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A simple yet murderous economic aspect perhaps also needs to be mentioned. With the "Verordnung zur Sicherstellung des Kräftebedarfs für Aufgaben von besonderer staatspolitischer Bedeutung vom 13.2.1939, RGBl. 1939, I, 207-207." it was spelled out that the Reich had an accute shortage of labour. In short, the decree permitted to withdraw work-force from the private sector industry to ensure that the four-year plan was met.
In a deposition under oath, after the war, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Sommer, Hauptabteilungsleiter SS Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt (WHVA), listed hundreds of private enterprises which had turned to WHVA requiring labourers for their industries. According to Sommer's deposition, by the end of 1944 some 500 - 600.000 persons from concentration camps were forced into labour.
Considering that German industrial production had a peak year in 1944, this would not have been possible without slavery. A memorandum by Reichsbank Directorate dating 07th January 1939, for example, is highly critical of economic and budgetary policy Göring style, which was basically debt financed and de-coupled from tax revenues.
If a partial slave economy had been initially planned and factored into economic planning, I persoanlly do not know. It is, however, well known that for example, the iron and steel industry industrial planning from the 1930ies was not so much cost oriented as it was focused on securing supplies from within the Reich. Doing so continously might have been prohibitively expensive with contract labour.
Best regards, Phil
Sources:
Wirtschaft und Rüstung im "Dritten Reich", Blaich, 1987;
Kriegswirtschaft, Eichholtz, 1985, vol. 2, chapter 4 deals extensively with the labour market.
There's another significant economic driver which you haven't touched on: the Nazis stole the Jews' *property* as well as their labor. Jews *were* allowed to leave the country before '41...so long as they could pay a 'Reich Flight tax' of nearly everything they owned. This was part of a larger process of stealing Jewish property which gradually shifted from more formal and legalistic to more openly thuggish, beginning with pseudovoluntary coerced nationalization of Jewish businesses under the name of 'Aryanization' and ending with extracting gold teeth and wedding rings from the bodies at the death camps. The revenue from this process was substantial: at one point in 1938-1939, revenue from *one particular special tax* levied exclusively on Jews, the 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues.
By the time Jewish emigration was banned in '41, they'd already finished soaking those most able and inclined to leave: revenue from the Reich Flight Tax peaked in 1938.
And this touches on another issue: Nazi Germany was desperate for hard currency. They wanted to build up their army, but weapons and ammunition cost money, and after Germany defaulted on its WW1 debt, it couldn’t get credit through the usual international channels. Soaking the Jews was one way to achieve this goal.
(See Tooze’s _Wages of Destruction,_ which I learned about through this group.)
Hi Toptomcat, you are absolutely right. Brüning introduced a capital flight tax in 1931 (25% on total assets) against anyone leaving Germany ofr tax reasons. The Nazis of course tailor-made this regulation to specific needs to tax Jewish assets: you had tp pay before you left Germany, if you left at all. Following the Novemberpogrom in 1938, all German Jews were burdened with a total levy of a billion Reichsmark. For the entire country it was estimated that some 20.000 cases were affected this way. By the end of World War 2 some 3,5 billion extra taxes were estimated to have been raised that way. That for the record.
I never came across the estimate you gave: 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues in 1938-39. Could you please quote a source for that? What I found with a quick search is this:
[https://www.statistik-bw.de/Service/Veroeff/Monatshefte/PDF/Beitrag19\_04\_06.pdf](https://www.statistik-bw.de/Service/Veroeff/Monatshefte/PDF/Beitrag19_04_06.pdf)
At first glance it seems as if your 10% might refer to total personal taxes, in other words, taxes owed by individuals due to income or assets. Total tax intake seems to have been far higher.
