CHAIM RUMKOWSKI (1877 – August 28, 1944) Head of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Lodz Ghetto, appointed by the Nazis during the German occupation of Poland.

Rumkowski demonstrates his generosity towards his fellow sufferers, as indicated by this label once affixed to a package of food. It reads, in part: ‘Father and mother! I am sending you a greeting on a small envelope…for your child aged 2 to 7 years. (The deadline for publishing the underwritten will be communicated through a special announcement). At the same time, you will also receive for your child 5 Uka sugars from my Magrik-Ausorgeshubb. They are nutty and sweet, so it should be eaten healthily. I wish you a good writing[?]…’ Signed in type at conclusion. Attached to the notice is a small receipt to be filled-out by the recipient. (February 27, 1877 – August 28, 1944) was the head of the Jewish Council of Elders in the Łódź Ghetto appointed by Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Poland.

Rumkowski accrued much power by transforming the ghetto into an industrial base manufacturing war supplies for the Wehrmacht in the mistaken belief that productivity was the key to Jewish survival beyond the Holocaust. The Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1944. All remaining prisoners were sent to death camps in the wake of military defeats on the Eastern Front. 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, 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.

The Debate over Rumkowski’s role in the Holocaust-
In his memoirs, Yehuda Leib Gerst described Rumkowski as a complex person: “This man had sickly leanings that clashed. Toward his fellow Jews, he was an incomparable tyrant who behaved just like a Führer and cast deathly terror to anyone who dared to oppose his lowly ways. Toward the perpetrators, however, he was as tender as a lamb and there was no limit to his base submission to all their demands, even if their purpose was to wipe us out totally. Either way, he did not properly understand his situation and position and their limits.”

Historian Michal Unger, in her Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (2004) explored the materials leading to his reputation. Rumkowski is described “on the one hand, an aggressive, domineering person, thirsty for honor and power, raucous, vulgar and ignorant, impatient (and) intolerant, impulsive and lustful. On the other hand, he is portrayed as a man of exceptional organizational prowess, quick, very energetic, and true to tasks that he set for himself.” Research performed by Isaiah Trunk for the book Judenrat attempted to revise the prevailing view of Rumkowski as traitor and collaborationist.

Rumkowski took an active role in the deportations of Jews. Some historians and writers describe him as a traitor and as a Nazi collaborator; Rumkowski aimed at fulfilling the Nazi demands with the help of their own Orpo Security Police if necessary. His rule, unlike the leaders of other ghettos, was marked with abuse of his own people coupled with physical liquidation of political opponents. He and his council had a comfortable food ration and their own special shops. He was known to get rid of those he personally disliked by sending them to the camps. Additionally, he sexually abused vulnerable girls under his charge. Failure to submit to him meant death to the girl. Holocaust survivor Lucille Eichengreen, who claimed to have been abused by him for months as a young woman working in his office, said, “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.”

Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, in his book The Drowned and the Saved, concludes: “Had he survived his own tragedy…no tribunal would have absolved him, nor, certainly, can we absolve him on the moral plane. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption against which it is difficult to guard oneself. To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski…was fragile.”

At best, Levi viewed Rumkowski as morally ambiguous and self deluded. Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, placed Rumkowski’s egotism at the low end of the spectrum of wartime ghetto leadership examples. Professor Yehuda Bauer points out that if the Russians had continued their summer offensive in 1944, Lodz would have been the only ghetto to be liberated with a significant number of its inhabitants still alive, and Rumkowski might be remembered in a very different light.