In January, Leiden historian Bart van der Boom already condemned the cold case team that had delved into the (possible) betrayal of the residents of the Secret Annex. Now, three months later, in his book about the Jewish Council he devotes a few more words to ‘the nonsense story’, which nevertheless received serious attention. In addition, he attributes to the cold case team a statement that it has not involved in this way, namely that the Jewish Council would have systematically collected the names of those in hiding and passed it on to the occupier (in reality the team suggested that a former member of the Jewish Council had did once). But this is irrelevant to the point that Van der Boom wanted to make: the Jewish Council is in a bad mood. Readers of his book cannot fail to notice that he is disturbed by this.
After all, posterity’s judgment of the Jewish Council is based on two tenacious lies: that David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, the presidents of the Council, were aware of the fate that awaited the Jews in Poland, and that they Shoah itself to the Germans. After the war, Cohen and Asscher were able to refute this view with great difficulty. But in doing so they have not been able to save themselves and the organ led by them, ‘a state within the state’, from a place on the dung heap of history.
Initially, the judgment of conscientious historians about the motives and actions of the Jewish Council corresponded to that of ‘society’. That is no longer the case, writes Van der Boom. While historians have increasingly leaned towards the view that the Jewish Council was no more wrong or less wrong than other bodies dealing with the German occupation, the Jewish Council “went into popular culture and everyday speech (…) into a ludicrous and malicious caricature’. As a rule, no noble motives are attributed to Cohen and Asscher: they would above all have wanted to save themselves and other privileged Jews.
A milder judgment
Van der Boom does not set himself up as an apologist for the Jewish Council. He did, however, write his book ‘from the sources’ – as befits an honorable historian. This means that he refrains from ‘post-wisdom’, which seems an almost impossible task in the case of the Second World War. He argues that Cohen and Asscher—men shaped by the pre-war political culture of “arrange and fold, tamper with and hold”—were ill-equipped to deal with brutal rulers who were unwilling to behave like “normal bureaucrats.”
They may have held on too long to the illusion that Nazi authorities were also subject to any reason. But they had that in common with someone like Lodewijk Visser, former president of the Supreme Court, who, while completely disagreeing with the Jewish Council’s cooperative attitude towards the Germans, at the same time assumed some respect for the law among the latter.
The question whether the policy that arose from this horrific misunderstanding was correct can only be answered in the negative – with reference to the fact that three quarters of the approximately 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands did not survive the war. The question that Van der Boom asks himself, however, is whether the policy seemed wrong at the time. The answer to that question requires the ability not to base the assessment of the Jewish Council on current knowledge, in other words: the knowledge that the Nazi regime culminated in the extermination of 6 million Jews, of whom 102 thousand came from the Netherlands. . For historian Loe de Jong – and many with him – ignorance was no excuse for the Jewish Council’s compliance. But Van der Boom is more lenient: even in the middle of the war it was not allowed to assume what horrific fate awaited the people who had been transferred to ‘the East’.
Auschwitz was still a place name – which was also often misspelled at first – and not the synonym of industrial mass murder. Auschwitz even enjoyed the benefit of the doubt as long as Mauthausen, the Austrian camp where all 400 victims of the Amsterdam raids in February 1941 had been killed within a few months, was regarded as the pinnacle of barbarism.
‘Anything better than Mauthausen’: that was the guiding principle of the policy of the Jewish Council for a long time. He reassured himself, and the nervous Jewish community, with the assurance that Auschwitz was a labor camp from which the majority of the detainees would return after the war emaciated but safe. Simply because a million-fold murder was beyond imagination. Even the most hardened of Nazis did not realize the full extent of their macabre project until about 1942. Until then, mass emigration, possibly to an African destination, had been regarded as the most promising solution to what the Nazis regarded as ‘the Jewish problem’.
Humble Goals
Against this background, the Jewish Council believed it best served the interests of its supporters by ‘apaising’ those in power. Care (of deported Jews), mitigate (of their fate) and prevent (of further punitive measures against the Jewish community): these were the modest goals the Jewish Council set for itself. In doing so, he garnered criticism from his own ranks and from sections of the illegal press, but also appreciation from Jews who actually felt supported by the Council – and some understanding from post-war historians.
However, the policy (insofar as this can be said of a body charged by the occupying forces with ‘transfer tasks’) was continued after the mass deportations to eastern Europe began. So at a time when the Jewish Council could have ascertained the futility of its efforts. Even then he did not want to point out the possibility of going into hiding to the Jews who remained behind. On the contrary: the Council considered going into hiding more risky than appropriateness. Although he did not actively cooperate with the deportations, he did strengthen the Jews’ hope that they would make it out alive in the east with travel advice and detailed tips for packing a backpack.
Based on the scant letters that had reached him from Poland, Cohen believed that the Jews there were ‘not bad’. As late as 1943 he expected that the Germans would spare a substantial part of the Jewish community in the Netherlands. And when that illusion, too, had dissipated, he hoped to delay the deportations through as many waivers as possible (blocking) from the Germans – not realizing that the pace of the deportations was mainly determined by the capacity of the crematoria in the extermination camps. In the end, he and Asscher also ended up on ‘the last train to Westerbork’ – although for them that destination was not the limbo of death.
The story that Van der Boom told is known to the extent that imported readers know all the stages of the Jewish agony by now. But he describes the fortunes of the Dutch Jews, omitting ‘his hindsight’: what we know about their fate was at most a fearful conjecture for them. With his businesslike phrasing, for example, he manages to evoke the oppression and fear in which a beleaguered community was ‘which knew it didn’t know something’.
Bart van der Boom: The Politics of the Lesser Evil – A History of the Jewish Council for Amsterdam, 1941-1943. Tree; 388 pages; €29.90.
