Dan Michman
eral Nazi state policies which had to cope with economic realities (and
was therefore utilitarian to a considerable extent) yet did so by applying
also racial considerations which affected also non-Jewish groups. Tenen-
baum had been a leader of the Jewish anti-German boycott movement in
the 1930s, and was therefore especially sensitive to the economic dimen-
sion of the Shoah. And though his book is outdated in many respects
and has many deficiencies, it is still worth reading today precisely
regarding this aspect.!®
Raul Hilberg’s landmark study The Destruction of the European
Jews (first published in 1961) went much further. In the modular struc-
ture of the Holocaust as conceived by Hilberg, the economic aspect —
“expropriation” as he called it — became the second stage in the linear,
four-stage escalation of the process of anti-Jewish policies, after “defini-
tion”, and before “concentration” and “annihilation”. That means that
expropriation was promoted by Hilberg to be an essential cog in the
destruction process. In the part on expropriation he included dismissals,
Aryanizations, property taxes, blocked money, forced labor and wage
regulations, income taxes and starvation measures. All these ingredients
related to policies inside Germany, mainly before 1939. But also in the
parts on the later stages of what he coined “the destruction process” —
“concentration” and “The Destruction Process II” (in which he dealt
with the Final Solution) — Hilberg recurrently included chapters about
confiscation and also dealt with forced labor. And in the chapter dealing
with “consequences” he once again analyzed the problematics of resti-
tution.” Interestingly, Hilberg never tackled the question why expropri-
ation should be a second stage in the destruction process at all — and not
some other domain of the regime’s activities (“exclusion”, for instance);
apparently, this was obvious for Hilberg, in view of the enormous
amount of documentation on economic issues that he encountered in his
archival research.
However, already among scholars of the first post-1945 period in
Holocaust research there were some who did not view the economic
18 Tenenbaum, Race and Reich. On Tenenbaum’s analysis see Michman, Holocaust
Historiography, pp. 20-24.
19 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. For an analysis of Hilberg’s con-
ceptualization see Michman, Holocaust Historiography, pp. 16-20.
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