PUBLISHED AUGUST 2011 BY POLITY PRESS

By Doron Rabinovici

“A unique and candid account of the internal workings of the Jewish Community Vienna during the war. Doron Rabinovici has the courage and the gall to address directly the question of how much Eichmann’s Jews facilitated the Holocaust.” Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law, New York

The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up their own people for deportation, managing the “collection points” and handling the people being deported until the last moment? This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more specifically the “Judenrat” or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna. It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of destruction.

Doron Rabinovici is a writer and historian living in Vienna.