The Holocaust was, among other things, the largest theft in human history. The Nazi state and its collaborators systematically expropriated the property of European Jews: their businesses, their homes, their bank accounts, their insurance policies, their art and silver and books, and finally, in the camps, the gold from their teeth and the hair from their heads. The economic dimension of the Holocaust is not separate from the killing. It is part of how the killing was funded, who profited, and why the destruction was so thorough.
Aryanisation: the legal theft
The expropriation began before the killing. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws excluded Jews from professions and citizenship. Throughout the late 1930s, Jewish-owned businesses were forcibly transferred to non-Jewish German owners under a programme known as Aryanisation. Sale prices were set far below market value, often to politically connected buyers. By 1939, virtually no Jewish-owned businesses remained in Germany. The same process was applied in occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and across occupied Europe.
The deportation economy
When Jews were deported to ghettos and then to camps, the property they left behind was confiscated by the state and disposed of, often through public auction. Furniture, clothing, kitchen utensils, and household goods were sold to ordinary Germans. The proceeds went to the Reich treasury or to the SS. The deportation trains themselves were paid for: the Reichsbahn invoiced the SS at standard third-class passenger rates per head, with discounts for groups.
What was taken in the camps
On arrival at the extermination camps, prisoners were stripped of every personal possession. Suitcases were tagged with names and addresses, an act of deliberate cruelty designed to maintain the illusion that the prisoners would later reclaim their belongings. The contents were sorted in warehouses known at Auschwitz as Kanada, named for the country that German prisoners associated with abundance. Clothes, shoes, spectacles, watches, jewellery, currency, and prosthetic limbs were sorted and shipped to the Reich. Even the hair shaved from women’s heads was packed and sent to German textile mills, where it was woven into industrial felt and used in submarine crew socks.
Gold from teeth, gold from vaults
The gold extracted from the teeth of murdered prisoners, melted down in the camps and shipped to the Reichsbank in Berlin under the codename “Melmer gold,” became part of Germany’s gold reserves. Some of it was traded with neutral countries, particularly Switzerland, in exchange for the foreign currency needed to buy raw materials for the war economy. The story of the Swiss National Bank and looted Nazi gold remained largely buried until the 1990s, when investigations and the Volcker Commission produced the most comprehensive accounting yet of where the gold went.
Industrial profit
The economic apparatus extended to private German industry. IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen all operated factories staffed by concentration camp prisoners. Prisoners were leased from the SS at a daily rate. Their food and shelter cost the corporations little, and they could be replaced from fresh transports as they were worked to death. The factories were profitable. Some of those companies still exist, and most have, in recent decades, formally acknowledged their wartime use of slave labour and contributed to compensation funds.
The art and culture stolen
A separate apparatus, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, was charged with looting art, books, and cultural property from Jewish collections across occupied Europe. Hermann Göring assembled one of the largest private art collections in Europe through this means. Hitler’s personal project, the Fuhrermuseum at Linz, was to be stocked entirely with looted works. The story of recovery, restitution, and the works still missing or held by museums and private owners is told in the dedicated section on Art Looting and Restitution, which lives under Jewish Victims.
What this section covers
This section is the umbrella for the economic dimension of the Holocaust. The detailed pages on art looting, slave labour, the Reichsbahn deportation invoices, the Swiss banks settlement, the Wiedergutmachung programme, the Luxembourg Agreement, and the Foundation Remembrance Responsibility and Future are distributed across the relevant sections of the site. Together they document one of the most thorough and best-recorded acts of theft in modern history, and the long, partial, and still-unfinished work of returning what was taken.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards