Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944 [Paperback]

The center of the art world before the war, Paris fired the Nazis greed. The discovery of more than 1,500 prized paintings and drawings in a private Munich residence, as well as a recent movie about Allied attempts to recover European works of art, have brought Nazi plundering back into the headlines, but the thievery was far from being limited to works of art. From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jewsmostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europewere robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz. Brought from Paris in 1945, the photographs were cataloged by the staff of the Munich Central Collecting Point. Beyond bearing witness to the petty acts of larceny, these images provide crucial information on how the Germans saw their work. They enable us to grasp the Nazi gaze and to confront the issue of the relation between greed and mass destruction.

This is a rich volume that encourages us to look closely at the photographs and read them in detailed historical context, revealing layers of meaning for countless ordinary lives, which Gensburger painstakingly attempts to redeem from their silence.

1. Paris, Capital of Plunder
2. Looking at the Past, Witnessing History: The Koblenz Album
3. The Photographs
4. Images and Traces of the Past
Bibliography
Index

The material for Sarah Gensburger's study is for the most part previously unseen: a collection of eighty-five photos taken in France during the Occupation [...] These are particularly powerful images. They are all the more so because of the meaning that is given to them through the analysis and historical commentary of the authorWith piercing insight, Sarah Gensburger guides readers through this extraordinary collectioló$