Pots and pans

by Marc Masurovsky

Since the first Holocaust memorial was built in Europe, soon followed by dozens of others, the story line that these venerable institutions have conveyed to a global public has been exemplified by the Holocaust is not about property but about people.

Put another way, the vast majority of the six million Jewish men, women and children who lost their lives in the Holocaust were so downtrodden that all they owned were pots and pans and the clothes that they wore. Or so the conventional story goes. Those lucky enough to collect art were people of means who hailed for the most part from Central and Western Europe. The facts speak for themselves: 75 per cent of Jews lived in Eastern Europe; 90 per cent of them were murdered. In other words, the Holocaust is for the most part an Eastern European Ashkenazi story.

This stale stereotyping of Jews as living in substandard poverty across Europe has gone hand in hand with a stubborn refusal by Jewish communities worldwide to address the more complex question of property loss as one of the keystones of 20th century anti-Jewish behavior. If we follow this line of reasoning, there were only two classes of Jews-on top, the wealthy who had enough disposable income to collect fineries of all sorts including lavish furniture and expensive art, and the “shtetl” Jews, the peddlers, the pieceworkers who lived “on the other side of the tracks”, the inhabitants of the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe. Forgotten or ignored are the lower middle class, artisans, skilled workers, cultural and intellectual workers, the midde class whom we find in every community, town, city, region of Europe. What of them? Do they fit in this story? They do but their property does not count. It’s not part of the Holocaust story. Or so we are told.

Fast forward to November 15, 2019, to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Paris-based CIVS—Commission for indemnification of Victims of Spoliation during WWII. Participants to that conference heard from some speakers that most Jews living in France were of “humble backgrounds” and did not collect any art. They were more about “pots and pans.” That did not stop the Vichy authorities and their Nazi friends In the Paris region alone, from confiscating and transferring to non-Jewish owners (a process known as “Aryanization”) the intangible and tangible property of 31000 owners. Moreover, close to 70000 residences where Jews lived were literally emptied during the so-called “M-Aktion” between March 1942 and the summer of 1944 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I doubt that those responsible for this wholesale campaign of ransacking Jewish dwellings would have committed so many resources and logistics if it were just about “pots and pans.” 

You do not have to be an “art collector” or “art dealer” to amass works and objects of art. There are multiple tiers of value in the art world and the art market whereby individuals can amass an impressive amount of esthetic objects of small value---paintings, works on paper, even sculpture, decorative objects, books, musical instruments, Judaica, produced by talented artists and craftsmen whose names are not Bellini, Tintoretto, Fragonard and Rembrandt.

In short, it is too convenient and shameful to oversimplify in order to deflect attention from the real problem:
-Culture is an integral part of the discussion on National Socialism, anti-Jewish policies and the Holocaust;
-Jewish culture was thriving in the interwar years;
-The Nazis and their local Fascist allies nearly extinguished it;
-Human beings—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are attracted to objects that please them and, if they can, they acquire them so that they can live with them, appreciate them and share them with family, friends, acquaintances and complete strangers.

Thousands of artists, writers, poets, musicians, craftsmen from close to twenty nations lost their livelihood and their lives between 1933 and 1945, their property was seized, never to be seen again. The cumulative impact of those losses triggered a lessening, an impoverishment of the cultural heritage of Europe from which we have not fully recovered.

These losses were part of a well-orchestrated State-sponsored attempt (2/3 successful) by the Third Reich and its allies to erase all traces of Jewish life and activity across Europe—a continental form of “Aryanization” which witnessed a multi-billion dollar transfer of property from Jewish ownership into the hands of non-Jews and their businesses which powered the wartime and postwar economies of European countries.

So, no, it was not about “pots and pans.” It was about much more. To deny this fact is to deny and rewrite history.

The time is long overdue for these longstanding revisionist trends in the teaching of the Holocaust to come to an end.

Teaching plunder to children Part Two

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the continuation of a set of slides developed for children ages 9 to 13 who attended a Jewish middle school in Michigan.  Feel free to use them!

The end... for now.

The binary: Holocaust and/or plunder

by Marc Masurovsky

The binary—Holocaust and plunder—is a taboo.

The official binary—Holocaust OR plunder—has been the prevailing dogma characterizing the conceptualization, development and implementation of Holocaust historiography, education, and remembrance, in particular in the United States and Europe. Even flagship institutions like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, France and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, eschew the discussion on plunder thus provoking and perpetuating a revisionist approach to Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust studies.

