"Worse than the Gestapo"? Berlin Jews accused of collaboration during and after the Shoah

Philipp Dinkelaker’s doctoral thesis focuses on individuals who were persecuted on antisemitic grounds and accused of collaborating with the Gestapo in Berlin during and after the Holocaust. Based on exemplary case studies from a pool of over 80 researched biographies of alleged Jewish collaborators, Dinkelaker examines how these accusations changed from the Nazi era to the 1960s, considering the perspectives of both German Jews and non-Jews from East and West Germany. Drawing on antisemitism studies and bridging the gap between the Holocaust and its aftermath, the thesis analyses the extent to which these differing narratives influenced the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past for both German Jews and non-Jews. Berlin had a large pre-war Jewish community of more than a hundred thousand people, and a comparatively high number of Jews attempted to survive the Shoah by going into hiding. After 1945, the city became a focal point for survivors' painful struggle to come to terms with betrayal among the victims as well as the Nazi enforced complicity of Jewish institutions in the regime's deportation efforts. The thesis greatly expands our knowledge of the previously under-researched Berlin Jewish honor court system, which was set up to handle accusations among survivors in the immediate post-war era. Dinkelaker demonstrates how the emerging Cold War severely impacted this internal Jewish court, contrasting it with postwar tribunals against former Jewish prisoner functionaries, ghetto police, and Jewish Councils ('Judenräte') in Poland. The Berlin honor court addressed alleged collaborators quite differently, basing its decisions on social standing and an exculpatory narrative of the former Jewish mock self-administration under Nazi rule. Moving beyond the internal Jewish debate, Dinkelaker illustrates how the official German criminal and compensation courts punished Holocaust survivors, including Jewish resistance fighters, as 'Jewish perpetrators' and with greater severity than former Gestapo officers. By comparing court decisions against Jews who betrayed other Jews under Gestapo pressure with case law on Nazi perpetrators, sources reveal a form of perpetrator-victim reversal. Decisions were informed by a double standard for Jews. In many cases, German institutions demanded self-sacrifice from Jews alone in the face of overwhelming odds, creating an exculpatory argument of 'Jewish guilt' in the unique context of Jewish defendants appearing before post-war courts in the land of the former perpetrators. This discourse impacted the early reception of the Shoah and became a specific form of postwar antisemitism in both East and West Germany.

Author dc:creator

• Dinkelaker, Philipp

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Schüler-Springorum, Stefanie

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-24598

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/25774