Jewish council cooperation did not substantially alter the Holocaust’s final outcome.
Evidence
The memorable verdict of Hannah Arendt – that were it not for the deeds of the Jewish collaborators, and for the zeal of the Judenräte, the number of victims would have been considerably reduced – would seem not to be able to bear closer scrutiny. Arendt’s harsh verdict can hardly stand up to the fact that in spite of the wide range of attitudes taken by the leaders of persecuted communities – from Czerniakow’s suicide through Rumkowski’s and Gens’s active and conscious co-operation with the Nazi supervisors and up to the Bialystok case of the Judenräte’s semi-official assistance to the armed resistance – the final effect was much the same: almost total annihilation of communities and their leaders. … According to this view, Jewish participation or non-participation in the deportations had no substantial influence – one way or the other – on the final outcome of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. … One would not know how much more effective the disobedience could have been were it universally expected. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 341
Categorization
- XREF: Directly engages Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; the reader’s scaffolding module on agency and structural causation in genocide will recur in Islamophobia readings on institutional complicity.