LemmyCaution
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2011
- Messages
- 2,857
Thanks for this excellent summary, Nick. I want to add to the point about ghetto roundups. It is documented that during the September Gehsperre in Lodz, the famous Children's Action, the infamously collaborative Jewish police force was seen as so ineffective by the SS, despite the exception of the Jewish police from deportation, that midway through the action the SS moved in and took over, with far more brutality and effect than were in force during the early part of the action.Aaand we see you doing it again. . . . Now you assert that Jews "helped load passengers onto the trains", referring presumably to the Jewish ghetto police. It's pretty hard to think of a single deportation where there weren't large numbers of Nazi police and auxiliaries driving the deportees onto the trains; the majority of deportations affected ghettos where there wasn't a Jewish police force worth naming. Their role is fairly marginal to the overall success of deportations from the larger ghettos.
As to Gens, deniers might want to read Kruk's diary, for example, to understand that, as with Rumkowski, ghetto inmates were divided. In Vilna, there was significant, vocal opposition to some of Gens's policies, e.g., the Oszmiana action. Kruk's header for one part of his discussion of this action in fact is "How Jews Destroy Jews (About the Slaughter in Oszmiana)." Gens was forced to defend himself within the ghetto - and following the action never really had the credibility he had before it. At the same time, as the Nazis' hand-picked "leader" of the ghetto, and go-between, ghetto residents continued to depend on Gens. I think you are right that Gens would have been tried after the war, just as some Auschwitz Kapos were tried (and convicted). This point ties to your point about the SK, in that surviving members have expressed that some of their silence was due to the negative perception of them within the Jewish community for years following the war.