Economic Entjudung in Nazi Europe
bystander aspect gained growing attention and importance as from the
second half of the 1960s. From this perspective, intriguing questions
regarding collaboration in the process of implementation of the anti-
Jewish campaign (as well as rescue activities or lack of them) also shed
light on local involvement in Aryanization and profiting from the disap-
pearance of Jews, yet this involvement has usually been interpreted as
resulting from greed and as a by-product of legal and social exclusion
preceding the Final Solution.”
In the realm of research on the history of Jewish society during the
Shoah, historians first tended to focus on highly sensitive issues of lead-
ership and Judenrite, armed and spiritual resistance, and — later on (as
from the 1970s) — on daily life, social relations, religious problems etc.
The functioning of besieged Jewish communities in local settings — espe-
cially (but not only) in the ghettos — drew much attention.”® Within these
studies robbery, forced labor, confiscations, profiting etc. from the Ger-
man side and their impact on life conditions of Jews were always men-
tioned as part of the picture, but were seen — as in bystander studies — as
by-products of larger Nazi goals or/and results of ad hoc situations,
rarely as an essential feature.
Fresh interest in the Nazi economy in general and the anti-Jewish
component in it in particular can be discerned since the beginning of the
1980s, to a considerable extent due to the influential studies — in German,
English and Hebrew — carried out by Israeli historian Avraham Barkai.”!
In the 1990s, the partial overcoming of the intentionalist-functionalist
controversy; the critical stance of the younger generation of scholars
(mainly Germans) in perpetrator history towards the older generation of
historians; and the public awareness regarding the unsettled economic
aspects of the Shoah — awakened by the dormant Swiss bank accounts
affair in 1994 and the consecutive questioning of restitution issues in a
29 See for instance the important study by Kaddr/Vigi, Self-financing Genocide.
30 For overviews and surveys of these aspects see: Michman, Holocaust Historiogra-
phy: throughout.
31 Barkai published many studies on this topic. The most important are: Barkai, Das
Wirtschaftssystem des Nationalsozialismus; Barkai, Die deutschen Unternehmer
und die Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich; Barkai, Vom Boykott zur ‘Entjudung’;
Barkai, The German Volksgemeinschaft from the Persecution of the Jews to the
‘Final Solution’.
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