Authors

Magdalena Waligorska¹;  ¹ Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

Discussion

The plunder of Jewish personal belongings during, and in the aftermath of, the Holocaust was the most widespread, but also the most tabooed aspect of genocidal dispossession. Yet, while historical research has given a good deal of attention to the top-down and centralized Nazi state’s takeover of Jewish financial assets, real estate, businesses, or art objects, the history of mundane items of everyday use, stolen from Jewish households, and utilized for decades after the war’s end in many homes of East-Central Europe, remains little known. My presentation discusses the modalities of intimate dispossession, listing the conditions in which Jewish personal belongings would be appropriated by German perpetrators, their auxiliaries and the local populations. Clothes, in particular, constituted the most intimate and emotionally charged objects of dispossession. Their loss was related to the extreme humiliation of the victims, directly conditioned survival, and constituted physical forensic evidence of the genocide—as the items of clothing were often bearing traces of blood or bullet holes. At the same time, clothes constituted the bulk of Jewish possessions that changed hands in result of the Holocaust, as many millions of individual items of clothing were stolen from European Jews and then redistributed among non-Jews on a truly mass scale. My presentation addresses this intimate aspect of Holocaust dispossession and sheds light on the mechanisms and aftereffects of this violent process.