Author on Aryanization of Jewish property: “The Holocaust was not a Nazi event”

taz: Mr. Flesch, how did you come to the subject of Aryanization?

Armin H. Meat: I received an email from an acquaintance, Rolf Sturm. His grandfather had owned a factory in Frankfurt until the Jewish family left Germany in 1935 and the factory was Aryanized. The current owners claim on their website that they can look back on 100 years of family tradition right up to the founding of the company.

taz: Which was a lie.

Meat: Exactly. The company was founded in 1914, but not by the current owners. All attempts to talk to the Elsen family failed. This was not about financial issues, but simply about a correct historical representation on the website. This is where my research began.

taz: Now you have had a number of files closed for yearsr Aryanization evaluated. Aryanization – what does this word mean and why is it so rarely heard?

Meat: Before May 8, 1945, everyone in Germany knew this word, but after May 9, 1945, suddenly no one could remember it. For example, if a Jew had a department store, even if it was founded by his grandfather, expanded by his father and now managed by himself, then he owned it, but it did not belong to him, because as a non-Aryan he was a foreign body. He was – I am now speaking in the diction of anti-Semites since the end of the 19th century – a “parasite on the German national body”. If you take the department store away from him, you’re not taking it away from him at all, you’re giving it back to the German people.

taz: What effects does Aryanization still have today?

Meat: The vast majority of the household goods stolen from those deported and murdered were never returned. When Jews were taken to the extermination camps, they left their homes and furnishings behind. These legacies were offered for sale at public auctions. And people came because it was worth it. You knew you were getting something for a reasonable price. It was like a big summer sale. If there were survivors after 1945, they had to prove that each piece had belonged to their family. But who still has receipts after Auschwitz?

taz: And the descendants have these items partly until today.

Meat: Yes. When guests come, two silver candlesticks and the elegant gold-rimmed porcelain are placed on the pretty old Biedermeier table, and the silver cutlery, which has also been inherited, lies next to it. And no one asks themselves: Where did Grandma and Grandpa actually get this stuff? When and under what conditions did they buy it? From whom? What did you pay for it?

taz: What you describe is the participation of “normal Germans” in the Holocaust.

Meat: Exactly. It is wrong to say that the Holocaust, in its materialization, was a Nazi event. The Holocaust was a crime of the Germans. And also the non-Nazis. Almost everyone participated and benefited. Have you ever looked at photos of the people in the concentration camps with their heads shaved and asked yourself: What did they actually do with their hair?

taz: No. What happened to the hair?

Meat: The men’s hair was sold to felt factories for 50 pfennigs a kilo, probably cheaper than sheep’s wool. This not only made shoe inserts for the Eastern Front, but also hats. Yes, the fellow citizen took off his hat and saluted himself with the hair of his murdered neighbor. Women’s hair was sold to wig factories, and “Aryan” comrades wore the hair of their murdered neighbor on their heads as wigs. The dental gold was taken from the mouths of the murdered and used to make Wehrmacht dental gold in addition to gold bars. That was what came into the mouths of German soldiers. When you see how quickly a people who are considered righteous can turn into a bunch of greedy, ruthless, unempathic criminals, then you realize that this could happen again, anywhere in the world – including in Germany.