This essay examines Eastern European Jewish livelihoods in western Germany during the first years after the Holocaust. It charts the different paths Jewish displaced persons (DPs) took into the world of work, including the Allied economy, the black market and the German economy. Over time, entrepreneurial activity in the formal Germany economy would become the main means of making a living. In the period covered here, however, the consequences of Nazi-era persecution converged with the postwar remnants of a racialized economic order to strongly disadvantage Jewish foreigners seeking to “set up shop.”