[NOTE: I noticed this word appearing again lately, so I think it’s time to repost this. I originally wrote it in December of 2015.]

I’ve noticed the word “kapo” cropping up now and then in the comments section of this blog, to refer to someone Jewish who is seen as an underhanded betrayer of the Jewish people or Israel. Here’s a typical example, which was posted around the time of the Iran deal and referred to the vote for it:

Kapo:
Did Jerry Nadler Betray America, Israel and His Community?
Yes.

Kapos were an essential component in the running of the German National Socialist concentration camps.

But Jerry Nadler (and all the others I’ve ever seen described by the word, except of course for the actual, real-life historical kapos) had no gun pointed at his head when he decided about the Iran deal. Nor was he facing a death camp or concentration camp. And therein lies a tale—about the actual kapos, who they were and what they faced.

Let’s first establish that, although the word is often used to refer to Jews, and although some were certainly Jewish, most kapos were not [emphasis mine]:

A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks in the camp…The system was designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos. Many prisoner functionaries were recruited from the ranks of violent criminal gangs rather than from the more numerous political, religious and racial prisoners; those were known for their brutality toward other prisoners.

The kapos were involuntary prisoners in a system that was known for its overwhelming brutality. By becoming kapos, they qualified for some moderate privileges that meant they might actually be able to survive their horrific captivity. Some kapos actually were relatively decent (mostly in secrecy) to the fellow-prisoners under their supervision. The camp administrators preferred kapos from the criminal population, because they were less hampered by conventional morality:

At Buchenwald, these tasks were originally assigned to criminal prisoners, but after 1939, political prisoners began to displace the criminal prisoners, though criminals were preferred by the SS. At Mauthausen, on the other hand, functionary positions remained dominated by criminal prisoners until just before liberation…

Identified by green triangles, the befristeten Vorbeugungshé¤ftling or “BV” [criminal] kapos, were called “professional criminals” by other prisoners and were known for their brutality and lack of scruples. Indeed, they were selected by the SS because of those qualities. According to former prisoners, the criminal functionaries were more apt to be helpful to the SS than political functionaries, who were more apt to be helpful to other prisoners.

More evidence that Jews were not preferred by the SS to be chosen as kapos:

The SS sometimes had racial criteria for the prisoner functionaries, sometimes one had to be racially “superior” to be a functionary.

And once a person was fingered to be a kapo, there was no turning back. Here’s Himmler on the subject:

The moment we become dissatisfied with him, he is no longer Kapo, he’s back to sleeping with his men. And he knows that he will be beaten to death by them the first night.

After the war, some particularly brutal kapos were tried and sentenced—German ones in Germany, Polish ones in Poland, and some Jewish ones in Israel. I have tried to get a good estimate of what percentage of kapos were Jews, since the word is usually used today in the context of accusing Jews of various offenses, and although I haven’t found an official estimate it’s clear that the Nazi preference was for them not to be Jews. This book of interviews with Jewish Sonderkommandos from Aushwitz contains one survivor’s estimate that 80% of the kapos were not Jewish, for example. Another memoir indicates that 10% of kapos were Jews. A historical novel QB VII by Leon Uris, presumably based on research, states that only a few out of every hundred were Jewish.

So it appears that the idea that kapos were predominantly Jewish is almost certainly false, and in fact Jews seem to have been significantly underrepresented among kapos in comparison to their numbers among regular camp prisoners. However, some kapos were indeed Jewish.

In addition, camp survivors usually say that the Jewish kapos tended to be better (see this) and German kapos were often (although not always) considered the worst (see this).

But the situation of the kapos in general, particularly those who had no previous criminal history, was so substantially different from that of virtually anyone in the US today, that I would say it is actually an abomination to compare the two, for the simple reason that kapos were concentration camp inmates under threat of torture and death. As kapos they received special privileges, and the most special one was life itself. In other words, their first motivation was to save their lives in a situation of evil so total and so horrific that in a very real way they were victims who were coerced into colluding with their oppressors.

Consider the case of Jacob Tannenbaum, a Jew and a former kapo who was alleged to have been violent and who was tried many years later in the US. This was his pre-kapo history:

…Tannenbaum [was] an observant Polish Jew who, before the war, had been active in Zionist activities. His wife, six-month-old daughter, parents and five siblings perished during the Holocaust.