The conventional approach, at least in the United States, has been to discuss the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War, without referring to the economic and cultural crimes that preceded, accompanied, and followed crimes against individuals, including the infliction of physical harm and, in many instances, death.

During and immediately following the Second World War, British and American policies were geared towards the physical defeat of the Third Reich and its allies, the neutralization of its economic infrastructure, which was heavily blamed for sustaining, fueling and amplifying the Reich’s predatory, expansionist, and, yes, exterminationist policies. The framers and executors of Reich policies carried out ferocious campaigns against individuals belonging to specific groups, Jews, Roma, political opponents, homosexuals, the handicapped, and others viewed as not worthy, sub-human, and disposable.

And yet, starting with the first months of the National Socialist regime, economic assets, including real estate, businesses, financial assets, and cultural objects, were targeted for seizure, expropriation, forced sale, and incorporation into the Reich’s economic machine. Anti-Jewish and other forms of discriminatory policies went hand in hand with economic deprivation and confiscations of victims’ assets.

The Allies were well aware of this and wanted to prevent at all cost the overt and covert recycling of victims’ assets by those who either confiscated them or profited from their access on the open market. For that reason, they targeted representatives of industry, finance, government, trade, as well as the institutions in which they worked, together with all sorts of brokers and resellers used as fences and cut-outs to exfiltrate victims’ belongings out of the Reich and its occupied territories into neutral zones.

In other words, the postwar recovery and reorientation of economic, commercial, financial and cultural assets was as important to the Allied powers as the neutralization and punishment of those who fought against them and who engineered and implemented criminal acts against their victims.

The planners of the International Military Tribunal at Nurenberg established crimes of plunder as crimes against humanity. Few defendants were charged for such crimes because priorities were reordered and focus given on the planning and carrying out of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, a genocidal policy. Part of the genocide against the Jews involved the mass removal of Jewish wealth in all its forms and the profiteering that resulted therefrom on a European scale with ramifications worldwide.

Why is it that in the twenty-first century, most, if not all, academic and museological programs dedicated to retelling and teaching the history of the events that we construe as the Holocaust fail to include any reference, mention, or citation of economic crimes committed against Jews and the forcible removal of their property?

Nazi war on culture
The National Socialist movement’s mantra was to tear down the corrupt, “Jewish” culture that poisoned Germany under the Weimar Republic, cleanse the civil society of all its pernicious influences, restore German greatness through a reordering from top to bottom, bottom to top, a “refonte” of the cultural landscape.

For twelve years, Nazi bureaucrats and their Fascist allies in neighboring countries waged an incessant war, a Kulturkampf, against the cultural sphere, and, through expansionism, exported that cultural conflict into the territories the Reich occupied.

That obsession with eradicating negative cultural influences suffused the Nazi discourse, comingling culture and anti-Jewish policies. The inevitable result was the marginalization of the Reich’s cultural enemies, which included the Jews, through job discrimination, eviction, expropriation, pauperization, seizures and confiscations. The consequences are well-known: millions of cultural objects were forced onto the open market without the consent of the owners and sold at whatever prices to a domestic and international clientele for twelve years.

The restitution of these objects is a direct result of Allied policies framed during and after WWII, to restore justice and cancel out the nefarious effects of the Nazi Kulturkampf.
When we hear leaders of Holocaust education proudly state that “they do not do culture,” one’s neck hairs should rightfully bristle.

It’s time to give up these idiotic stereotypes and prejudices against teaching the Holocaust and economic crimes, side by side.

How much courage does it take to pronounce in a single sentence the words Holocaust, Aryanization, forced sales, and restitution?

Monday diatribe: How to buy your way out of genocide accountability

by Marc Masurovsky


Chances are that not a month goes by without us buying a product, investing in a transportation company (railroads and a select group of airlines), buying insurance policies, or for those with more cash buying stocks in firms whose parent companies were around in the 1930s and 1940s. Do we ever ask ourselves how those companies reacted to the coming to power of Fascism in Italy, authoritarian governments in Southeastern Europe, National Socialism in Germany, and pro-Axis governments in Western Europe (France and the so-called neutrals—Spain and Portugal)? We probably don’t ask these questions any more than we ask ourselves where an art object came from which we admire in an art museum, a gallery, or at an auction.

