21-22). He claims that religious Jews were absent from their ranks, and that the collaborationist Jews had a virulent hatred of religious Jews. Schonfeld, in reference to a Jewish religious teaching that forbids that some Jews be allowed to be killed so that other Jews may be spared, condemns the collaborationist actions of the JUDENRAT (p. 120). He singles out Jewish leaders Merin and Moldetzky for their collaborationist actions that resulted in the annihilation of East Silesian Jews at a more efficient rate than at other places (p. 123). He thereby rejects the exculpation that the JUDENRATE actions saved some Jews by betraying other Jews.

RUDOLF KASZTNER AND ADOLF EICHMANN

Author Moshe Schonfeld elaborates on the sundry relationship between the Jewish collaborator Rudolf Kasztner and the Nazi German mass murderer Adolf Eichmann (pp. 66-67). Schonfeld quotes from a document that charges Kastner with knowing about the impending mass gassing of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz, but striking a sordid deal with Eichmann for the sparing of some favored Jews in exchange for Kasztner’s silence. The deal included a hefty payment, which Eichmann later used to escape to Argentina. For more on this, see my review of KASZTNER’S CRIME, by Bogdanor.

ABBA KOVNER A NON-HERO

Schonfeld condemns the Jewish guerilla leader Abba Kovner for saving, from the Vilna [Wilno, Vilnius] ghetto, only a few of his chosen men, even though initially the thinking was that many young Jews would be saved, based on the notion that they were the future of the nation. Kovner is accused of callously refusing aid to various fugitive Jews who had sought his aid the forests that surrounded Vilnius (pp. 33-34).

HOLOCAUST NON-UNIQUENESS

Moshe Schonfeld’s book has broad-based implications. For the longest time, Jewish sufferings have been given preeminence in the US in the form of Holocaust education, which is mandatory in some US states. Common arguments adduced for the virtually exclusive remembrance of the 5-6 million murdered Jews as opposed to, for example, the 2-3 million murdered Polish gentiles, are based on: 1) The presumably-unalterable Nazi priorities, 2) The presumed unique irrationality of the hatred of Jews, and 3) The presumed necessarily total annihilation of all Jewry. Schonfeld’s analysis shows that, contrary to these arguments, the German Nazi actions against Jews were not such a priority, nor so uniquely irrational, nor so comprehensive, that they could not at least sometimes be reversed by the payment of bribes. Clearly, the Nazi Germans were not necessarily nor unalterably interested in the killing of every last possible Jew within their grasp.