Perhaps that would be enough to make a person go mad, even without more. But there was considerably more that Tannenbaum experienced before becoming a kapo:

After some time in a Polish camp in 1942, he was sent with other relatively healthy prisoners to the forced-labor camp in Galicia, where his Nazi captors blinded him in one eye and severely injured his back in a beating.

Finally, for eight months in 1944 and 1945, he served as a kapo in Gorlitz, supervising 1,000 prisoners who worked there in an armaments factory.

Tannenbaum was in camps for a total of three years. After the war he came to the US and became a citizen in 1955, a practicing Orthodox Jew who donated money to causes such as that of Weisenthal, the Nazi-tracker. Years later he was recognized and arrested, and the camp survivors testified that he had been especially brutal, beating them sometimes without even Germans being present, and in six cases causing the death of inmates (for example, by informing on them for infractions). But Tannenbaum said there had always been Germans present during the beatings and that he did what he did under threat of death. In the end there was a settlement, with Tannenbaum stripped of his citizenship but not deported for health reasons. He was 77 (or 79; I’ve read conflicting reports) at the time of the proceedings, suffered a stroke while testifying, and died a year later.

Some called Tannenbaum a tragic figure. In my opinion, he is surely that, but is he guilty? I would have to know more to make a decision, but I know that I have my doubts about his guilt in the moral sense. His case was exceptionally controversial, with many people thinking he should not have been charged, but I’m not bringing it up to decide his guilt or innocence. I’m bringing it up to point out the intensity of the pressures kapos were under, and the profundity of the moral decisions and dilemmas they faced.

I have already said that they did not volunteer for the camps, which is self-evident. What is less evident is that they did not volunteer for the job of kapo, either. They were selected [emphasis mine]:

…[T]he Tannenbaum case already has resurrected the history of the several hundred Jewish kapos, all selected by the Nazis to oversee and punish their own people, often with the hope of sparing themselves. Theirs was the conundrum within the catastrophe.

“I know that when the Tannenbaum case is heard, many of the allegations will be horrifying,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which studies the Holocaust and human rights issues. “What needs to be said generally is that one must make a distinction between those who volunteered for the SS or the Gestapo and those who thought they would save their lives by cooperating. You can’t say Patty Hearst played the same role as her kidnappers. The same is true of any kapo.”

“It is important to retain a perspective,” said Henry Siegman, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress. “There is a critical difference between the Barbies of the world – the victimizers – and the Tannenbaums, as sad and tragic and despicable as they were. They were victims. They were people who succumbed to unbelievable stress.”

Tannenbaum alleged, among other things, that the beatings he administered were designed to save accused prisoners of worse at the hands of the Nazis themselves, who would just as soon have killed them instead. Who knows? Tannenbaum himself had been subject to psychological torment as well:

“He told us once that in one of the camps the Nazis played this ‘joke’ on him – a kind of psychological torture,” said Sonny Tannenbaum, a peace officer in the New York City court system. “They had him dig a grave and made him believe they were going to bury him alive in it. Then they all laughed and had him come out, and threw a dead German shepherd in the grave.”

Here’s the moral distinction the legal system was trying to make:

“Any inquiry like this, Jewish or German, comes down to whether someone took part in the persecution of innocent people willingly and voluntarily,” said Mr. Ryan, a former director of the Office of Special Investigations and now a lawyer for Harvard University. “It’s just that with the kapos you have to add the additional layer of what the SS was doing over their shoulders. Were the kapos beating the inmates only enough to keep the SS from beating them even more brutally? Or were they persecuting them as badly or even worse than the SS?”

How could one ever judge such a thing about a person who had been tortured as Tannenbaum had? There is little question in my mind that under anything remotely resembling ordinary circumstances he would not have done anything of the sort. Yes, he had choices, and he probably made some bad ones, but is he required to have been a hero and/or a saint, exhibiting a bravery and goodness that—to be honest—very few among us would be capable of under similar circumstances?

Someone using the word “kapo” to refer to anything less than that sort of pressure and that sort of horrific choice seems wrong to me, a trivialization of a profound human tragedy and a deep outrage.