Israeli trials of Jewish kapos from WW2 - 1950-1972

A kapo was a prisoner in a Nazi camp assigned to the SS guards, to supervise the forced labour. It was cheap for the SS since they didn’t have to pay the kapos. But more importantly for the SS, making an ordinary person into a kapo could turn one Jewish victim against all the other Jewish victims that he guarded.

In towns the functionaries would have been Jewish policemen or members of the Jewish Councils, not kapos.

**

Between 1950 and 1972 the newly formed State of Israel prosecuted 39 Holocaust survivors in the Kapo Trials.

At the Australian Association for Jewish Studies 2017 in Sydney, Dr Dan Porat’s analysis included all the Jewish policemen, kapos and other funct­ion­aries in ghettos and camps who were caught. They were charged with collaborating with the Nazis in implementing the Final Solution. The courts convicted two-thirds of the kapos who faced trial, and all of those convicted served gaol time ranging up to 6.5 years. Porat’s paper focused on the causes and outcomes of the trials, as well as questioning the moral implications of survivor behaviour during the Holocaust.

The identification of Jewish policemen and kapos in post-Holocaust Israel was easy. Citizens travelling on the same bus or drinking coffee in the same café would recognise their tormentors from 1941 Poland or 1944 Hungary, and would scream out loudly until the offender had been firmly identified. Israel’s Knesset/Parliament, in a tiny nation that absorbed over half-a-million battered survivors, HAD to act. Potential violence against the kapos had to be channelled into the proper court system; otherwise they might have been faced with summary justice in the buses and cafés.

Rudolf  Kastner in broadcasting booth at Kol Yisrael state radio station.
c1953 

In August 1950 the Knesset enacted the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law. Entirely retroactive, the law targeted only those crimes committed during the Nazi regime; the nation would conduct trials of Nazis, their associates and collaborators who com­mitted War Crimes Against the Jewish People, or Crimes Against Humanity. The punishment for Crimes Against Humanity could be capital punishment. Between 1950 and 1961 this law was used to prosecute only 39 (35 men and 4 women) Jewish Holocaust survivors, alleged to have been Nazi collaborators. The rest of the accused Jewish kapos either escaped from Israel before being brought to trial, or were not charged because the eye witnesses’ accounts were conflicted.

Dr Porat studied the case of a kapo who had murdered a group of Jews in his camp, despite there being no SS guards in sight. The Jewish kapo was sentenced to death by the Tel Aviv district court, but this ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court. The idea of the grey zone, by which some Jews willing served the Nazis, counters our ideas of the Holocaust and thus we tend to ignore the ambiguous.

At the Sydney conference I was deeply offended by the concept of capital punishment. If a court felt it was necessary to punish a particular kapo, I would have been happy to have seen the criminal in gaol for the rest of his life, fed on bread and water. But for a Jewish judge or hangman to execute a kapo for doing what he had to do under Nazi control... that judge or hangman would have in turn been reduced to the level of the Nazis.

As it turned out, only two people were ever executed in Israel's history. In 1948 Meir Tobianski was an officer in the Israel Defen­ce Forces who was executed as a traitor on the orders of the IDF Intelligence Branch's Director. A year after the execution, Tob­ian­ski was exonerated of all charges. (Did the parliam­ent­arians apolog­ise to his widow and orphans?) In 1952, capital punishment for Nazi war crimes under the Nazi Collaborators' Law was imposed on a Jewish kapo called Yechezkel Jungster, a man who was convicted of viciously beating other Jews in the camp. Thankfully the sentence was commuted to two years' imprison­ment.

The second and last execution was carried out in 1962, when Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann was hanged for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The world's lack of knowledge about the Kapo Trials comes from two causes, Porat noted. First the state archives and Yad Vashem archives prevent­ed access to the trial documents for 70 years. Second the idea that a few Jews may have acted in horrible ways does not match the dich­ot­omy we have of victim and perpetrator. It is still inconc­eiv­able to us that our parents and grandparents were tortured by kapos who may have gone to the same school as our parents in the late 1930s.

Yet if I was faced with my parents starving to death and my children’s diseases untreated, would I not have cooperated with the SS guards? Probably yes. Jews in Poland, Hungary and other threatened communities were desperate; to have not taken the remote chance of survival by cooperating to some extent with the Germans would have been the equivalent of writing the family’s own death certificates.

Yet British historian Paul Bogdanor has written a detailed book showing that Rudolf Kasztner was an unscrupulous Nazi collaborator in Hungary, rather than a Jewish functionary merely trying to keep his family alive. Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) clarified that by collaborating with the Nazis wholeheartedly, he wanted to avoid jeopardising, at any cost, the special privileges he received from them. So in the end he was said to play a small but specific role in the death of thousands of Hungarian Jews, by helping the Germans and their Hungarian allies buy precious time.

Would the Hungarian Jewish catastrophe have turned out differently, had Kasztner not cooperated with the Germans? Of course not. But the Kasztner Train in June 1944, which saved 1684 Jews by taking them to Switz­erland instead of to Bergen Belsen death camp, was said to be more due to careful Nazi planning than to Kasztner’s heroism.

How ironic then that after the war, Kasztner moved to Israel and became a successful worker in the ruling Labour Party. After an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis, Kastner became a hated figure in Israel, and was assassinated in 1957 by people who knew him during WW2. The Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgments against Kastner in 1958, but it was too late.

Hungarian Jews who had just arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 

May 1944

Historians will learn a great deal by reading Porat, Dan State of Suspicion: Israel Prosecutes Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators, AAJS Conference Sydney Feb 2017.  And Porat, Dan Changing Legal Perceptions of 'Nazi Collaborators' in Israel 1950-1972 which is easier to find.