More than half of the municipalities where Jewish property was expropriated and resold during the Second World War have investigated their own role in the looting trade or are still doing so. This is evident from a round of questions by research platform Pointer among all 218 municipalities where it is known that Jewish homes and pieces of land were traded during the war.
A total of 135 municipalities are scrutinizing the predatory trade, of which 74 municipalities have already completed the investigation. Eindhoven, Apeldoorn, Lochem and Winterswijk, among others, have donated tens to hundreds of thousands of euros to Jewish foundations and memorial centers in response to the results, as a moral restoration of rights.
During the Second World War, the German occupier traded more than 7100 Jewish-owned properties. The administration of those transactions is in the so-called Verkaufsbücher, which was digitized in 2019. Most of the expropriated property was resold to entrepreneurs and real estate dealers, but the Verkaufsbücher shows that a number of municipalities themselves purchased Jewish properties from the German occupier.
According to Pointer, the 135 municipalities investigating the robbery trade mainly want to know whether this also applies to them, or whether they played a different role in the expropriation. It is also being investigated how the municipalities dealt with Jews who returned to their hometown after the Second World War. For example, after the war, municipalities collected back taxes from Jewish returnees who had gone into hiding or were in concentration camps during the war.
Of the 218 municipalities where looting of Jewish property took place, 53 tell Pointer not to investigate this. Some say they do not see the need for this or prefer to wait until next of kin report. It is not known to what extent thirty municipalities intend to conduct an investigation.
Pointer has been researching the looting of Jewish-owned properties and plots of land during the Second World War for some time. Since the digitization of the Verkaufsbücher, the research collective has already published several times about it, after which dozens of municipalities launched an investigation into their own role. That number has now risen to 135. In 2021, Pointer won a Sigma Award for publications about the predatory trade, the prize for the best data journalism in the world.
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