Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940–1944 by Sarah Gensburger (review)

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews artfully examines an album of photographs taken by Germans plundering the property of French Jews. The album was arranged by Allied occupation forces after the war and preserved by the Federal Archives in Koblenz. These pictures document Operation Furniture (Möbel Aktion), the institutionalized robbery of French Jews, directed first by Alfred Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and then by Colonel Kurt von Behr’s Dienststelle West (of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) from 1942 to 1944. This evidence, likely compiled originally by Rosenberg and von Behr as proof of their productivity, showcases the massive theft of everything from valuable art to the kitchenware, radios, light bulbs, and mattresses from 38,000 homes “abandoned” by Parisian Jews during the height of their incarceration and deportation. In presenting us with this material, Sarah Gensburger blends analysis of historical photographs with an impressive collection of survivor testimony and displays a sweeping familiarity with both the documentary evidence and historiographical context of Germany’s pillage of Jewish assets during the Holocaust.

This book’s most meaningful scholarly intervention is to revise academic work privileging the economic utility of the Holocaust. In opposition especially to Götz Aly’s controversial Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005), Gensburger interprets these photos as proof that Operation Furniture and other forms of mass pillage never benefitted the Third Reich materially. Rather, systematic looting belonged to the larger process of complete annihilation, eliminating the physical traces of Nazi victims by transforming personal possessions into goods that were frequently destroyed due to their shabby condition and lack of functionality. Instead of propping up the economy of everyday Germans during the war, the ransacking of all Jewish possessions resulted from the overwhelming ideological urge to destroy every remnant of European Jewry.

Gensburger supports her interpretative claim in part by critiquing the ways in which textual historians of the Holocaust use archival images. Pointing out mistakes by well-known historians like Martin Dean in Robbing the Jews (2008) and others, she does much more than highlight the errors of colleagues. In one case, she shows how Aly mislabeled photos from the album under review: his captions misrepresented images of packed crates of art as material goods intended for transport to the civilian population of Germany. In this manner, she directly weakens his assertions of a strong economic dimension to the genocide (64–65). Gensburger also strengthens the book’s central point by contextualizing each photo. In one example, she identifies the illusory nature of an image of interned seamstresses turning stolen garments into skirts for German girls of the Reich. She quotes former inmate Erna Herzberg, who suggested that almost no skirts were ever actually produced. Herzberg and others only reused fabric for occasional items made to order by National Socialist elites. What appears to be evidence of targeted plunder was actually a photo staged by von Behr or Rosenberg so that they could maintain autonomy over their economically unproductive action and retain laborers who fulfilled their personal requests (106–107). Such layered analysis unveils the complexity of using photographs as primary sources, illustrating the rigorous scrutiny that such analysis requires.

The depiction of Jewish victims frequently excluded from historical narratives constitutes another intriguing element of this book. Gensburger fills a “memory hole” that devalues the Jewish spouses of gentiles and so-called Mischlinge that inhabited the internment camps of Paris and whose conditions were more tolerable than most forced labor facilities. As comparably fortunate Jews who largely escaped both deportation to Auschwitz and the horrors of the notorious Drancy concentration camp, internees at camps like Levitan, Austerlitz, and Bassano formed the primary labor force of Operation Furniture. The gaze of National Socialist photographers frequently relegated these prisoners to the margins of the images, making plundered goods the...