Genocide and Property:

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss the relationship between genocide and property transfer. In the growing interdisciplinary field of genocide studies much useful research has been conducted into the evolution of separate genocides such as the destruction of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust in Europe, the Great Terror in the USSR and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Much is also known on specific aspects of genocidal processes. For example, there is both separate and comparative research on the turn from a more or less ‘normal’ civic society to a genocidal society, the motives of the ordinary killers, the power and operation of charismatic leaders, the gender-related aspects of violence and, indeed, the dispossession of the victims. In all genocides the possessions of the victims, both individually and as a group, play a role in the initiation, development and aftermath phases of the destruction.¹

A Jewish survivor returns from a concentration camp and meets a Christian friend in Budapest, who asks him how he is doing. ‘Don’t ask’, says the Jew, ‘I came back from the camp, and now I have nothing left except for the clothes you are wearing.’

Hungarian Jewish joke in the aftermath of the Second World War