Language:
English
Year of publication:
2019
Titel der Quelle:
The Journal of Holocaust Research
Angaben zur Quelle:
33,4 (2019) 254-276
Keywords:
Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland
;
Holocaust survivors
;
Courts of honor
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Jews History 1945-
Abstract:
In order to mend rifts among the victims that were created by the Nazi method of delivering orders via intercalated ‘Jewish councils,’ Jews who were perceived as collaborators where brought to criminal courts and/or internal Jewish courts after the Shoah. In this regard, little has been said about the situation of German-Jewish survivors in postwar Germany. This article expands the findings of Laura Jockusch and others on the matter of the Ehrengericht (honor court) trials of the postwar Berlin Jewish Community. The article tries to fill in the blank spaces by combining these trials with complementary sources like compensation and criminal court files from the early postwar-period in both German states. One of these blanks is the role of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (RV) during the Shoah. The complicated role of this German-Jewish mock self-administration is seldomly discussed in the honor court trials although many trials revolved around the dilemmatas created by the enforced collaboration. Strikingly though, in its verdicts, the honor court retroactively legitimized the cooperation of RV members with the Gestapo – for instance following Gestapo orders to round up Jews – but condemned individuals who had not been RV employees and cracked under Gestapo torture following arrests resulting from their attempts to rescue others. The article discusses possible reasons for this incoherent practice which are related to aspects of class, gender and the contested person’s standing within the postwar community. Furthermore, the article aims to show, that the internal Jewish court became intertwined with the German judicial system and the compensation administration. This resulted in the disturbing situation that the German postwar administration increasingly interspersed with former Nazi personnel could deny survivors of the Shoah their compensation and legal status as a victim or even accuse them as Nazi criminals based on an inner-Jewish honor court verdict.
DOI:
10.1080/25785648.2019.1677099
URL:
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