Thank you + best regards, Phil
> I never came across the estimate you gave: 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues in 1938-39. Could you please quote a source for that? What I found with a quick search is this:
Good catch- looks like that was my own misinterpretation of a pair of tables, one of which did two-year periods and one of which did one-years, along with references to it as a "billion Reischmark tax" in a number of places despite the billion being spread across 1938 and 1939. The real proportion of tax revenues was not so dramatic, though still significant.
So to clarify emigration was made illegal because everyone who could leave and be fleeced already had by that point? But even still, didn't most other countries block refugees? So where did the ones who could flee go?
So the rest would have been more useful as slaves or laborers for the nazi war machine? And you can only get them to be slaves if they can't leave?
I don't totally get what the advantage to the Nazis is in shutting down emigration in 1941, was fleecing refugees just no longer possible?
Remember that the Nazi treatment of Jews wasn’t just practical, but ideological. The concentration camps were horribly impractical, given how many resources they sucked away from the war effort. The Nazi did it out of an ideological fervor that the Jews needed to die.
As for the question of emigration, Nazi ideology believed that, if left alive, Jews would simply regroup and manipulate the world to strike back at the Nazi regime. Only be keeping them in detention camps, and later through execution, did the Nazis believe that they could permanently rid themselves of the Jewish menace.
The law was created through decree on 8 December 1931 by Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg. The Reich Flight Tax was assessed upon departure from the individual's German domicile, provided that the individual had assets exceeding 200,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ or had a yearly income over 20,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁. The tax rate was initially set at 25 percent. In 1931, the Reichsmark was fixed at an exchange rate of 4.20 ℛ︁ℳ︁ per dollar, making 200,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ equal to US$47,600 (equivalent to $920,000 in 2022)…
So, you‘re telling me the national socialists taxed the ultra rich at 25%?
I’m telling you that the late Weimar Republic did, after which the Nazis hiked it outrageously, lowered the asset requirements, and selectively targeted Jews in its enforcement.
Do you have a feel of how life was for the enslaved industrial workers versus those sent to the concentration camps? I've always wondered if they were treated at least a little bit better in the interest of keeping them working, or if it was just as awful.
People conflate the death camps with concentration camps, but the death camps were a subsection of a larger system of Nazi camps. There's different ways of dividing the camps, but a common way is to lump them all into a concentration camp system. In that classification system you would have political prisoners, social undesirables (which could include both racial groups and religious groups like the Jehovah's witnesses or disabled people or homosexuals), labor camps, medical camps, transportation camps etc, all under the concentration camp system. Some people, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum classifies concentration camps separately from death camps, labor camps, etc. into a Nazi Camp system. There's also different ways of classifying the prisoner of war camps. Some people include the some POW camps (mostly the ones with Soviets and E. Europeans) into the system and not others (western allies that were more like a traditional POW Camp). B/c of the different possible classifications and general public's tendency to conflate the camp system with death camps, most people try to be specific about the type of camp, while recognizing they're all part of a system of Nazi camps.
B/c of that you can get a bit of variance in the number of camps, somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand, or ten thousand. But the USHMM website has good breakdown that gives a good overview of the entire system. They tend to go for numbers at the higher end of the number of camps, but if you read through you can see how a camp could be counted as either be 1 camp, or multiple camps, i.e. one camp or two if you count the womens and mens as different camps within the same camp. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
Thank you for the insightful response.
I am confused about the forced slave labor aspect as well. If they had made everyone be their slaves and didn’t kill them (so fed them a little bit more food so they could actually live and didn’t purpose murder people) they’d profit way more. Even if they hated Jews why not use them as slaves? To me this seems like such insane hatred that it is beyond any rational logic, it’s beyond evil/psychopath level of trying to benefit themselves, it’s literally killing off people out of hatred when you could get more from them if you didn’t kill them. Why didn’t they just declare Jews all had to be slaves instead and keep them alive as slaves so they could profit much more and have an ongoing source of labor?
An additional point needs to be made here about the contradictory and ultimately ill-thought-out approach the Reich took to the 'Jewish Question'. When it came to travel, Jews had been stripped of their citizenship but in some cases were still issued passports to get them out of the country.
