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

Abstract

Martin Dean's book reveals the centrality of naked greed, and the resulting impoverishment of European Jewry, in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust. “For the Jews,” Dean asserts, “deprivation of property reduced considerably their chances for survival,” substantially abetting “the terrifying effectiveness of genocide” (p. 221). Situating his study in a context encompassing political and legal developments, Dean states that “until the 1990s, most historians treated the issue of property confiscation as an abstruse and largely secondary aspect of the Holocaust” (p. 7). Scholars such as Hans Safrian, Frank Bajohr, Harold James, Peter Hayes, Jonathan Steinberg, Christian Gerlach, and Götz Aly then confronted this gross misapprehension. Dean synthesizes their work and incorporates his own copious research. He is too modest to claim that this book should displace the interpretations focused on racial ideology per se. But his work ought to facilitate a paradigm shift in the Holocaust master narrative specifying that along with the attempted annihilation of European Jewry there was a deliberate effort to steal their money and possessions, which renders the matrix of collaboration larger and murkier than previously imagined.