CHAIM RUMKOWSKI - Victim of circumstance or willing collaborator?

As the head of the Judenrat, Rumkowski is remembered for his speech Give Me Your Children, delivered at a time when the Germans demanded his compliance with the deportation of 20,000 children to Chełmno extermination camp. In August 1944, Rumkowski and his family joined the last transport to Auschwitz,[1] and he was murdered there on August 28, 1944, by Jewish Sonderkommando inmates who beat him to death as revenge for his role in the Holocaust. This account of his final moments is confirmed by witness testimonies of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

As the Elder of the Jews tasked with running the ghetto’s Nazi-installed Jewish Council, Rumkowski, a 62-year old former orphanage head, thoroughly relished his authority. In the analysis of some historians, Rumkowski identified so closely with his Nazi masters that the chairman became their Jewish counterpart — a Machiavellian fascist bent on separating “useless eaters” from productive workers, all the while stoking his own cult of personality.