It may seem that every aspect of the Holocaust has been thoroughly analyzed, but three American academicians have opened up a new research field through their five-year study of the long-range economic impact of the extermination of Jews in some areas occupied by the Nazis during World War II.
The study concludes that to this day the economies in large areas of Russia under Nazi rule 65 years ago lag substantially behind neighboring areas that were spared Nazi occupation and where most of the Jewish middle class survived.
In cities and districts where Jews were largely wiped out, not only do residents earn less than in the rest of Russia, but they are politically less reform minded and cling more to old Communist loyalties.
The conclusions in “Social Structure and Development: A Legacy of the Holocaust in Russia” are based on research by political scientists and economists James A. Robinson of Harvard, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tarek A. Hassan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Drawing mainly on detailed Russian census data, supplemented by reports of Nazi death squads, the three professors studied the demographics and economies of 48 oblasts (administrative districts) across Russia, of which 11 in western Russia were overrun by the German army early in the war, with the subsequent extermination of 1 million Soviet Jews.
Although making up only a minute fraction of the total population of the prewar Soviet Union, Jews predominated in the productive middle class. In some of the oblasts under German control, Jews made up 1 percent of the population but represented 70 percent of all physicians. Jews also predominated in high-skill trade and education occupations.
In the prewar Soviet Union, 67 percent of Jews held white-collar jobs, compared to only 15 percent of non-Jews.
“The persecution of the Jews had long-lasting effects on the societies left behind, not because Jews constituted a large share of the population, but because they constituted a large share of the key strata of society which are essential constituents of economic and political development,” Hassan said.
Concretely, the study found that in 2002, per capita gross domestic product in the 11 Nazi-occupied oblasts lagged 23 percent behind the nationwide GDP.
In their political outlook, voters in the 11 oblasts were more likely to elect Communist candidates than in the rest of Russia and more likely to support keeping the Soviet Union intact in a crucial 1991 plebiscite.
Taking the long historical view, Hassan said he believes it is easier for a nation to clean up the physical devastation of a catastrophic war than it is to replace the destruction of its middle class.
For example, while Europe has been completely rebuilt since World War II, the effect of the extermination of the Jewish middle class lingers on.
Robinson noted that while the Holocaust and its aftermath have been thoroughly examined from the psychological, cultural and moral aspects, the economic consequences have been largely overlooked.
The same omission pervades much of the history of the killing and expulsion of targeted religious and ethnic populations in centuries past. An exception, though, is the extensive research on the expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots by the Catholic monarchy of France in the early 17th century, which deprived the country of its most skilled craftsmen, Acemoglu said.
More recent and limited is a study by University of Warwick economics professor Fabian Waldinger on the effect on mathematical research of the expulsion of Jewish faculty members from German universities in the 1930s.
The current study breaks new ground in analyzing the economic impact of the Holocaust, but Robinson warns that “this is the first attempt to analyze this question … and is not meant as the final word on this topic.”
The research by the three academicians was funded in part by the William A. Ackman Fund for Holocaust Studies and the Warburg Foundation.
