The Historiography of the Holocaust

330 Dan Michman
is often imprecise and should be carefully checked. Trunk relied on much of
this information and was heavily criticized for doing so by the Israeli historian
Mendel Piekarcz. 30
Regarding Councils in the former Soviet Union – with the exception of eastern
Poland and the Baltic states, for which reasonable material and testimonies can
be found in Israel and the West – research was blocked for five decades by
Soviet policy. Research on Jewish life in these areas was still being compared to
archaeology by the Israeli researcher Shalom Cholavsky in the 1980s. But since
the fall of communism, when materials became accessible and opened the way
to young researchers to study freely, many studies have appeared, albeit in
Russian. In and on the more western countries of the former Eastern Bloc –
Hungary, Slovakia and Romania – some research was being undertaken during
the communist period, 31 and has proceeded even faster than in the Commonwealth
of Independent States (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova) since the end
of communism.
But even in western Europe research did not progress at an even pace. While
in the Netherlands studies on the Amsterdam Jewish Council (Joodsche Raad)
began to appear as early as the 1940s, and de Jong dedicated large sections of
his 25-volume history of the Netherlands in the Second World War to it, 32 in
Belgium the first scholarly study of the Association des Juifs en Belgique – by
Maxime Steinberg, in his comprehensive history of the Holocaust in that country –
appeared only in the 1980s. 33 In Germany and France aspects of the Reichsvereinigung
and the Union Générale des israélites de France (UGIF) were researched
during the 1950s–1970s, but more general studies were published only in the
1980s and 1990s. 34 Regarding Vienna, Rosenkranz published a study with
much material on the Vienna community and Council of Elders in the 1970s,
but the first comprehensive, analytical and well-balanced study appeared only
in 2000. 35
Second, studies on local Jewish Councils and Unions – regarding both their
general functioning and the personality of their chairmen – which run into the
hundreds, have recurrently shown how complex the functioning of each
Council was, and how dependent on the local situation (local Germans, local
‘bystanders’ and local Jews) it was, that is, how careful one has to be with
generalizations. Not much comparative research was carried out, but the little
that was done, mainly by Aharon Weiss, 36 has shown that many Councils
were not perceived by the Jews at the time or later as badly as post-1945 retrospection
presented it. 37 It has also become clear that in many cases the German
authorities changed the composition of Jewish Councils (sometimes several
times) when these Councils were not ‘cooperative’ enough in their eyes, especially
in the Final Solution period which began in the second half of 1941 and
spread over Europe in 1942. 38 Moreover, the detailed studies on all headships
have shown that, except for the tasks that were carried out on the orders of the