Why Was Mordechai Rumkowski Killed in The Holocaust?

Soundgarden

Banned
I mean, to many the guy was like the Jewish Fuhrer, wheather it was under pressure from the nazis or for personal gain, its hard to tell. He always tried to make improvements within the Lodz ghetto to help them survive, but the downfall was only a certain number of people would be that lucky. He was best known for the "Give Me Your Children" speech.

Besides the fact that he was Jewish(which makes me question why they would collaborate with him to begin with), why was he sent to Auschwitz especially after he cooperated with ever ridiculous demand(and even gave them gifts) the Nazis gave him? Did he do something that pissed them off? I'm interested in knowing about his fate.
 

jacobus

He too was deported in the end, because he was just a feeble old man and the Nazis knew he could be of no further use to them. However, it may not have been the Nazis who killed Rumkowsi. Some claim he was beaten to death by enraged fellow Jews, in the train car en route to the extermination camp. Others say they fell upon him and killed him only after they arrived at the camp, when the deportees were ordered to undress and it became clear that they were all about to be executed.
"Give me your children!" Truly, a pathetic figure.
 

Soundgarden

Banned
jacobus said:
He too was deported in the end, because he was just a feeble old man and the Nazis knew he could be of no further use to them. However, it may not have been the Nazis who killed Rumkowsi. Some claim he was beaten to death by enraged fellow Jews, in the train car en route to the extermination camp. Others say they fell upon him and killed him only after they arrived at the camp, when the deportees were ordered to undress and it became clear that they were all about to be executed.
"Give me your children!" Truly, a pathetic figure.
Click to expand...

So why did they work with him to begin with? Wouldn't it make more sense to kill him right away?
 

jacobus

He kept the ghetto running smoothly for them. He encouraged people to believe that the Nazis intended to get rid of the sick, the infirm, and above all, those who dared to resist, but those who obeyed their regulations, and made themselves useful by working in their factories would be spared. Rumkowski was able to help the Nazis get some use out of their victims, before it became necessary to kill them, and he made the process of deportation and mass murder more efficient and orderly, which must have appealed to the minds of the administrators who ran Hitler's campaign of extermination.
 

sloreck

As Jacobus said - the Nazis tried to work with "local" (eg: Jewish) political figures or structures to make it easier to get the Jews to do what needed to be done relatively compliantly and efficiently. Another example was the Judenrat of Warsaw. The Endlösung (final solution) was well underway before the Jews as a whole realized what was going on. Sure there was local brutality, killings, ghettoization but these were just the "same old pogroms" just a little bigger and nastier. Extermination of the Jews was incredibly inefficient (using them as forced labor would have been much better, and many skilled Jews could have been used as engineers etc), and of course that sort of genocide was "unthinkable" coming from an advanced culture like Germany. Even those who were aware of the Armenian genocide by the Turks in WWI saw a real distinction between the cultural level of the Ottomans & that of Germany.

Many of the Jews who were in "leadership" positions worked with the Nazis in the hope of minimizing the suffering of the Jews of their communities as a whole, and, like Adam Czerniakow of the Warsaw Judenrat, when they realized that their efforts were misplaced, many committed suicide. Of course, there were quite a few "leaders" who were willing to sell out other Jews to save their own skins and those of their families (perhaps understandable), and others like Rumkowski, who attempted to profit from the situation.

You have to remember that until the camps were over-run and the evidence was irrefutable, most people outside the Jewish community in the unoccupied countries (and many in those communities) thought the reports of the camps were overblown/hysterical propaganda.

Of course once their usefulness was finished, these Jews were eliminated like so many others. Europa musse Judenfrei sein.
 

Alex1guy

Birds fly, fish swim, Sonic makes progressively more depressing games and Nazi's kill Jews. Natural order of things.
 
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