One of the most difficult and painful questions to emerge from the Holocaust was that concerning the degree to which the Jews themselves were to blame for their plight and ultimate fate. How far was their alleged and relative passivity and cooperation (collaboration?) with the Nazi authorities, especially after the creation of the special ghettos for Jews in the eastern occupied territories, a necessary element for the successful execution of the Final Solution, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the whole of European Jewry during the Second World War? At his trial in 1961 Adolf Eichmann argued that it was, a point stressed by Hannah Arendt in her commentary on the trial with particular reference to the work and role of the Jewish Councils: ‘if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people’ (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, London, 1963, p. 111.) In his standard work on the Final Solution, Raul Hilberg had already levelled similar charges at the leaders of the Jewish communities under Nazi domination: ‘the Councils responded to German demands with automatic compliance and invoked German authority to compel the community's obedience. Thus the Jewish leadership both saved and destroyed its people - saving some Jews and destroying others, saving the Jews at one moment and destroying them at the next. Some leaders broke under this power; others became intoxicated with it’ (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, London, 1961, p. 146).

Not surprisingly, these comments and others stirred up a fierce controversy during the 1960s and 1970s which brought into sharp focus a multitude of questions concerning the Jewish role throughout the years of Nazi rule, but above all from 1939 to 1941 when there was in fact no ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Final Solution’, and the years from 1941 to 1944 when there was.