Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (review)

During her 1971 jailhouse interviews with Franz Stangl, journalist Gitta Sereny asked the former Treblinka commandant why the Nazis had exterminated Europe’s Jews. Without hesitation Stangl answered, “They wanted their money.” Few scholars take Stangl’s explanation seriously. They recognize that racist zeal, Social-Darwinist fanaticism, and technocratic opportunism are more fundamental to understanding the Nazi genocide than the desire for material riches. But could it be also that the Nazis killed Jews because they wanted their property and bank accounts? In Robbing the Jews, Martin Dean does not assert such a crude causality. But in this sobering book he does remind us that, on all levels, persecution was accompanied by plunder and confiscation. Stealing Jews’ income and property was not an incidental byproduct of the Holocaust; it was a fundamental component of mass murder.

In and of itself, the study of the dispossession and impoverishment of Europe’s Jews is not new. Aryanization, spoliation, the stripping of dental fillings at death camps, and other forms of sanctioned and spontaneous thievery have been central themes in Holocaust scholarship for decades. Indeed, Götz Aly’s controversial 2006 book Hitler’s Beneficiaries hinges in part on the question of whether the German people benefited materially from the murder of Europe’s Jews. What is original about Dean’s study, however, is its demonstration of how widespread and sophisticated the National Socialist program of robbery was. From the cities of occupied Western Europe to the killings fields of the East, Europeans at every turn colluded with the Nazis to strip Jews of their possessions and redistribute them to more “worthy” individuals and institutions. While moving vans were loading up Jewish household belongings in Germany and France, Belorussian townspeople were picking over the clothes of recently murdered Jews.

Martin Dean’s research is comprehensive. While he has been publishing on related themes for some time, this book represents an attempt to synthesize his and other scholars’ findings and to complement them with further archival discoveries. Dean has combed through a vast array of published and unpublished materials in the United States, France, Germany, Belarus, and Russia to assemble a portrait of every kind of thievery imaginable. We witness a flood of measures designed to strip Jews of their money and goods. Special taxes, surcharges, levies, fees, blocked bank accounts, cash withdrawal limits, and myriad confiscations were accompanied by spontaneous bouts of vandalism, harassment, and “petty pilfering” (p. 241). Such actions reflected both the thoroughness of the Nazis’ plans and the inchoate nature of their larceny. Competition between state and party administrators, disagreements about the best way to secure Jewish property, and local initiatives within occupied territories helped drive anti-Jewish policies inexorably forward.

Central to this process, Dean repeatedly points out, was the Nazis’ attempt to separate Jews “lawfully” from their money and possessions. While we have long known about the Nazi regime’s penchant for legal formalities, it still comes as a surprise to see how eagerly it lent a veneer of propriety to this massive theft. In part, its effort in this direction was born of a desire to avoid the chaotic plundering and corruption that had taken place in Austria after Kristallnacht. As a consequence, the Nazis tried to direct the bulk of Jewish loot to the state, rather than to SS or other party functionaries or private citizens, and they aimed to do so with maximum efficiency. The Nazis thus realized that meeting their ideological (and financial) goals would depend on functioning within legally sanctioned parameters. On the one hand, therefore, they could steal Jewish property and redistribute it as a reward to especially zealous Jew-killers within local police units, or as “compensation” for those party hacks who had “suffered” under “Jewish” economic control in the 1920s. On the other hand, they could profess to be working...