Event Highlights: Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953
This event, organized by the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, celebrated the recent publication of Prof. Jonathan Zatlin’s new book, Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953, by the University of Michigan Press. Zatlin, Associate Professor of History at Boston University, and his co-editor Christoph Kreutzmüller, a Senior Historian of the House of the Wannsee-Conference, Berlin, were joined by Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University and Julie Keresztes, PhD candidate in History, and Ana Maria Reyes, Associate Professor of Art History, both at Boston University.
The book is a collection of essays by a range of international, multidisciplinary scholars explores the financial history, social significance, and cultural meanings of the theft, starting in 1933, of assets owned by German Jews. Despite the fraught topic and the ongoing legal discussions, the subject has not received much scholarly attention until now. It offers a much needed contribution to our understanding of the history of the period and the acts. The essays examine the confiscatory taxation of Jewish property, the looting of art and confiscation of gold, the role of German freight forwarders in property theft, salesmen and dispossession in the retail world, theft from the elderly, and the complicity of the banking industry, as well as the reach of the practice beyond German borders.