Fear and misery in the Third Reich: from the files of the collective guardianship office of the Berlin Jewish community.

"Guardian and ward have left. There are no assets." This was the terse formulation used by the National Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland) in the 1940s when it had to "propose" to the county court that a guardianship be terminated. It was the closing comment for most of the 106 extant individual case files of the collective guardianship (Sammelvormundschaft) that had been administered by the Berlin Jewish Community. While these files contain numerous indications that the original number must have been far larger, that incompleteness does not detract in any way from the historical value of what has been preserved. In particular, the materials cast new light on a phenomenon that has tended to be treated only marginally in historical research on the Berlin Jewish Community: poverty within the Jewish population, with all the concomitant social, psychological, and material consequences for the families involved.