The Historiography of the Holocaust

332 Dan Michman
their retrospective views of their own behaviour (in Slovakia, Romania, Hungary,
the Netherlands and Germany).
Other forms of Jewish leadership under the Nazi regime
In any society varying forms of leadership coexist: political, religious, social,
spiritual, etc. Similarly, next to the Jewish headships – who, as we have seen,
also carried out leadership functions – other forms of leadership, inherited from
the pre-occupation period, continued to exist in Jewish societies. The most
important to be considered are: the communal and philanthropic/welfare leadership,
the religious leadership and the youth movements.
Communal and philanthropic/welfare leadership
In most cases, the headships replaced the former community structure that
existed before the arrival of the Nazis/Germans and absorbed or inherited its
infrastructure. However, this was not the case everywhere. In Germany in the
1930s and in western Europe in the 1940s, the official communities and
their country-wide umbrella organizations as well as welfare organizations
continued to function until the headships were established. In Germany, shortly
after the Nazi rise to power, a Central Office for Aid and Reconstruction (Zentralausschuss
für Hilfe und Aufbau) was established (April 1933), using the infrastructure
of several aid organizations. Later in that year it was incorporated into
the newly established Reich Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der
deutschen Juden; September 1933), a voluntary organization of both the major
country-wide organizations of German Jewry and the communities. 46 The
communities continued to exist and kept their autonomy, and even continued
to receive subsidies from the government, until a law passed in April 1938
terminated this unacceptable (in the eyes of the Nazi authorities) situation. This
caused the people already working together in the Reichsvertretung to consider
the creation of a new overall organization of German Jewry (first called the
Verband der Juden in Deutschland). This idea merged unintentionally with
the proposal of the SD authorities to create an overall forced organization –
‘headship’ – of the Jews, which incorporated the communities and turned
them into branches of the central organization. 47
In Amsterdam, the Jewish Council was established in February 1941, but its
authority was extended to the entire country only in the autumn of that year;
in Belgium and France the ‘unions’ were not set up until the end of November
1941 and started to work only during the first months of 1942. The communities
and the umbrella organizations – the Nederlandsch-Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap
(Ashkenazi Synagogue Association) and the Sephardic (or ‘Portuguese’) Portugeesch-
Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap in the Netherlands, and the Consistoire Central in
Belgium and France – continued their activities after the occupation and not