THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Jewish wealth confiscated by the Nazis paid for almost a third of the German war effort, a new study has found.
Nearly 120 billion Reich marks – over £12 billion at the time – was plundered from German Jews by laws and looting.
The official study commissioned by the ministry examined the years from 1933 to 1945. Hans-Peter Ullmann, a Cologne history professor, said the tax authorities under the Nazis actively worked to "destroy Jews financially" and to loot wealth in the nations the Germans occupied.
Even Jews who managed to escape from Germany before the Holocaust had to leave part of their wealth behind in the form of an "exit tax". Tax laws discriminated against Jews from 1934 onwards.
The ministry raised money for the war effort through taxes, borrowing and "outright theft," Prof Ullmann said. "Conservatively, their money financed at least 30 per cent of the German war effort," he added.
Christine Kuller of the University of Munich, who also worked on the study, said tax offices built whole hierarchies of bureaucrats "who discovered dwellings and bank accounts and emptied them". The bureaucrats then disposed of all traces of those who disappeared in the extermination camps.
She added; "Post war there was a myth that the civil servants of the finance ministry were neutral; the reality was that anti-Semitism among them was an everyday occurrence." >>> Allan Hall in Berlin | Tuesday, November 09. 2010
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: German Foreign Ministry 'actively encouraged Holocaust': A German government report has concluded that German diplomats were complicit in the murder of millions of jews during the Second World War. >>> | Thursday, October 28, 2010
