The Moral Conundrum of Jews Who Helped the Nazis, and How Israel Addressed It

In her deeply flawed book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher Hannah Arendt asserted that had Jews—and Jewish leaders in particular—refused to cooperate with the Nazis, the Final Solution would not have been nearly so effective as it was. She points to those Jews who served on Jewish councils (Judenräte), in ghetto police forces, and most notoriously as Kapos (supervisors of other prisoners) in the death camps. Following World War II, many in Israel came to similar conclusions, and there were numerous instances of vigilante violence directed at such Jews by their fellow survivors. In the 1950s, accused collaborators began to be put on trial by the Jewish state. This is the subject of a new book called Bitter Reckoning. David Mikics writes in his review: