When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE (PT. 1)
camps, several hundred Jews from the first transport were part of the [prisoner]
aristocracy, along with German prisoners.” [SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 147]
In 1987 a former Jewish kapo (a kind of foreman for the Nazis among prisoners),
Jacob Tannenbaum, faced deportation from the United States for brutality
in concentration camps. He was accused by fellow Jewish concentration
camp survivors of ordering 300 Jews to their deaths in 1945, for raping women,
and torturing and killing male prisoners, including a rabbi. “He was a nasty,
nasty guy,” said a former head of the Office of Special Investigations, Martin
Mendelsohn, “There were a lot of witnesses who remembered him and his bestiality.”
[MAGIDA, p. 4] Yet, notes the Jewish Week, “most [Jews] agreed, in the
words of Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, that the
kapos were victims. They were chosen by their enemies. It is true that some were
very, very cruel, but even those were acting as instruments of the enemy.”
[BOROSON, 5-22-87, p. 17] Tannenbaum was eventually stripped of U.S. citizenship,
but not deported. “This is the best solution for all concerned,” said
Tannenbaum lawyer, Elihu Massel, “It will also avoid a truly ghastly trial in
which Jews would have had to testify against Jews, none of whom really want to
remember.” [JW, 2-12-88, p. 34]
Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes the case of an “ex-Gestapo
agent named David Zimet – a Jew!” Zimet was “the right hand of a very known
Gestapo sadist with the name of Grunov ... In one truck of Jewish women
[deported by the Nazis] were the wife and the daughter of Zimet. And the
hatred against him was so great that the Jewish women in that truck taking
them all to die killed his wife and his daugthter then and there’ ... Years later,
Wiesenthal was looking over a confidential list of cases being investigated by the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police when he read: ‘ZIMET, David. A policeman in
ghetto in Tarnow. Witnesses have attested to his brutality.’ ‘Zimet!’ Wiesenthal
exclaimed. ‘This is my old case!’ He informed the Canadian authorities of his
evidence against Zimet, but they proved unwilling to prosecute a Jew for Nazi
crimes. The Canadian Jewish Committee intervened and Zimet agreed to submit
to a council of arbitration established by the committee. ‘Nothing ever
came of it,’ says Wisesenthal, ‘because the Jewish community was reluctant to
publicize the case since Zimet was himself Jewish.’” [LEVY, A., 1993, p, 83, 84]
(As Jewish scholar Peter Novak notes about Jewish collaborators with the
Nazis: “With only one exception known to me – an article in Life in 1950 about
a New York rabbinic court proceeding against a surviving Jewish camp official
accused of beating another person to death – discussion of the phenomenon
was confined to Jews. Much of [Jewish scholar Hannah] Arendt offense [to fellow
Jews] was that she had written of these matters before a large gentile audience.”
) [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 140-141]
“The true lords and masters of the kommandos were the kapos,” notes
Wolfgang Slofsky, in his study of the Nazi death camps,
“They were always on hand … They kept the work sites under surveillance,
distributed work tasks, and were responsible for their groups being
complete … They were to blame for a great deal of excessive
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