Holocaust & Memory

Materiality of Genocidal Violence: Testimonies of Robbery of Jewish Possessions in Lithuanian Provinces during the Holocaust. Holocaust and Genocide Studies. with Dovilė Budrytė. In Press.

In just several summer and fall months in 1941, 80% or 150,000 to 160,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered by the Nazis and Lithuanian auxiliary police and paramilitary units. Local non-Jewish eyewitnesses, whose testimonies constitute the major data in this article, remembered looting, robbery, and redistribution of Jewish property and possessions as an integral part of the Holocaust in Lithuanian provinces. In this article we ask how materiality is implicated in histories of genocide, conceptualizing looting and robbery as a form of genocidal violence. Based on the testimonies, the appropriation of Jewish property and possessions in Lithuanian provinces can be divided into four stages: (1) expropriation and looting at the beginning of Nazi invasion; (2) theft of Jewish things and clothing at the shooting pits; (3) redistribution of Jewish property and possessions after mass shootings; (4) murdering individual Jews, survivors of mass shootings, for property and things. We analyze the materiality of genocidal violence as intimate dispossession to refer to local auxiliaries’ and inhabitants’ appropriation of immovable property and personal possessions of Jews by looting, robbing, undressing the bodies, extracting teeth, wearing clothing, and living in Jewish homes. By moving into Jewish homes and accepting or purchasing Jewish
possessions local people became implicated in the genocide.

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