Judenrat Flaws
1612 WordsSep 12, 20137 Pages
David Nguyen
9/11/2011
World History
The Judenrat’s Mistake
During the holocaust, Jews were losing their jobs, rights, and property. In 1933, the Nazi leaders began assigning Jews to handle situations to help the jews in the Ghettos, these Jews were known as the Judenrat. The Judenrate weren’t Jewish volunteers, they were assigned and given tasks to perform: “Composed of 24 male jews … prescribed as 1) executing German orders, 2) taking an improvised census of the Jew in their area, 3) executing the Jew from rural to urban locations, 4) furnishing adequate maintenance for the evacuees en route to the cities, 5) providing quarters for the evacuees in the cities ghetto.” (Bernard 27). In many cases, the Judenrat were responsible…show more content… The Judenrat led the resistance by assisting the rebels to escape from the ghettos. As a result to these resistances Nazi officers would just send attack dogs or perform search parties and eventually led to death. The Judenrat began to have negative attitudes towards the resistance and escapes from the ghettos. The Judenrat feared that the Germans are going to blame the Judenrat for not keeping their section under control. As a consequence: “mass escape would make it impossible for the council to negotiate with the germans in order to revoke measures of persecution, or, at least, to save some inmates; Coucil members who were responsible to the germans for the inmates’ behavior be the first to pay with their lives if a revolt took place. The inmates knew about these dangers as well.” (Trunk 462). Both the Jews and councils knew that having a mass escape would eventually cost their lives or be executed, but they lack food and water in order to have a successful, as evidence: “Of an estimated 300 inmates who escaped from Treblinka that day, about 100 survived the massive SS manhunt.” (www.ushmm.org). The quote is from the revolt of a death camp in Treblinka, where a mass escape take place and only a third of the escaped prisoners have successfully escaped. In many cases, Judenrat councilmen have stood to prosecute their own people on trial: “…the men who have betrayed everything was in the way to their claim to power.”(Arendt 102).
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