However another controversial form of reaction is co-operation with the Nazis. The main two groups that co-operated with the Nazis were the Sonderkommando and the Judenrat. The Judenrat was the council of Jews appointed by the Nazis in each Jewish community of ghetto. They were led by the community leaders and had the responsibility of ensuring that all laws affecting the Jewish population were obeyed in the ghetto. This put the Judenrat in a difficult position. Many question the fact that they helped the Nazis. However without doubt, a refusal to co-operate would have resulted in a worsening of the already appalling conditions in the ghettos or death for the Judenrat members. Also two Judenrat members Mordechai Rumkowski in Lodz and Jakob Gens in Vilna both justified the sacrifice of some Jews in order to save others. This means that they purposefully picked the sick and weak who were certainly going to die rather than the stronger and fitter who had more chance of life, yet still many groups question the acts of the Judenrat.
Another group that co-operated with the Nazis is the Sonderkommando. The sonderkommando were Jews who were used as slave labour in the death camps who were given the ghastly job of getting rid of the dead bodies & basically jobs in the extermination process. However some may not accept or forgive them for helping the Nazis but under the idea of collective responsibility if they would of refused to help the Nazis all of the Jews in that area would have been punished. However the Sonderkommando did resist the Nazis by leaving incriminating evidence eg, leaving notes in the mass graves when they buried the Jewish corpses, in the hope that when the mass graves were found that the outside world will know what happened and that the experience of the hell they had to endure would not be lost, which was what the Nazis wanted, for the Jews just to have disappeared without anyone knowing what happened to them.
Now I am going to discuss the Jews that resisted by force in the death camps and in the ghettos. One example of amazing courageousness and bravery was seen in the Warsaw ghetto in which 700 young Jews defied an SS armoured brigade for a month. Also there was an example of resistance in which Sondenkommando blew up a crematorium in Auschwitz which would of delayed the ‘production line’ of the extermination of Jews and possibly saved some of Jewish lives.
Then there is the subject which many find hard to understand was why did some Jews offer no resistance. The three main reasons for the Jews offering no resistance are disbelief, deception and dehumanisation. They disbelieved that Germany; a civilised country could do such a thing as mass genocide, also even if they could believe that gassing of Jews was happening, as most people think, it couldn’t happen to them. Proof of this can be seen by an account of Eva Schloss who said that when they came off the cattle trucks at Auschwitz she said that woman were going around telling them pointing at the smoke from the crematorium saying “That’s going to be you” but they did not believe the woman. So it isn’t surprising that they could not believe that mass genocide was happening in the ghettos if some could not believe it when they were in Auschwitz. Also the Nazis went to great lengths to deceive the Jews. Firstly when they were being taken in the cattle trucks to the death camps they said that they were going to be relocated in the east, they even told them to take pots & household items. This was to deceive the Jews in to thinking that they were actually be relocated otherwise why would they ask them to take their household items? Also the main evidence for the Nazis effort to deceive the Jews was the fact that they made the gas chambers into shower rooms, also just before they were going to be ‘deloused’ they tried to stress to them not to forget the peg number that there clothes were hang on.
Also one of the reasons that the Jews offered no resistance was dehumanisation. The Nazis dehumanised Jews by shaving their hair, stripping them naked, taking there clothes away from them & also gave them a number rather than calling them by their name they were just a ‘number’. The reason the Nazis dehumanised Jews was to lower their morale and take away their individuality by giving them a number, this was to minimise resistance. The whole idea of dehumanisation can be summed up in 1 statement, ‘One literally became a number: dead or alive- that was unimportant; the life of an ‘number’ was completely irrelevant’ Victor E Frankl That was the idea behind dehumanisation, it helped the nazis deal with what they were doing they were just ‘freeing up a number’ and it minimised resistance the Jews were ‘just a number’
The fact that Many Jews reacted different can be explained easily, people are different. It’s not surprising people reacted different because people react different to different situations, despite what the Nazis tried to achieve, the Jews were all individuals. When put up to the horrors that Jews were put up to during the reign of the Third Reich some resisted some didn’t that’s just how Humans vary, they did not go to the gas chambers like ‘sheep to the slaughter’ they went like human beings who were subjected to the most horrific experience that many will hopefully never happen again.