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The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration. Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries.
List of contents
Preface; Introduction; 1. Disrupted communities? Jewish leadership and communal representation until 1941; 2. Institutional rivalry and improvisation: The establishment of 'Jewish Councils' in 1941; 3. Continuation or discontinuation? The nature of the Councils' leadership, 1941-1944; 4. Optimism and frustration: German perspectives; 5. Between legality and illegality: Cloaking and resistance; Epilogue.
About the author
Laurien Vastenhout is researcher and lecturer at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She received her doctorate in History at the University of Sheffield and was awarded the Claims Conference Saul Kagan research Fellowship in Shoah Studies and a Yad Vashem research fellowship.
