Roland Achuko

UWRT-1102-003
10/14/15
Weekly Writing 5 Assignment
The focus of my topic is what steps members of the Jewish community took to get
retribution for holocaust. It will mainly be looking at groups like the Nazi hunters and theyre
attempts to bring former Nazi members to justice. Using the Aktins library database I was able
to find a book called Jewish Honor Courts: revenge, retribution, and reconciliation in Europe
and Israel after the Holocaust a series of essays edited by Laura Jockusch and Gabriel N. Finder.
Just by the title I can tell this book will be a great resource for my topic. What I didnt was for it
to add another dimension to my research topic, which is about involvements from people who
were not Nazis but did collaborate with that group.
This book deals with dilemma Europe was in after the defeat of the Nazis. The fact is the
Nazis alone were not responsible for the holocaust. A lot of their success had to do with
collaborators from other European countries and to make matters more complicated some of
these collaborators were Jewish people. The deal with crimes European Jews established
tribunals-honor courts. Israel had many court cases not too long after being established. The
book deals with rationale for punishing and purging these collaborators from Jewish society.
Also how these cases were handled in different parts of Europe, such as Poland, the Netherlands,
and France.
Initially, when looking at this topic I was focused on retaliation on for Nazi members.
This book has broaden my understanding of the issue by pointing out that were other people

outside of the Nazi party that had a role to play in setting up the holocaust. So instead of just
focusing on at retaliation towards former Nazi-members I will broaden the scoop of the target of
these retaliation efforts. I will also try to compare whether or not these collaborators were treated
differently than actual nazi members. Also, I had no idea that the Jewish people had their own
legal process for dealing with Holocaust. I initially fact these kinds of process were left just to
the Nuremburg trails and governments of the European country. I had no idea that there was
another system in place to deal with Holocaust perpetrators.
Thinking about the complicated issue of collaborators and their reasoning for helping the
Nazis has me with many questions that I am hoping the book answers. How much did the
rationale of these collaborators matter? I imagine considering the horrific results of the
holocaust, it would be very difficult for these collaborators to make a justifiable case. How many
of these collaborators knew what was really going on? Again, considering how horrific the
Holocaust was it is very questionable whether or not these people would had sided with Nazis
had they known what they were contributing to. Lastly how did the punishment for these
collaborators differ from those of former members of the Nazi? I would think that former Nazi
members would generally receive harsher punishments, but it would depend on how much these
collaborators knew about the holocaust and what their actions were.