Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945

By Yehuda Bauer

Book Overview

The world has recently learned of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of Jewish workers in his factory in Poland by bribing Nazi officials. Not as well known, however, are many other equally dramatic attempts to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of Jews in exchange for money, goods, or political benefits. In this riveting book, a leading Holocaust scholar examines these attempts, describing the cast of characters, the motives of the participants, the frustrations and few successes, and the moral issues raised by the negotiations.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, Yehuda Bauer deals with the fact that before the war Hitler himself was willing to permit the total emigration of Jews from Germany in order to be rid of them. In the end, however, there were not enough funds for the Jews to buy their way out, there was no welcome for them abroad, and there was too little time before war began. Bauer then concentrates on the negotiations that took place between 1942 and 1945 as Himmler tried to keep open options for a separate peace with the Western powers.

In fascinating detail Bauer portrays the dramatic intrigues that took place: a group of Jewish leaders bribed a Nazi official to stop the deportation of Slovakian Jews; a Czech Jew known as Dogwood tried to create an alliance between American leaders and conservative German anti-Nazis; Adolf Eichmann's famous "trucks for blood" proposal to exchange one million Jews for trucks to use against the Soviets failed because of Western reluctance; and much more.

Tormenting questions arise throughout Bauer's discussion. If the Nazis were actually willing to surrender more Jews, should the Allies have acted on the offer? Did the efforts to exchange lives for money constitute collaboration with the enemy or heroism? In answering these questions, Bauer's book--engrossing, profound, and deeply moving--adds a new dimension to Holocaust studies.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300068522
• ISBN13: 9780300068528
• Release Date: August 1996
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The best book on this sensitive subject

There are several books on the negotiations the Nazis forced the Jewish people into. This racket for hypothetic survival had to be analyzed through time and this is what the author does to perfection.The progressive superposition of the Nazi emigration policy and their attempt to replace, in the secret negotiations with the allies for a separate peace with the west, Hitler's head by the Jewish lives they were cynically harvesting is clearly shown here. As a Christian reviewer, I think that the author has duly treated with dignity the debate over Kasztner's negotiations and money aspects in Jewish survival matters. It was taking crazy politics of post-war periods to blame the ones who had saved whoever they could by every means they could find.How can someone blame another human beings for having first taken care of his foes and family. The father of the reviewer resisted the anti-semitic nazi madness in France and for that shared for several years the Jewish fate in Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. It was an "unnecessary experience" (to quote an Auschwitz survivor) but as Yeshuda Bauer rightfully states in his final words: these people should not be juged by their success or failure in resisting criminal authorities, but by the answer to a basic moral question: did they try? And try they did.People dying in the concentration camps begged survivors letting them sware they would withness their suffering to the world: some of their voices have joined in Yeshuda Bauer's lines. The testimony should be read, and the respect for the victim extended to the author who testified for them.