Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici Tim Cole Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945. By Doron Rabinovici. Translated by Nick Somers. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Pp. x + 260. ISBN 978-0745646824. Doron Rabinovici’s study of the role of the Vienna Israelite Community (IKG), first published in German in 2000 and now available in English translation, is fueled by a desire to understand and explain the “cooperation” (199) of Jewish administrative leaders with Nazi authorities in post-Anschluss Vienna. As Rabinovici himself acknowledges, the book is largely “a description of what happened to the Vienna Jewish community between 1938 and 1945 and how it reacted” (147). Here it succeeds in sketching out the story of one of the more neglected Jewish administrative bodies under Nazi occupation. Describing the intricacies of the complex web of varied forms of cooperation, Rabinovici makes a valuable contribution to the field, particularly given that the IKG was “the prototype for a Jewish administration under Nazi control and a precursor of the later Jewish councils” (40). The IKG played a critical role in post-Anschluss Vienna in a wide range of spheres. On the one hand, it was active in organizing large-scale legal emigration, as well as in providing welfare for Jews living under an ever-growing set of measures that had serious economic impact. On the other hand, and more controversially, it was a critical tool in “the administration of extermination” (109). When Jews in the city were required to wear the yellow star, the IKG was made responsible for their manufacture and distribution. Over two days, IKG employees worked “day and night” (111) to make 176,000 stars from the yellow fabric supplied to them, and then sold them to the city’s Jews from morning to night at a cost of 10 pfennig each. As deportations commenced, the IKG played a critical role notifying those scheduled for deportation, as well as in clearing the collection points and providing food to Jews waiting there. Rabinovici’s conclusion—that “although the Central Office could no doubt have killed all of the Viennese Jews without the Jewish administration, the deportations and extermination would not have run smoothly without its collaboration” (119)—is one that echoes studies of other Jewish councils across occupied Europe. Rabinovici does point to differences of opinion within the IKG, as was the case elsewhere. Whereas one employee refused to issue the Jewish stars, another was unhappy—at least initially—about having to draw up lists of individuals exempted [End Page 690] from deportation on the grounds that they were essential employees. This practice signaled one of the more problematic aspects of the “cooperation” offered by the IKG. While the lists of deportees were drawn up by the Nazi authorities, IKG personnel could and did request exemptions for individual employees and others for various reasons, e.g., “imminent emigration, health reasons or the splitting up of the family” (117). In these cases, the IKG had “to find someone to replace these deferred persons” (118) from lists provided by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Such measures invited charges of corruption, and it does seem that some employees sought to save themselves by making donations. More generally it opened up IKG leaders—and especially Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, a controversial figure who played a key role here—to criticism of favoring some at the expense of others. Because of this lobbying for exemptions, Rabinovici places the IKG historiographically somewhere between Hannah Arendt’s damning critique of a collaborationist “Jewish leadership” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and Dan Michman’s defense of Jewish Council “headship” as Nazi imposed (“‘Judenräte’ und ‘Judenvereinigungen’ unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Aufbau und Anwendung eines verwaltungsmäßigen Konzepts,” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft [1998]: 293–304). As Rabinovici unpicks what the IKG did and did not do during the war, he is careful to note that they were no longer the elected representatives of Vienna’s Jews, or simply taking orders from the Nazi occupiers. Rather, he positions them as “an authority without power” (162), squeezed between fellow victims and the Nazi authorities with limited room for...