The Overorganized Ghetto

This chapter examines the administration of the ghetto, the most complex and largest Jewish self-administration per capita in German-occupied Europe. It also offers background on the German and Austrian SS, who controlled but did not administer the ghetto. The Theresienstadt bureaucracy developed its own politics, wherein the ethnicity of functionaries carried as much weight as belonging to one of the often competing departments of the self-administration. The chapter explores the agency of the Jewish functionaries vis-à-vis the SS, and how they interacted with and were perceived by ordinary prisoners. In doing so it contributes to the debate on Jewish Councils. It also discusses the role of Leo Baeck and shows that he was a skillful, occasionally cunning functionary. Finally, the chapter discusses the Jewish informers, their motivation, and their contributions to the German running of the ghetto.

Imponderables of the Holocaust

Recent literature, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, has provided insights into some of the most perplexing imponderables of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. These are, first, the development of consensus among the various German elites for the purposes of the Final Solution; second, an incremental kind of German decision making which led to the efficiently implemented mass annihilation of the Jews; and third, the passive mood toward the disasters befalling the Jews on the part of the entire universe of bystanders. (In the case of the Netherlands, this resulted, in spite of an unusually low degree of anti-Semitism, in an unusually high degree of Jewish victimization—in contrast to the so-called Danish reversal.) Fourth, because of the unimaginable predicament experienced by the victims and their “governments,” the Jewish Councils (such as the Amsterdam Joodsche Raad), they never had a chance to develop workable responses to such a catastrophe.