Neither citizens nor Jews: Jewish property rights after the Holocaust, a tentative survey

The topic of the Jewish property seized or plundered during the Holocaust resurfaced in the 1990s, becoming one of the most active fields of research in Holocaust Studies. This article attempts to retrace the suggestions made by the World Jewish Congress, starting in 1944, about how to address the problem of restitution and compensation. How did these proposals contend with the persistence of a traditional juridical framework, especially within each system of municipal law? Did international law provide adequate tools for managing such an unprecedented scenario? Was the pressure applied by Jewish organizations successful? This article presents some of the issues that most commonly arose in various Western European countries in regard to Jewish restitution (the problem of heirless property or of ‘enemy alien’ assets held by a number of national Custodians), shedding light on how conflicts between the criteria of nationality and the yardstick of race often constituted a major obstacle to righting the wrongs Jews had suffered.