Robbing the Jews

Martin Dean is an Applied Research Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC. He received a scholarship in History from Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1980 and was awarded his PhD also at Queens' in 1989. His publications include Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (2000); Austrian Policy during the French Revolutionary Wars, 1796–99 (1993); and numerous articles. He has also worked as a Staff Historian for the Australian Special Investigations Unit and as the Senior Historian for the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London (1992–7). He has held a DAAD grant and was awarded the Pearl Resnick Post-Doctoral Fellowship by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1997. He has acted as an expert witness in Nazi war crimes cases in Australia and Germany.

“Martin Dean’s book is the first fully comprehensive study on the confiscation of Jewish property in the Holocaust and will set the standard for future research and analysis. In the complicated field of robbing and spoliation it connects important archival findings with a masterly knowledge of even remote research literature, cogently integrating the process of confiscation into the general history of the Holocaust. Therefore I warmly recommend Dean’s study as a compulsory work for scholars, students, and all readers interested in the field of Holocaust history.” -Frank Bajohr, Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Germany

• Part I. Economic Persecution Inside the Third Reich, 1933–41: 1. The Nazis' initial confiscation measures; 2. Mounting obstacles to Jewish emigration, 1933–9; 3. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht: accelerating aryanization and confiscation in Austria and Germany, 1938–9; 4. Blocking Jewish accounts and preparations for mass confiscation, 1939–41; Part II. Jewish Property and the European Holocaust, 1939–45: 5. Destruction and plunder in the occupied east: Poland, the Soviet Union, and Serbia; 6. Settling accounts in the wake of the deportations; 7. 'Plunder by decree': the confiscation of Jewish property in German-occupied Western Europe; 8. Sovereign imitations: confiscations by states allied to Nazi Germany; 9. Receiving stolen property: neutral states and private companies; 10. Seizure of property and the social dynamics of the Holocaust.