The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service.
Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen’s place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions.
Read on for an excerpt.
They were lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of businessmen with connections. They came from War-saw and its suburbs, and many came from Łódź. In the autumn of 1940, they reported by the hundreds to a collection point in the Jewish Council building. They received hats and batons, and the poorer ones were given shoes. They were quickly trained and sent into the streets. “At the time, we treated it very naturally, they gave us a wage after all (and you could not even dream of getting a job) there wasn’t much work to do and we got food rations. It was even considered a success — to get into the police,” one of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto recalled after the war.
In a German propaganda film from the spring of 1942, the ghetto policemen differ very little from German soldiers. They stand in two rows, facing one way. When they march, the cameraman concentrates on their shiny boots. Then we see them at work — the kind of work usually associated with German soldiers — they check the identification papers of passersby, stand at the gates of the ghetto, and brutally beat detained children.
In the official album of the Jewish Order Service created at the time, ghetto policemen pose for a photographer at their workplaces. [Photographs available for viewing in book.] Here, they are focused on officials filling out forms behind massive desks, typists, officers conducting briefings, guards supervising prisoners at work. Some are smiling. At first glance, it looks like any other wartime police precinct. If you look closely at these photographs, however, you can see worn-out coats, suits that are too large, the damaged shoes of some contrasting with the shining boots of others, the resignation on many faces.
There are other photos, with titles that speak for themselves: “The [Jewish] Order Service ‘taking care’ of children”; “The Jewish Order Service con-ducts a search of children ‘smuggling’ food into the ghetto”: “The [Jewish] Order Service organizing a crowd.” These photos from the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (known as the Ringelblum Archive, or ARG) were taken in the ghetto as an indictment.
As we look deeper into the history of the Jewish Order Service, images clash with images. Jewish policemen are portrayed as dutiful German soldiers, German officials, and, finally, traitors to their own people. Each account, each testimony reveals its own version of the activities of the Jewish police during the occupation. All these narrative threads are reunited on the Umschlagplatz, the collection point by a railway station, where the policemen are burdened with what for many became their final task: that of assisting in the deportation of Jews to the death camp of Treblinka. The question of how they got there constitutes the heart of this book.
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As in several other ghettos, in Warsaw the Jewish Order Service was not created as a new entity but was based on an already existing paramilitary organization, in this case the Security Guard of the Judenrat’s Labor Battalion. The Labor Department of the Jewish Council, later the Labor Battalion, was established at the Judenrat at the end of 1939 to facilitate the delivery of German-imposed quota of workers for forced labor. The department was at first subordinate to Section IVB of the German Security Police (Sipo) and the Security Service (SD), from mid-April to July 1940 to the Plenipotentiary of the Chief of the Warsaw District, and from July 1940 to the Labor Office in Warsaw (Arbeitsamt). As Czerniaków wrote in March 1940, this institution was set up by the Judenrat “on the one hand to satisfy the demands of the German authorities, and on the other to provide the impoverished population with the opportunity to earn a living.” From the beginning of March to the end of May 1940, a Security Guard of 111 people functioned as an extension of the Labor Battalion, dealing primarily with finding men who evaded compulsory labor. After the reorganization of the battalion at the end of May 1940, a separate unit was created from the Guard, and this became the nucleus of the later Jewish Order Service. At that time, the responsibilities of the Guard became much broader. Its members were among others overseeing the construction of a wall around the area of the future ghetto. Beginning in the summer of that year, the Guard patrolled the Jewish Cemetery, where gravestones had been defaced and broken. It also provided security in the Labor Office building and other Jewish Council offices. In late July and early August 1940, official instructions and internal regulations were drawn up for the Guard.
The transformation of the Security Guard into the Jewish Order Ser-vice was defined by the Germans as part of the Selbständige Autonomie (Self-Regulating Autonomy) of the Jewish community in Warsaw. This was also the general feeling on the ghetto’s street.
