‘Intimate Dispossession’: The Theft of Jewish Clothes during and after the Holocaust

The theft of Jewish personal belongings during the Holocaust was the most widespread but also the most tabooed aspect of genocidal dispossession. Yet the history of mundane items stolen from Jewish households and used for decades after the war’s end in many homes in eastern Europe remains little known. This chapter reconstructs the modalities of this ‘intimate dispossession’, listing the conditions in which Jewish clothes would be appropriated by non-Jews; the consequences of despoliation, especially the gendered aspects; the strategies for domesticating Jewish clothes; the unwritten rules of despoliation; and the boundaries of social taboo. Based on survivors’ testimonies and interviews and the records of post-war trials of Nazi collaborators, this chapter attempts a microhistory of this most intimate form of genocidal dispossession as an embodied dimension of violence.