Robbing the Jews

Describes the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies seized Jewish property, first in prewar Germany and Austria in the form of Aryanizations and confiscation by the state, then throughout Nazi-controlled Europe during the war. Examines this process on three levels: sheds light on Nazi plans for confiscation and how they were implemented through various state organizations, presents the perspective of the Jewish victims, and reveals the responsibilities and responses of low-level perpetrators. In the early stage, the seizure of Jewish banks and other assets was a tool to coerce Jews to emigrate. In occupied countries during the war, almost everywhere, economic persecution and confiscations preceded deportation and murder. The main perpetrator of the seizures of Jewish property in the Reich was the financial bureaucracy; the role of the police was secondary. Dwells on the specifics of the expropriation processes in Western Europe and in the East; even in Poland, the USSR, and Serbia the Nazis tried to endow a veneer of legality to the process. In Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc.) pro-Nazi governments adopted the Nazi practice and initiated their own programs to expropriate the Jews and to oust them from the nation's economy. In many cases robbery acted as a catalyst for genocide, getting the local population involved in the mass murder of Jews. Among the beneficiaries of the Nazi seizures of Jewish property were private companies, and neutral states such as Switzerland and Sweden. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)