Auction of items belonging to Jews from Lörrach before their deportation to France on 22 October 1940.
Photo: Gustav Kühner. Stadtarchiv Lörrach, StaLö 2.43.7.
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- Das Vermögen des Juden, der die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit auf Grund dieser Verordnung verliert, verfällt mit dem Verlust der Staatsangehörigkeit dem Reich. (…)
- Das verfallene Vermögen soll zur Förderung aller mit der Lösung der Judenfrage im Zusammenhang stehende Zwecke dienen.
- The assets of the Jew who loses his German nationality by virtue of this decree are expropriated by the Reich […].
- Assets thus expropriated shall serve to further all purposes connected with the solution of the Jewish question.
The Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, 25.11.1941, section 3, legalized the confiscation of property from German Jews deported to the East.
Theft was an integral part of the persecution of Jews. In Nazi Germany, Jewish-owned property was confiscated and sold at auctions. The bank accounts and flats of Jews and the belongings they had left behind were seized. In the General Government, Jewish communities were forced to pay heavy fees and donate certain items, such as clothes or metal.
Furniture from Jewish homes after the Jews were displaced from Wieniawa, Lublin 1940.
Source: Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
One of Globocnik’s main goals was to strengthen his economic position through Jewish forced labour. He founded the ‘Ostindustrie’ company, which had 45,000 Jewish workers by mid-1943.
We had to get out of the carriages as quickly as possible and were led into the Sobibór camp. Suddenly we came to a very large barrack with the front and back doors wide open. As we walked through, we had to hand over everything we had with us, rucksacks, bread bags, everything was gone. We thought: ‘Heavens, how are we going to get this back?’ And I had taken my guitar from home and protected it in the Westerbork camp and in the railway wagon – that’s how naive I was back then.
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Jules Schelvis, born in 1921 in Amsterdam, recorded in 2007.
List of personal items taken from Jews in the death camp in Belzec and sent to the warehouses of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ in Lublin on 8.2.1943.
Source: State Museum at Majdanek Archive.
A central aspect of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ involved mass looting. Upon arrival in the death camps, Jews were robbed of their last suitcases. The belongings of Jews from all over Europe were collected, sorted, registered, and stored in depots in Lublin – such as in the ‘Lager Flugplatz’ – and became the property of the German Reich.
The area of the German Flugplatz camp at the former airport in Lublin, circa 1941. During the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ Flugplatz served as a selection square and central place for the segregation and storage of property looted from Jews murdered in the extermination camps.
Marek Gromaszek’s Collection.
During the day, we were in a large hall where planes had been produced. I think there were three large, round halls next to each other. Women had to sort the clothes there.One should not be able to recognise that the clothes had belonged to Jews. They tied a bundle together and then – as we now know – the clothes were sent to Germany.
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Jules Schelvis, born 1921 Amsterdam, recorded 2007.
During and after the deportations, Jewish homes were looted by the Germans, and then by the local population. ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ is estimated to have made nearly 179 million German marks in profits.
Extras:
Jules Schelvis
The Eleventh Decree, 1941
Marek Gromaszek’s Collection
Jules Schelvis was born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam on 7 January 1921. He lived and worked in Amsterdam as a printer until 26 May 1943, when he was deported with his wife and family to the Westerbork camp, from which his journey began through various extermination, concentration and labour camps, including Sobibor, Dorohucza and Lublin. He was liberated by French troops at Vaihingen/Enz in southern Germany on 8 April 1945.
He returned to the Netherlands after the war and continued to work as a printer. It was not until thirty years after his terrible experience in the camps that he began to confront his history and the history of the Holocaust. He accompanied groups and students who studied the subject, speaking about the events of the Holocaust as one of the last witnesses and trying to promote remembrance. He published a book on the Sobibor death camp, which became one of the key works on the subject. He died in 2016.
Marek Gromaszek’s Collection
Wartime photographs of Lublin collection includes over 130 photographs from the private collection of Marek Gromaszek. Taken by German soldiers, they mainly depict images of the wartime districts of Podzamcze and the Old Town. Some feature information on the back and some are dated. Most are in a semi-postcard format. The entire collection has been digitised by the ‘Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre’ Centre.
Marek Gromaszek’s Collection
The Eleventh Decree, 1941
On 25 November 1941, the 11th Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law (RGBl I 1941, p. 722ff) was issued. Under it, all citizens recognised as Jews on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws no longer residing on the territory of the German Reich were deprived of their German citizenship. The decree also stated that their property was forfeited to the German Reich, which was a state-sanctioned form of looting. Those deported were never to recover either their confiscated belongings or their remaining property, which had been auctioned off.
The Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, 25.11.1941, section 3, printed in the German Reich Law Journal, Part I, Volume 1941, p. 722–724. Published by the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Berlin 1941.
The original document The Eleventh Decree, 1941 – Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
The Eleventh Decree, 1941 for reading