Intimate Dispossession: The Afterlives of Plundered Jewish Personal Possessions in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

Introduction

This project aims to write the history of the great plunder of small things—everyday household objects and personal items, including clothing—looted on a mass scale by local non-Jews during, and in the aftermath of, the Holocaust.

Historical Context

While historical research has focused on the top-down and centralized Nazi state's takeover of Jewish financial assets, real estate, businesses, or art objects, we know nothing about the afterlives of unmarked objects of daily use that changed hands in the course of the Holocaust and continued being used for decades in the small local communities of East-Central Europe.

Project Objectives

The main objectives of the project are to:

1. Document different modes of how Jewish personal possessions were appropriated by non-Jewish local populations of East-Central European shtetls.
2. Examine how these possessions have been redeployed, adapted, and misused by their new owners.
3. Assess the social and psychological trans-generational impact of this kind of plunder on the communities of both the beneficiaries and the victims.

Methodology

Breaking with the top-down view on Holocaust dispossession, this project focuses on eight microstudies of communities located in three different administrative units of German-occupied East-Central Europe.

Novelty of the Project

PLUNDERED LIVES' novelty lies in:

• A combination of microhistorical analysis with qualitative approaches of social studies and social psychology.
• Extending the typical time frame (1939-1945) to include dispossession practices that continued after WWII.
• Experimental outreach strategies of digital crowdsourcing, curatorial interventions in public spaces, and cross-generational interviewing to elicit responses from the implicated communities and document hitherto inaccessible material in private possession.

Interdisciplinary Approach

Highly interdisciplinary, PLUNDERED LIVES will open avenues for future research into the fields of genocide studies, anthropology of conflict, social psychology, economic history, and forensic studies.