Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945 by Martin Dean (review)

The present publication by Martin Dean, researcher at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC, gives the first synthesized overview on the confiscation of Jewish property in continental Europe between 1933 and 1945. However, his study is far more than a simple summary of the previous research, which has focused on this issue since the 1990s, as it draws upon his own, extensive archival research beyond the already existent literature.

Dean's research is split into two parts. In the first part (17-172), elaborating the economic persecution in the Third Reich until the year 1941, the author lays his focus on the confiscation of political opponents' property and the exploitation of emigrated Jews, while also including the plans of the Nazi Party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) and the commercial companies' Aryanization. Dean points out that numerous of the measures introduced and the final access to the German and Austrian Jews' fortune—for example by freezing Jewish accounts—already were the blueprint for the later robbery of the Jews in the regions occupied. The German authorities learned from the particular confiscations and steadily improved them, according to Dean a "confiscation as 'work in progress'" (11).

In the book's second part (173-398), Dean investigates the German raids in Eastern Europe, referring to the events in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Serbia. However, he also devotes an extensive part on the robbery of the Jews' last possessions in the extermination camps and other homicide actions. These processes are afterwards compared to the processes of confiscation in Western Europe, where Dean convincingly works out a more bureaucratized character, while raids in the East have always been closely linked to violence and the killing of Jews. In conclusion, Dean even goes into detail about the dispossession of the Jewish population in countries allied with Germany (Slovakia, Romania, Italy, etc.) and the benefit, which neutral nations and private companies drew out of the exploitation of Jewish property.

Furthermore, Dean uses several case studies to convincingly point out that it was not only the German state, which had secured the lion's share of the prey by using its bureaucratized capture of the Jewish possession, but also numerous other agents who benefitted from the confiscation. The range of profiteers in the German sphere of influence did contain not only the Schutstaffel or SS, the local population, and state authorities, but also private companies as well as neutral nations such as Switzerland. All these parties involved helped organizing the exploitation of the values stolen, for example by forwarding services, the valorization of precious goods (diamonds, furs, etc.) or the financial handling of deposit accounts and stocks. Different from smaller companies and private persons, who, driven by their personal greed, directly enriched themselves on the Jewish goods (395), the major companies (Degussa, Allianz, Dresdner Bank, etc.) focused more on maintaining their market position and the goodwill of the NS-government-agencies during the Holocaust than on greed for profit. Dean correctly points out that several companies who did not participate in the Aryanization of Jewish enterprises and real estates were not prevented by moral causes but feared adverse consequences in foreign markets.

These and further numerous institutions' and segments' society involvement—once again—clarifies that the Holocaust was not only conducted by the SS and that the knowledge within the population, the third party contributions, and the local collaboration were huge; otherwise the valorization of the properties from millions of Jewish citizens by state authorities would have been impossible. Exactly, this interaction between the countless authorities and persons involved ("social dynamics", 378-396) accelerated and radicalized the complex processes of confiscation, which, according to Dean, was not just a by-product of the Holocaust but an important catalyst on the way to genocide.

Even though the Jewish population's entire...