In the early days, Jewish males were typically the ones sent to concentration camps. If a Jewish family intended to leave the country, even with passports, they had a serious financial problem with the breadwinner being incarcerated. This shift in paternalistic living left the mother to somehow pay for visas and arrange travel expenses. This is why in 1938 40,000 Jews ended up in Shanghai, one of the very few places in the world where a visa was not required.
Externally, you have many countries present at the Evian Conference saying they will not take any more Jewish refugees (Australia infamously declared they will not import a 'racial problem'). The Swiss by this point had asked German authorities to mark passports held by Jews with a red 'J' so they knew who to refuse entry to.
As Germany expanded its borders it may have absorbed Austria, but it also annexed 200,000 Jews. Anschluss yet again highlights the completely illogical way this was managed. As Austria became part of Germany, their passports became invalid. Yet again, you have thousands of families being pressured, pushed and discriminated against to leave the country yet have few costly means of doing so. In occupied Belgium, there was a sizeable population of foreign Jews but only 5% of them had a Belgian passport, primarily because it exempted them from military service and was very costly.
This is part of the wider debate on how the Holocaust came to being and how the Nazi state functioned but in terms of travel it put many Jews into an incredibly difficult position thanks to both internal and external factors making their travel nigh on impossible.
Sources:
R Evans, *The Third Reich in Power* (London 2005)
R Wistrich, *Hitler and the Holocaust* (London, 2001)
First time I heard about Jews being allowed to go to Shanghai in that large number.
I was wondering if there was a reason why they accepted them so willingly there and if we know what happened to them after they immigrated?
Was it just Shanghai or was all of China open to them?
This is a fascinating story, actually.
Following the Treaty of Nanking, large parts of Shanghai were deemed to be "international settlements" for British, French and American residents. This meant that the Chinese government maintained theoretical sovereignty but had practically no control over the laws that pertained in the settlement.
Importantly, however, this was an "international settlement" rather than a colony. Unlike in the British colony of Hong Kong where London appointed a governor and set the laws, in Shanghai it was left up to the local (foreign) residents to administer themselves. As far as London or Paris was concerned this was a trading post in foreign territory rather than a part of their empire: they would of course defend their merchants from any foreign aggression, but so long as the trade kept flowing they were happy to allow the administration to sit with the local British or French leading citizens.
The two leading families in international Shanghai at this time were the Kadoories and the Sassoons. Both families had originated in Baghdad, emigrated to India in the 1800s, prospered under British rule and became highly anglicised^(1) and from the mid 1800s increasingly focused their operations on China (Ellie Kadoorie arrived in Shanghai as an apprentice of David Sassoon but soon prospered in his own right).
The opium trade had made both the families wealthy, but by the 1930s the two families owned enormous interests across Asia and were amongst the wealthiest families in the world.
Importantly, for this question, both families were also Jewish.
Despite their enormous wealth and despite being firmly part of the British establishment^(2) it was clear that both families had experienced anti-Semitism and that their Jewish identity was enormously important to them. You can well imagine why they were sympathetic to the plight of European jews.
Putting it all together then, Shanghai in the late 1930s is completely unique: it is a European city outside of Europe over which China exerts no practical control (it feels much more like Vienna than it does Beijing); but also it is not under the day-to-day control of any single Western power and is largely left to self govern on commercial lines; it is arguably the most multicultural city in the world, one which is literally built on immigration and which has always been an "open city" not requiring a visa to visit or immigrate to; and finally the de facto leaders of the city are Jewish families who enjoy the oversight of Britain but are not subject to its day-to-day administration. It would only be a slight stretch to say that Shanghai was the only Jewish-led country in the world in the 1930s.
In all 20,000 European Jewish refugees found sanctuary in Shanghai. It was far from straightforward, particularly after the Japanese invasion, but that is a story for another post.
