Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski - Debate Over Rumkowski's Role in The Holocaust

Debate Over Rumkowski's Role in The Holocaust

Due to his active role in the deportations and his iron rule, Rumkowski's behavior remains a topic of bitter debate.

Some historians and writers see him as a traitor and as a Nazi collaborator. In all his activities, Rumkowski displayed great zeal and organisational ability, becoming increasingly dictatorial. Within the ghetto, Rumkowski overcame opposition with the aid of Nazi intervention. His attempts to satisfy all Nazi demands and to set up a model ghetto earned him comments such as "a man sick with megalomania", "King Chaim", "an old man of 70, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty". His 'rule', unlike the leaders of other ghettos, was marked with abuse of his own people. He and his council had a comfortable food ration, and their own special shops. The suffering of his 'comrades' was beneath him. He was known to get rid of those he personally disliked by sending them to the camps. On top of this, he sexually abused vulnerable girls under his charge. Failure to succumb to his abuse meant death to the girl, as Lucille Eichengreen, who claims to have been abused by him for months as a young woman working in his office, testifies to:

"I felt disgusted and I felt angry, I ah, but if I would have run away he would have had me deported, I mean that was very clear."

Others say that Rumkowski believed that some proportion of the ghetto would survive if they worked for the Nazis. They argue that Rumkowski believed that in order to save the majority of people, they had to cooperate with the Nazis' deportation demands. (Such a move would have immediately set him at odds with Orthodox observant Jews, as there is no justification for delivering anyone to certain death.) Following the setting up of the extermination camp at Chełmno in 1941, the Nazis forced Rumkowski to organize a deportation. Rumkowski claimed that he tried to convince the Nazis to cut down the number of Jews required for deportation and failed. Nevertheless, an estimated number of 5,000 to 10,000 Jews gave him some credit for their survival, and the Łódź ghetto lasted longer than other such establishments in occupied Poland. The Łódź ghetto was also the only ghetto not controlled by the SS.

It remains unclear whether, if he had survived the war, Rumkowski would have received thanks for saving the people he did, or a jail-term for allowing so many to go to their deaths. Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, in his book, The Drowned and the Saved, gives considerable consideration to Rumkowski concluding that we forget that "we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." At best, Levi viewed Rumkowski as morally ambiguous and self deluded. Conversely, Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, was scathing in her opinion of Rumkowski.