Eichmann's Jews (PDF)

The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime
during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one
of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the
Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own
destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up
their own people for deportation, manage the 'collection points'
and supervise the people being deported until the last moment?

This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more
specifically the 'Judenrat' or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna.
It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a
Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the
Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent
Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is
possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime
incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of
destruction.

Drawing on recently discovered archives and extensive
interviews, Doron Rabinovici explores in detail the actions of
individual Jews and Jewish organizations and shows how all of their
strategies to protect themselves and others were ultimately doomed
to failure. His rich and insightful account enables us to
understand in a new way the terrible reality of the victims'
plight: faced with the stark choice of death or cooperation, many
chose to cooperate with the authorities in the hope that their
actions might turn out to be the lesser evil.