Benjamin Murmelstein

Benjamin Israel Murmelstein (9 June 1905 – 27 October 1989) was an Austrian rabbi. He was one of 17 community rabbis in Vienna in 1938 and the only one remaining in Vienna by late 1939. An important figure and board member of the Jewish group in Vienna during the early stages of the Second World War, he was also an "Ältester" (council elder) of the Judenrat in the Theresienstadt concentration camp after 1943. He was the only "Judenältester" to survive the Holocaust. He helped thousands of Jews in emigrating and is accused of being a Nazi collaborator. based on the interviews. He died in obscurity, but since the release of the documentary he and his role in the Holocaust have become the subject of increased media and scholarly attention.

Life up to and through the Holocaust A native of Lviv, Galicia, Benjamin Israel Murmelstein was raised Orthodox Jewish, like his family. After completing his education in Vienna, Murmelstein established himself there, becoming rabbi of a small synagogue, an occasional lecturer at the Vienna University on ancient Jewish history, and—following a speech on the Jewish soldiers whose names were effaced from German war memorials of World War I—a person of interest to the Viennese Jewish community organization, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG). As a board member of the IKG,

This camp was for many a scam and a lie. Eichmann promised to those Jews who paid him for the privilege the luxuries of a spa in what was billed as a "model ghetto," but while those who paid were "sent off in second-class train compartments well stocked with food and medicine," they found at their destination that they were to "be attacked by guards and dogs." After the deportation of Edelstein to Auschwitz in 1944 and the execution of Edelstein's successor, Paul Eppstein, for an alleged escape attempt, Murmelstein took the position of Elder himself in September 1944 and kept it until the camp's liberation by the Russians on 5 May 1945.

During his time in the camp, Murmelstein was actively involved in polishing its image through superficial renovation and beautification that was exploited in propaganda films in 1942 and 1944. Murmelstein developed a reputation for ruthless implementation of Nazi policy, for instance driving his fellow prisoners to work in spite of their starvation for 70 hours a week to meet Nazi quotas. He also purportedly refused to grant exemptions for deportations to Auschwitz unless a substitution was offered, and he was alleged to accept bribes to keep people from being added to those doomed to that fate. He also volunteered to stand as a witness to Eichmann's war crimes at Eichmann's trial before the Jerusalem District Court, but was not called. others criticized it for portraying Murmelstein in a positive light and for factual inaccuracies.

Murmelstein has been compared to Josephus Flavius, a classical Roman-Jewish historian widely regarded as a Jewish traitor whose work Murmelstein himself anthologized in 1938, the same year he began working with the IKG. He characterized his own behavior during the war and in Theresienstadt as doing the best he could in a bad situation. While not speaking to his motivations or endorsing his reportedly overbearing personality, he noted that Austrian Jewish leaders like Murmelstein could have chosen to flee Vienna before 1941 and thus evaded being caught up themselves in the Nazi concentration camps, but instead Murmelstein remained and saved countless lives.