Here's a simple statistic that should be easy to absorb: There were at least 300 American companies with subsidiaries operating in Nazi Germany until Pearl Harbour came and went on December 7, 1941. In other words, for eight years, American businessmen consorted and traded with their German counterparts from the moment that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, until that fateful morning in the Hawaiian islands which cost more than 3000 American lives and the near-total destruction of the US Pacific fleet.

The Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War would have been greatly hampered and impeded had it not been for the active participation of the private sector—industries, banks, traders, merchants—and professional groups—lawyers, accountants, finance personnel, cultural officials, brokers of all kinds, chemists, doctors, civil servants, and the list goes on.

Persecution, internment, deportation, extermination, are acts which require money and infrastructural support—human, and otherwise.


Since the end of WWII, few companies have been held accountable for “aiding and abetting” acts of persecution, internment, deportation, and extermination, except for the most egregious ones—IG Farben and Krupp being the standouts, as well as leading German bankers who were tried at the International Military Tribunal of Nurnberg and who lived like destitute princes under house arrest at Landsberg Prison until their release was ordered by the Americans.

In Europe only a small number of corporate executives and bankers went to prison or were fined for their wartime role as "collaborators."  None were punished in the United States, Canada, Great Britain or in the so-called neutral countries. And yet… tens of millions of documents are stocked on shelves in archives in the United States and Europe which illustrate and quantify the gory details of how the private sector was allowed to enrich itself off of persecution and genocide. Yes, crime does pay again and again and again.

There were a handful of punishments (if you want to call them that) meted out against companies in the past two decades.


Leading Swiss banks agreed to pay 1.25 billion dollars instead of the ad minima sum of 10 billion dollars that had been requested by the plaintiffs in order to settle class action lawsuits for their "mishandling" of financial assets deposited in their facilities by Jewish owners who fell victim to Nazism. The settlements paved the way for a groundbreaking merger of two of the three defendant Swiss banks.

JP Morgan and Chase National Bank were asked to donate a small sum of money to Holocaust survivors in exchange for authorization to merge into a megabank. They both had tripled their profits in German-occupied France in part through the Aryanization and reselling of Jewish-owned companies and real estate.

Ford Motor Company underwrote the ad-free screening on American television of “Schindler’s List” and contributed a token sum of money to charitable causes dealing with the Holocaust in exchange for being left alone about its role as an employer of Jewish and other slave labor during the Third Reich.

Barclays Bank settled for an absurdly small amount to wriggle its way out of litigation that linked its wartime activities to the fleecing of Jews living in occupied territories.

Slave labor settlements negotiated with Jewish organizations enabled multibillion dollar German companies to contribute sums that would help needy Holocaust survivors in exchange for "Holocaust peace."

The Italian insurer, Generali, was “fined” 100 million dollars out of the billions that it stole from Holocaust victims, the worst settlement on record dealing with Holocaust-era profiteering.

And the list goes on. For every company named above, there are hundreds, no, thousands that went about their business in the postwar era, unmolested, same executives, same corporate offices.

It’s hard to imagine how one can discuss the Holocaust without thinking that the most important financial, commercial and mercantile pump to the international wartime and postwar economic order came from the stolen and recycled wealth and assets of the victims of the New Order, mostly Jewish but also from non-Jews. Jewish assets were restructured, comingled with "non-Jewish" assets, Jewish-owned companies were merged into new holding companies and joint ventures through aryanization schemes that were, in fact, wholesale thefts of corporate assets. No one has been held accountable and especially not the armies of lawyers, accountants, and "notaires" who were indispensable for establishing these new "Aryan" entities and facilitating these thefts.

That stark reality explains why restitution in the postwar years was a dead letter no sooner had the word "restitution" been uttered and printed on official Allied documents.

Reparations became the token expression of what the victorious Allies and postwar governments in Europe refused to do, which was to hold the private sector fully accountable for its complicity in crimes against humanity. Had there been such justice, our ethical and moral fibers might be playing different tunes today and we might all be the better for it.

With so much cynicism about our capacity as a species to tolerate and endure mass murder and wholesale persecution around the globe, it is difficult to react except with the usual disgust at the news that a company like the French Railroad Company (SNCF) implicated in the deportation of Jews from German-occupied France has been trying to convince state governments and Holocaust remembrance institutions in the United States to accept charitable donations in order to help it cleanse its  wartime record... and facilitate its bids for contracts to provide high-speed train technology to the US. The public relations departments are working overtime to spin these fake expressions of contrition and repentance into genuine ethical moments that we are asked to savor.