The Nazi War on Wealth

I read two non-fiction books at my cottage in Canada last month, which is 1 below my average. (The weather was nicer than average.) One was that The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How a Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. The author is Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin.

I will post at least twice on the content that caught my economist’s attention. I see economics everywhere.

Here is an interesting discussion of how the Nazis propagandized against the wealth that relatively prosperous Jews had acquired in Austria:

Nazi radio blamed us for all the filthy evil in the world. The Nazis called us inhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of planning to kill them, to rob them blind; stated that she had to conquer the world to prevent this us of conquering the world. The radio said we had to lose everything we owned; that my father, who had fallen to his death on the job, had not actually worked for our nice apartment – ​​the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother’s ears – that we had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Did our friends and neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn’t believe it. They weren’t stupid. But they had suffered from depression, inflation and unemployment. They wanted to become wealthy again, and the fastest way to get there was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews owned. (page 56-57)