Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 [Hardcover]

Yehuda Bauer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 1994

The world has recently learned of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save the lives of Jewish workers in his factory in Poland. In this engrossing, profound and deeply moving book, a leading Holocaust scholar examines other equally dramatic attempts to negotiate with the Nazis for the release of Jews. Bauer's book adds a new dimension to Holocaust studies.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A handful of Jewish leaders established contacts with Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis in the hope of negotiating to rescue Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe from the Holocaust. These negotiators pleaded, resorted to bluffing, offered ransoms or took other desperate measures, as in 1942 when a Jewish group in Slovakia bribed a Gestapo representative with the aim of halting further deportations of Jews. Bauer, a professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argues that Jews who sought negotiations with the Nazis-many of whom were reviled or attacked after the war-were courageous heroes who took the only course available to them to save lives. His revealing chronicle unfolds a complex tale featuring individuals like Czech Jew Alfred Schwarz (alias Dogwood), an OSS agent in Istanbul who tried to forge ties between conservative German anti-Nazis and the Allies; and Zionist journalist Reszoe Kasztner, who dealt with the Nazis in Hungary for the release of Jews in 1944.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This well-written and magnificently researched volume reexamines controversial Jewish attempts to negotiate with the Nazis to effect the rescue of Jews in the Holocaust. Bauer, a distinguished Israeli scholar, focuses on major episodes such as the Ha'avarah ("transfer agreement"), the Weissmandel proposal, the Kasztner affair, and the mission of Joel Brand. Unlike many previous scholars, Bauer unmasks the complexities underlying these abortive efforts and shows how Jewish powerlessness rather than the wickedness of Jewish individuals was to blame for their failure. At the same time, he sheds new light on Nazi motivations and defends Zionist rescue efforts against contemporary critics. Thoughtful, readable, sober, and generally persuasive, this is an important contribution to Holocaust studies. For all collections.
Jonathan D. Sarna, Brandeis Univ., Waltham, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1St Edition edition (October 26, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300059132
• ISBN-13: 978-0300059137
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,694,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on this sensitive subject, February 26, 2003

By 

Etienne Lorenceau (Bethesda, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (Paperback)

There are several books on the negotiations the Nazis forced the Jewish people into. This racket for hypothetic survival had to be analyzed through time and this is what the author does to perfection.

The progressive superposition of the Nazi emigration policy and their attempt to replace, in the secret negotiations with the allies for a separate peace with the west, Hitler's head by the Jewish lives they were cynically harvesting is clearly shown here.

As a Christian reviewer, I think that the author has duly treated with dignity the debate over Kasztner's negotiations and money aspects in Jewish survival matters. It was taking crazy politics of post-war periods to blame the ones who had saved whoever they could by every means they could find.

How can someone blame another human beings for having first taken care of his foes and family.

The father of the reviewer resisted the anti-semitic nazi madness in France and for that shared for several years the Jewish fate in Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. It was an "unnecessary experience" (to quote an Auschwitz survivor) but as Yeshuda Bauer rightfully states in his final words: these people should not be juged by their success or failure in resisting criminal authorities, but by the answer to a basic moral question: did they try? And try they did.

People dying in the concentration camps begged survivors letting them sware they would withness their suffering to the world: some of their voices have joined in Yeshuda Bauer's lines. The testimony should be read, and the respect for the victim extended to the author who testified for them.