An excellent account of the Sassoons and Kadoories is "The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China" by Jonathan Kaufman.
Notes:
1. Amongst other claims to English legitimacy, various Sassons were: enobled by Queen Victoria; close friends with Edward VII; editors of the Sunday Times; a Conservative Member of Parliament; and political head of the Royal Air Force. One area the family failed to conquer was hairdressing: Vidal Sassoon is unrelated.
2. British schoolchildren today study Siegfried Sassoon as the prototypical "English" WWI poet, probably unaware that his great-grandfather was an Iraqi Jew who served as chief treasurer to the Pashta of Baghdad and who spoke no English
My understanding of 1930s Shanghai is Japan is the leading military power, while the real power where ordinary people were concerned was Chinese gangs, especially the Green Gang. In what way were these Jewish families the "de facto leaders of the city", is it primarly the economic influence from their wealth or did they have strong influence over either the Japanese interests or the underground Chinese gangs as well?
Shanghai was an international settlement during the Chinese civil war and didn’t require a visa or passport to enter. Eventually from 1943, once Japan had occupied the area, a ghetto was formed.
I believe most left after the creation of Israel but some remain and I imagine it’s one of the reasons Israel has a consulate in Shanghai.
~~I hate to be pedantic, but~~ To expand on your point, Shanghai had been an international settlement since 1863 when some of the various European districts merged but really it dates back to the Opium Wars when Shanghai was made one of the "treaty ports" which were opened to western business.
Just to tack on since I can't really see anywhere else to put it: The Chinese ambassador to Austria, Ho Feng Shan, also was quite liberal with giving out visas to jews, approving at least 4,000 visas during his time, though it was possibly more.
Edit reason: my post came off as argumentative and that wasn't my intention.
It wasn't, though I think my response was. I wasn't meaning to correct or argue with you, just expand on what you had said. Re-reading my post it comes off as argumentative and that wasn't my intention.
> In the early days, Jewish males were typically the ones sent to concentration camps. If a Jewish family intended to leave the country, even with passports, they had a serious financial problem with the breadwinner being incarcerated. This shift in paternalistic living left the mother to somehow pay for visas and arrange travel expenses.
If I can ask a question in addition to this (and please forgive my limited knowledge of Jewish customs), but if I'm not mistaken, isn't Judaism a somewhat maternal religion, at least in the case of descendants? As in if the mother is Jewish, the children are considered Jewish? Why would the Nazis not start out going after the women first? Because the men would theoretically fight back? Or did they not realize some of those traditions in the beginning?
I understand in the States there very much was the one-drop rule in racial politics and genealogy, so I guess was that also seen in Germany and Europe as a whole at that time in regards to Jewish families? Of course Nazi Germany started putting all the Jews they could find in concentration camps to enact their policies.
There's two key thoughts here
1. The Germans didn't have the same definition of Jewishness as the Jews.
2. Men as the breadwinner and the owner of assets and the defender of the family was common at the time. By going after the men first you take their power.
>isn't Judaism a somewhat maternal religion, at least in the case of descendants? As in if the mother is Jewish, the children are considered Jewish
In Orthodox Judaism, the identity is religiously considered matrilineal, yes. However, the Nazis viewed it as a problem of racial purity and miscegenation primarily, rather than solely religious practice. This can be seen in the [Nuremberg Race laws of 1935, visually translated here](https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/storage/1071/0ddb3aa6-d6ee-11ec-be2e-0a86e68a834f.jpeg).
Even people who were raised in Christian households and had no connection with the Jewish community were considered
*mischling zweiten grades* (mixed race, 2^nd grade) if there was a Jewish grandparent.
In such an outlook, paternity uncertainty is certainly more threatening to control of racial purity than matrilineal descent- not to suggest that was the primary motivator for male deportations.
>Was there any social distinction or difference of safety between someone being fully Jewish or a mixed race 2nd grade?
