The Historiography of the Holocaust

Jewish Leadership in Extremis 327
New insights into the emergence and essence of the Jewish
headships
A closer, Europe-wide examination of the documentation shows that the idea
of establishing a Jewish ‘headship’ was not an inherent imperative of anti-
Jewish policies, and emerged only in certain circumstances. At the beginning
of April 1933 an inter-departmental committee suggested the legal segregation
of the Jews, allowing them to continue to live in Germany within a Jewish
organization, the Verband der Juden in Deutschland, which would be headed by
an elected board called the Judenrat. This idea of a Jewish forced organization
(Zwangsorganisation) met opposition from different quarters and faded from
view for a while. However, in 1937 it resurfaced within the circles of the Jewish
Department of the Security Service of the SS (SD II 112), of which Adolf Eichmann
was an employee. The idea was then part of a broader intention to hasten the
implementation of anti-Jewish policies, mainly Jewish emigration. The experts
of the SD Jewish Department believed that former anti-Jewish policies – legal,
economic and other – had not been effective because they had been aimed at
the Jews as individuals. They expressed contempt for the Reich authorities that
had conducted policy-making until that point, and believed that the best way
to exert pressure on the Jews and make them behave according to the interests
of the regime, would be through treating the Jews as a collective. They also
believed that the people who knew best how to deal with the Jews were the
experts of the SD and Gestapo. This understanding led to the idea of attaching
all Jews to one organization, headed by authoritative leaders; a ‘Central Office’
controlled by the SD would have authority over this organization and these
leaders.
Initial steps to realize this idea were taken in Germany in 1937 and the
beginning of 1938. But with the annexation of Austria in March 1938 a golden
opportunity presented itself to implement it for the first time. Eichmann was
sent to Vienna, where he reorganized the Jewish community and was later
allowed to establish the longed-for controlling body, the Zentralstelle für
jüdische Auswanderung (‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’). With the success
of this structure (they succeeded in forcing almost 50,000 Jews to emigrate in
six months), the suggestion was made (at the well-known meeting of senior
Reich officials at Göring’s office on 12 November 1938) 20 to establish a similar
body in the ‘Old Reich’. Because of the different power structure there, this
organization took a different shape: a country-wide organization, the Reichsvereinigung
der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Union of Jews in Germany), which
began work in February 1939, but only became finally anchored in the law on
4 July 1939. Parallel to the developments in Germany proper, the Vienna model
was imposed in both the Nazi-controlled free city of Danzig and in Prague, the
capital of the newly occupied and annexed Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia