A Fatal Balancing Act: The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939–1945 by Beate Meyer (review)

In his classic study of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) in Eastern Europe during the Shoah, Isaiah Trunk looked carefully at the question of cooperation with the Germans, and concluded that what he called collaboration d’État was unavoidable; failure to work with the Germans would have destroyed the “rationale for [the councils’] very existence.”¹ While Beate Meyer reaches the same conclusion, she is far less harsh in her judgments of the German-Jewish leaders who headed the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (RJD; Reich Association of the Jews in Germany) from 1939 to 1943, and its successor organization, the Rest-Reichsvereinigung (Residual Reich Association) from 1943 until the war’s end.

The reason, she explains, is quite simple. While the responsibilities of the Jewish councils in the Altreich and in the ghettos were similar, their initial tasks were quite different. At first, the principal role of the RJD was to help oversee the “forced emigration” of the more than 200,000 German Jews living in the Altreich. Yet even in the midst of this particular phase of Germany’s evolving policies towards its Jews, the RJD had to care for those Jews, many of whom were elderly, ill, or disabled. By the end of 1939, almost two-thirds of the Jews still in Germany were receiving some form of aid from the RJD, which was drawing on funds from prewar Jewish organizations.

For the most part, efforts to force the Altreich’s Jews out of Germany were unsuccessful, and by the summer of 1940, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA; Reich Security Main Office), briefly sidetracked by ideas about Jewish emigration to Madagascar, Alaska, Brazil, New Zealand, or Rhodesia, began to insist on a shift away from individual to mass emigration. The RJD’s leaders quickly grasped the genocidal implication of this shift, and the importance of Palestine as a refuge for mass emigration.

Throughout all of this, RJD leaders were “tethered” to the policies of the RSHA and its principal Jewish “specialist,” Adolf Eichmann. Though the figure of Eichmann is ever-present in the book, there is little mention of the “banality” of his work. The only insight offered into his efforts is conveyed by the minute details of his office’s planning. This included deportations to Theresienstadt, where Eichmann had an office. Once mass deportations from Germany began, the camp became an important “way station” for German Jews on their way to Auschwitz. While viewed as a Vorzugslager (preferential camp) by many, the reality was quite different—something the author does not discuss in detail. Of the 157,126 Jews sent there between 1941 and 1945, almost half were sent on to death camps, while another 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself.²

The role of RJD leaders in the next phase of overall German planning changed as the RSHA developed its mass killing program in the summer and fall of 1941. At the time, many of the Altreich’s Jews were working in forced labor formations and living in Judenhäuser or labor barracks. They were further isolated on September 1, 1941, when Jews were ordered to wear the Judenstern (yellow star). In one of the few instances in which the RJD’s responsibility spread beyond the rigid confines of the Altreich, its leaders were required to oversee the distribution of star patches or armbands to ghettos in the Greater Reich. By early 1943, the RJD had distributed hundreds of thousands of stars throughout this part of the Nazi empire.

At the same time, the association was responsible for working with Eichmann on the forced deportations. The work of the RJD was seriously compromised by the deportation of its own principal leaders, and in the summer of 1943 the authorities decided to liquidate it. The organization was succeeded by the Rest-Reichsvereinigung (RR), led by Jewish Vertrauensmänner (designated intermediaries), whose principal...