The Nazi War on Wealth

I read 2 non-fiction books at my cottage in Canada last month, which is 1 below my average. (The weather was nicer than average.) One was The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. The author is Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin.

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

Here’s an interesting discussion about how the Nazis propagandized against wealth that relatively prosperous Jews in Austria had acquired:

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in the world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat—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 our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn’t believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed. (pp. 56-57)

 

(0 COMMENTS)