something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand - or at the very most, three
Ukrainians out of every ten thousand - and this leads to the most serious charge that can be
brought against the quality of his reasoning - which is the charge that he is engaging in this
primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One
individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,
it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How
refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many
generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? - The answer is, of
course, for all eternity. And why? - Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no
more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally
useful, it is never shelved.
Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt - and more particularly eternal
collective guilt - is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish
people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today
bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or - why
stop there? - that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a
Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face
of Freedom."
Another thought that occurs is that if all it takes is no more than one Nazi per ten thousand
people in a group to condemn the whole group as Nazi, then what group is safe? Take the Jews:
they had their kapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi
policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. Mr. Safer made much of Ukrainian auxiliary
police helping the Germans, but did not seem to be aware that under threat of immediate death,
collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:
The Judische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called,
furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone
the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men
strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 310)
Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above, then for every story of
Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to
find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving
one's life by serving a ruthless master with enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also
excelled?
But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate
the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish
police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos:
The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew
whether for life or death - be exclusively left up to the decisions of the
"councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a
general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the
individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the
enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish
police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in
accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through
moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims
Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, 1977, pp. 119-120,
emphasis added)
In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the