LemmyCaution and Wroclaw concur, by the gist of their posts, on the following:
- Less than a 1000 Jewish men were Jewish police and Judenräten in ghettos, kapos in camps, and SKs manning gas chambers.
- Jewish men performed the labor for the Gas Chamber genocide killing of 3 million Jews.
I say they wouldn't and that they didn't.
What do you say?
Another lie.
Where does Clayton Moore get that I believe there were less than 1000 members of even the Jewish police?
The order service in Warsaw alone IIRC had over 2000 members, and Lodz's was over 1000. There were more than 2000 ghettos, and, while not all of them had Jewish police, the larger ones had such police forces. Ghettos with Jewish police forces included Lvov, Cracow, Radom, Czestochowa, Kovno, Shavli, Bialystok, Lublin, Pabianice, Luck, Slonim, Kielce, and so on. I don't know the total number of Jewish policemen in the various ghettos and have not ever posted an estimate of the number.
The Jewish police forces were ordered into existence by the Germans, and not all played a role in roundups and deportations. Jewish police forces were to keep order in the ghetto, apprehend and punish lawbreakers, help in forming labor columns, help in tax collections, prevent smuggling, assist in guarding ghetto gates, etc.
Members of the police forces were often drawn from professional and somewhat privileged backgrounds, but in places (Lodz, Nowy Dwor, Chelm) and at times, recruits also included people with criminal pasts. There are many accounts of corruption and abuse of power on the part of some members of the police forces. In addition, many policemen tried using their membership on the forces to save themselves and their families from deportation.
Under duress from the Germans, many in the Jewish Councils and Jewish police believed that compliance with German orders, even extreme orders, could save the lives of Jewish ghetto inmates; that said, the role played by these groups is one of the most contested areas of Holocaust scholarship. While the Vilna police, under Jacob Gens, was one of the most active in anti-Jewish actions, assisting with the Germans in the massacre of Oshmiana, for example, Gens also sometimes assisted the FPO, as the main Jewish underground organization in Vilna was called, and a high leader, Josef Glazman (deputy commissioner), doubled as a top leader of the underground. Many other Jewish policemen similarly did the Germans' bidding whilst trying to mitigate or assist ghetto Jews. As is so often the case in life, the record of the Jewish police is a mixed bag full of shades of grey.
Taking just Clayton Moore's first lie, that I somewhere estimated no more than 1000 Jewish laborers involved in deportation and at killing sites, in the case of the Jewish police alone there were far more than 1000, but, of course, whilst many police forces were forced to assist in roundups, their general duties were quite different to this. I don't know precisely how many of the 1000s of Jewish policemen at some point in their duty assisted in roundups, for example.
Frankly, I also do not know the total number of Jewish policemen (many 1000s?), members of Jewish Councils, men forced into death camp SK's or to serve as ramp or barracks laborers (a few 1000s total for the death camps?), Jewish camp kapos (probably in the 100s), or Jewish men forced to dig pits into which Jewish shooting victims could be buried. 1000 is not a good estimate, its being far too low.
I did not post or imply what is claimed--that the killings in the death camps were done by Jews and that about 1000 Jews did the labor for the mass murder. I never made an estimate of how many Jews were "enlisted" by the Germans and supervised by them and their allies to perform various forms of labor building camps, digging pits, cleaning train cars, processing stolen goods, cutting hair, or cleaning out gas chambers and disposing of bodies. Since Clayton Moore claims otherwise, he needs to show where in this thread or anywhere else (I also post at Rodoh, where my username is KentFord9) I claimed that about 1000 Jews were forced by the Germans to do various forms of labor involving the deportations and killings.
