Predators and Isolates

Prime predators among Jewish prisoners were collaborators, criminals, informers, and thieves. They discouraged, impeded, and sometimes even betrayed or sabotaged acts of stealth altruism. Certain Jewish prisoners were carefully chosen by the Gestapo or SS to collaborate as barrack leaders and Kapos. Barrack leaders were in charge of food distribution, cleanliness, general behavior, and sleep hours. Kapos chose the members of work crews, delivered them to a work site, supervised them, and brought them back to camp, alive or dead. Jewish criminals—burglars, car thieves, muggers, murderers, pedophiles, rapists, robbers, and so on—were expected by the Gestapo and SS to help "shatter the cohesiveness of a prisoner group and create a threat to the prisoner community from within or without". Labeled "asocials" by the Germans, the ranks of Jewish independents included alcoholics, anarchists, beggars, drifters, drug users, free loaders, homosexuals, individualists, the mentally ill, panderers, pimps, prostitutes, vagabonds, and the "work-shy".