Perception of Jewish displaced persons as criminals in early postwar Germany: lingering stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophecies

Many Germans clung to the fiction that the decimated Jews remained threatening. The Jewish DP was often imagined to be abusive of Christians, capable of radical communism, capable of dishonesty, intrigue and even murder, without shame or modesty, physically abusive, a smuggler, rich and greedy. The stereotype of Jewish criminality continued to inform and inflame the immediate postwar period