Photographs of Jewish Clothing in Nazi Germany and the Shoah: Visual Records of Economic Assaults, Exploitation, and Plunder

Abstract

Pictures of Jewish clothing allow viewers to witness the centrality of clothes in Nazi persecution and expropriation both before and during the genocide of Jewish Europeans. The photographs serve as documentary records and vehicles for seeing specific situations in which buying, selling, producing, wearing, and stealing clothes was part of everyday life in Nazi Germany, occupied Europe, and the Holocaust. They demonstrate the importance of clothing as goods sold and produced by Jewish people and as a locale for publicly targeting and socially segregating them. This article focuses on several photographs of clothing stores, forced labor workshops in ghettos, massacre sites, and concentration and death camps to expose the dynamics of Nazi economic persecution and dispossession before and during the genocide of Jewish people across Europe.