In the Absence of “A Mastery of Their Natural Instincts”: Three Jewish ‘Collaborators’ on Trial in Postwar Europe

• In Event: (Il)legal Dialogues: Jews and Law in a Global Perspective post-1945

Abstract

Bruno Goldstein, a German Jew, was found guilty of persecution of others on racial and political grounds, in west Berlin in January 1949. For his collaboration with the Gestapo, which was instrumental in his and his family’s survival -- a “crime against humanity” according to the court -- Goldstein was sentenced to imprisonment for seven years. Critical to the sentence was the argument that he had committed a ‘racial betrayal.’ Precisely a year earlier, Anna van Dijk, a Dutch-Jewish woman and lesbian, was charged with treason and collaboration, and was executed by a firing squad in Amsterdam. She was the only Jew and woman among the 40 Dutch citizens executed for collaboration. Three years later, the transport worker Robert Bruno August Cohn, another German Jew, was convicted in East Berlin. Cohn was charged with crimes against humanity as well, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment. These are not single cases, but part of a larger group of Jewish defendants who were brought to trial for alleged collaboration with the Nazi regime. There were about 15 trials in Germany but also several in France, the Netherlands, and Israel. Nor were these trials a secret at the time. Both in Germany and in the Netherlands these trials received much attention in the press. They were in some way performances used to conceptualize the immediate past and the war experiences, and drew on the law to reshape national identities and (political) visions of the future. Even stranger, then, is the complete absence of these trials in historical accounts of the intense period of postwar retribution.
Based in archival research in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, this paper analyzes these three trials in their respective legal systems and their reception in society at large. through a micro historical analysis of the legal files and newspaper coverage. Particular attention is paid to the construction of the verdicts, especially the history writing within the verdicts themselves, notions of human behavior they proscribe, ideas about free will under duress and non-participation (Arendt). This paper analyzes the Cohn, van Dijk and Goldstein trials in the broader context of postwar retribution and is the first comparative study of western European state retribution against Jewish “collaborators.”

Author

• Lotte F. M. Houwink ten Cate, Columbia University