Description
Book Synopsis* This is a major new study of the very sensitive question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime. * The book uses newly discovered archival material to examine the role of the Judenrat or Jewish Council in Holocaust Vienna.
Trade Review"An important and moving depiction of how Jewish leaders coped with Nazi oppression."
American Historical Review"Rabinovici's judgments are sensitive and evidence-based. He concludes that the myth of Jewish collaboration and individual self-preservation was part of a post-Holocaust identity resting on the comforting fantasy that those who did not co-operate had resisted. In fact, the Jewish leaders inevitably shared the hopes and delusions of their communities and it was this common fate that makes their role so tragic."
Jewish Chronicle "A calm and careful analysis of what happened in one major centre of Jewish life."
Birmingham Jewish Recorder
"A unique and candid account of the internal workings of the Jewish community in Vienna during the war. Doron Rabinovici has the courage and the gall to address directly the question of how much Eichmann's Jews facilitated the Holocaust."
Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, New York
"An extremely well-researched and well-documented book."
H-Net Reviews
"Rabinovici's Eichmann's Jews, together with Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann, belong among the fundamental texts of political philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries."
Die Tageszeitung
"Rabinovici is not only an historian but also a great stylist and essayist... His wonderful prose is complemented by the meticulousness of his research. For the reader it is a stroke of luck not only that he knows how to report the facts but also that he is able to express their psychological ambivalence in a literary fashion."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Table of ContentsPreface.
1 Prologue.
Survivor guilt.
Breaching taboos.
No mass murder without victims.
2 The Vienna Kultusgemeinde before 1938.
Securing evidence - at the scene of the crime.
Jewish strategies to counter anti-Semitism.
The corporate state - in the shadow of the Third Reich.
3 Persecution.
The German invasion and the Austrian response.
Expropriation through the deprivation of rights.
The hunt for booty.
4 Struggle for survival and escape.
The decapitation of the Jewish Community.
The attempt to escape or 'Get rid of the Yids and keep their money here.'
5 The Vienna Jewish community under Nazi control.
The reorganization of the Kultusgemeinde.
Jewish self-help and welfare.
'Emigration' - mass expulsion.
Illegal escape.
6 November pogrom - overture to murder.
7 The Jewish community after the pogrom.
Escape as a last resort.
Functionaries: victims and messengers of terror.
Administration during the terror.
Benjamin Murmelstein.
The employees in the system.
Lateral entrants.
8 Beginning of the end.
Nisko or the dress rehearsal for deportation.
Segregation, concentration and theft.
9 Deportation and extermination.
10 The administration of extermination.
Segregation and identification or a Jewish star for 10 pfennigs.
Liquidation - expropriation to the last.
Designation and handing over of victims.
Welfare and burial service - administration in the shadow of destruction.
11 Die Kultusgemeinde - authorities without power.
Individual stories.
The victims' perspective.
The administration and its employees.
The conditioning of leading functionaries.
Questions of character - individual Jewish functionaries before and after 1945.
12 Discussion of the Jewish councils and the situation in Vienna.
List of abbreviations.
Notes.
Index of persons.
