A 1938 Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their Wealth—Making It Easier to Steal
Eighty years ago, the edict marked a turning point in the Nazi party’s efforts to push Jews out of the German economy
By Lorraine Boissoneault
smithsonian.com
April 26, 2018
The new law came mere weeks after the Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. On April 26, 1938, the “Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property†issued by Hitler’s government took effect, requiring all Jews in both Germany and Austria to register any property or assets valued at more than 5,000 Reichsmarks (around $2,000 in American currency of the period, or $34,000 today). From furniture and paintings to life insurance and stocks, nothing was immune from the registry. By July 31 of that year, German finance officials had collected paperwork from some 700,000 Jewish citizens—7 billion Reichsmarks-worth of wealth ripe for state-sanctioned theft known as “aryanization.â€
“Aryanization was essentially a gigantic, trans-European trafficking operation in stolen goods,†writes historian Götz Aly in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. As Nazi-occupied territory grew from Austria to Poland to more of Eastern Europe, so, too, did the number of Jewish families the Nazis could steal from. Jews had faced discrimination in Germany—and much of Europe—before the April 1938 edict, but that new law marked a turning point. One legal advisor for the Nazi Ministry of Economics deemed it the “forerunner to a complete and definitive removal of Jews from the German economy.â€
Read more:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-jews-register-their-wealthmaking-it-easier-steal-180968894/#GetGMtzdAus0ZwSc.99
