What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using powerful eye-witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, Martin Dean's new book reveals local policemen as hands-on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbors from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murders. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot-soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using powerful eye-witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, Martin Dean's new book reveals local policemen as hands-on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbors from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murders. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot-soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property, demonstrating the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from below and state-directed measures. In Western Europe the economic persecution of the Jews took the form of legal decrees and administrative measures. In Eastern Europe authoritarian governments adopted the Nazi program that excluded Jews from the economy and seized their property, based...