Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Betraying Your Own: Jewish Spies and the Deportation of Jews During the Second World War, by Benedetta Luciana Sara Carnaghi. 2020

Proffered Exemption From Deportation Was Not the Only Reason That Jews Spied For the Nazis

This is a review of a research article originally published in S.I.M.O.N (Shoah Intervention: Methods. Documentation) 8(2)50-65. It surveys Jewish informants, who served the Nazis by betraying fugitive Jews, in Austria, Germany, and Italy. Author Carnaghi notes that Jews serving the Nazis were under the “protection” of the Gestapo from deportation, an offer that sometimes was apparently genuine, but that there was much more to Jewish collaboration than this.

Carnaghi repeats some of the information, from Rabinovici, about Viennese Jews, but not the fact that the save-one’s-life exculpation, for Jewish collaboration, is at best vaguely applicable. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jewish-gestapo-agents-harmed-poles-rabinovici/

The author also elaborates on the notorious Stella Goldschlag/Kuebler. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jewish-gestapo-agents-wyden/

JEWISH COLLABORATION WAS NOT SOLELY DRIVEN BY CHOICELESS CHOICES

Carnaghi realizes that there is no simple exculpation for Jews serving the Nazis. She comments, “If it is hard to group Jewish spies together according to their motivation – mostly a combination of coercion and personal grievance or gain – it is not hard to recognize a pattern in the Fascist and Nazi manner of proceeding. One aspect of their ‘proactive’ terror state was to take advantage of the very communities it was targeting.” (p. 64).

JEWISH COLLABORATION AS A MEANS OF SELFISH PERSONAL GAIN

Consider the postwar trial of Celeste Di Porto, an Italian Jew who served the Nazis by exposing fugitive Jews. Carnaghi writes, “Since Celeste had not personally killed anyone, it was on profit that her accusations focused, and on the fact that she had seized her victims’ possessions, including the jewelry that she used to wear.” (p. 62).

JEWISH COLLABORATION WAS A REBELLION AGAINST JUDAISM

The author thus evaluates the collaborationist habits of Stella Kubler and Celeste Di Porto, “They both had complicated relationships with fathers, husbands, and lovers. Their conversion seems to be proof of an ultimate rejection of their family and community ties, of a desire to reinvent their identity. They shared that characteristic with more typical victims, as Dominick LaCapra showed: ‘especially for victims, trauma brings about a lapse or rupture in memory that breaks continuity with the past, thereby placing identity in question to the point of shattering it.’ Both Stella Kübler-Isaaksohn and Celeste Di Porto went through this process.” (p. 64).

THE GERMANS TAKING ADVANTAGE OF HUMAN FRAILTY: NO “POLISH COMPLICITY IN THE HOLOCAUST”

Let us take this study a little further. The author summarizes the dynamics of collaboration with Nazi Germany, “Instead, one must understand that the Fascists and Nazis adapted their repression to instrumentalize human frailty: Their spies and confidential informers often numbered among the individuals they persecuted.” (p. 50).

What she does not mention is that the same consideration applied to both oppressed Poles and oppressed Jews. Yet Jews are generally exempt from criticism for their collaboration, while Poles are blamed (e. g, the canard about “Polish complicity in the Holocaust”). Why the double standard?