Abstract

Before the Nazis took power, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin thrived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. But Nazi racism changed that, gradually destroying Jewish businesses before murdering the Jews themselves. Reconstructing the fate of more than 8,000 companies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish economic activity and its obliteration. Rather than just examining the steps taken by the persecutors, it also tells the stories of Jewish strategies in countering the effects of persecution. In doing so, this book exposes a fascinating paradox where Berlin, serving as the administrative heart of the Third Reich, was also the site of a dense network for Jewish self-help and assertion.

Christoph Kreutzmüller is a curator of the new permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He has written extensively in the field of the Holocaust, economic and photographic history. His publications include National Economies: Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (2015, co-editor Michael Wildt and Moshe Zimmermann) and Fixiert: Fotografische Quellen zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden in Europa (2016, with Julia Werner), forthcoming is Dispossession, Plundering German Jewry 1933-1953 (2017, co-editor with Jonathan Zatlin). Together with Hans-Christian Jasch he has just edited The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference (Berghahn, 2017).

“Kreutzmüller's well written study deals with resistance offered by Berlin's Jews in the face of Hitler's legal machinery to destroy their economic selfreliance. The exhaustive research... abundant examples and case studies complement the data, making the book useful for both research and teaching.” ·Choice

“Christoph Kreutzmüller's book is vigorously researched, elegantly structured and well-written, and succeeds in providing new information on a subject already exhaustively studied, namely ‘Aryanization’ and the destruction of business, that extends beyond the borders of Berlin.” · H-Net