Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation

Katarzyna Person

Published by Cornell University Press 2021

Warsaw Ghetto Police

The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation

Katarzyna Person
Translated by: Zygmunt Nowak-Soliński

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501754098

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service.

Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions.

Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear.

Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Author / Editor information

Katarzyna Person is a historian working at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and author of Assimilated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Reviews

At almost every turn in the story presented here, Person provides eyewitness accounts by Warsaw ghetto Jews. Warsaw Ghetto Police is also an emotionally and psychologically difficult book to read for anyone who is accustomed to seeing Jews exclusively as victims during the Holocaust.

Evgeny Finkel, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, author of Ordinary Jews:

Warsaw Ghetto Police will become one of the most important works published on the Holocaust in Poland in the last few decades.

Antony Polonsky, Emeritus at Brandeis University, author of The Jews in Poland and Russia :

Person's masterful scholarship contends with the difficult question of Jewish collaboration, dealing with these complex moral issues clearly and with well-balanced judgment. Warsaw Ghetto Police is a must-read.

Christopher R. Browning, Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill, author of Ordinary Men:

Warsaw Ghetto Police is a trenchant study of adaptation to escalating demands for brutality and opportunities for corruption. An invaluable contribution to scholarship, it confronts the searing topic of Jewish policemen's participation in the destruction of Warsaw's Jewish community.

Warsaw Ghetto Police offers a fascinating in-depth study of the Ordnungsdienst (Jewish Order Service), one of the most notorious organizations in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. [T]he book should serve as a model for historical scholarship of Jewish police activities in smaller ghettos in years to come.

Person's Warsaw Ghetto Police should be a staple read for courses in Holocaust history. Not only is the work an impeccable example of historical scholarship—meticulously researched and organized—but it also precisely articulates significant historical themes surrounding the Holocaust, such as responsibility, collaboration, memory, choice, and justice.

Person has written what should become the definitive study of the Jewish Order Police during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Highly recommended.

Katarzyna Person's text is a multifaceted and rich explanation of the Jewish community's condemnation of the Ordnungsdienst that leaves room for the acknowledgment that ghetto policemen, like Poland's Jewish community more broadly, had few if any better options in the face of the Holocaust. Paired with a wealth of haunting photographs of the policemen at work in 1941, this short volume performs an essential service in expanding the English-language conversation on Jewish community life during the Holocaust and on the complexity of the perpetration landscape in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Establishment of the Jewish Order Service Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	4
2. Organization and Objectives of the Service Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. Violence and Corruption in the Exercise of Daily Duties Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
4. Police in the Eyes of the Ghetto Population Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
5. Policemen’s Voices Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
6. Response to Violence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
7. Spring 1942 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
8. Umschlagplatz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
9. After Resettlement Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
10. The Courts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
Appendix 1. Sanitation Instructions for Precinct Patrolmen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Appendix 2. Official Instruction for the Order Service Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Name Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Subject Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Images: 31
- Other: 31 b&w halftones, 1 map
Keywords: Jewish Police during the Holocaust; Jewish Order Service of the Warsaw Ghetto; Umschlagplatz; death camp of Treblinka

eBook

Published: April 15, 2021
ISBN: 9781501754098