Götz Aly

Another major source of stop-gap revenues to fund Hitler’s popular tax and rearmament policies was Germany’s — and later much of Europe’s — Jewish population. By late 1937, civil servants in the Finance Ministry had pushed the state’s credit limit as far as it would go. Forced to come up with ever more creative ways of refinancing the national debt, they urged their attention to property owned by German Jews, which was soon confiscated and added to the so-called Volksvermögen, or the collective assets of the German people.

Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2005), Jefferson Chase, trans., p. 41.