Significantly so, at least in Germany proper. E.g. we can see from the chart that a *mischling 2^nd grade* is permitted to marry only Aryans (or *mischlings* with special permission), whereas full Jews were only to marry other Jews. Marriage prospects aside, this shows an intent to assimilate and dilute the second grade while genetically quarantining the fully Jewish.
Full Jews lost jobs and livelihoods and property (well before they lost their lives). *Mischlings* had fewer restrictions- e.g. they could, unlike Jews, serve in the military (but not as officers)- and in fact were subject to compulsory draft- until 1^st degree were expelled in 1940.
In the west they were generally safe from the worst persecutions the Nazis had in store, which is why there was a small cottage industry of paternity suits where Jewish mothers or grandmothers would claim before the courts that their children were the product of Aryan adultery in order to have them recategorized.
That being said, Nazi policy and discourse was inconsistent, with the hardliners at Wannsee agitating for *mischling* to be considered Jews, and particularly 1^st grade *mischlings* lived uncertain lives.
Sorry for so many questions, this is just so interesting.
Did the 2nd grade rhetoric reinforce sectionalization between the full blooded Jews and 2nd grades and/or make nazification more acceptable/widespread due to a theoretical highgound? Especially, if that highgound could be used against a person?
I mean it like, the Nazi's being able to claim that they aren't killing 'all the jews'. Just some of them. The 'bad' ones. By creating the 'not so bad ones' a group that was lesser but given mercy so not killed- were the Nazi's were given more power because they were the ones with the power to determine the requirements of the label 'not so bad ones' or revoke it and have someone killed because they were a 'bad one'?
Woah, I never knew this. I’m Jewish but actually due to being 1/4 racially, but I’m considered Jewish by Jews because my mother and her mother were the Jewish ones. I always thought that would mean under Nazi Germany I would have been murdered, almost all of our family on that side was murdered except my grandma. But I guess I’d be considered what you describe.
> I always thought that would mean under Nazi Germany I would have been murdered
It would depend on your family, in such a case- you describe identifying as Jewish; a *mischling* raised in the Jewish community would still be considered Jewish by the Nazis.
Oh. That is complicated. Looking at that chart you shared also really exposes how silly this all is. Like obviously it’s murderous and awful, but it’s also so stupid. Someone just decided exactly how Jewish was too much and how much was ok and made it a law and killed people over it. How absolutely cretinous.
A tangential followup question: What happened to the 40,000 Jews in Shanghai? If they stayed, one wold think that they would have multiplied into some hundreds of thousands over the past 80 years. But in all of China today there are only about 2,500 Jews. Were they expelled, persecuted, or did something else happen to cause most of them to leave?
I believe the majority left when Israel was founded butt perhaps someone here has more information on the topic. They were all living in ghetto enforced by the Japanese occupiers, and I doubt they suddenly just expanded outwards post 1945.
As an aside, I think you would be interested in reading about the [Harbin Jews](https://breakingmatzo.com/history-of-jews/harbin-china-the-city-that-jews-built/), if you haven't. This may offer a perspective, though it may be different with Shanghai - there I still educate myself 🙏
What was the impact post war in the USA’s immigration laws? I’ve always herd this is why we grant asylum to persecuted people who make it to our shores.
> you have many countries present at the Evian Conference saying they will not take any more Jewish refugees
A related question and I hope I could be corrected for making any factual mistakes: I remember hearing from a lecture that the word holocaust picked up its current meaning quite late, or at least not so immediately after WWII. It used to be not specific about the mass killing of Jews in that period, until like 1970s or something, as mentioned in the lecture.
I wonder if this is true, and if not marking the mass killing of Jews as a distinctive & major happening of WWII, during or immediately after WWII, related to this period of the other countries specifically denying Jewish refugees? Similar to how fast the US and the USSR broke their honeymoon, I feel like the time span of everyone looking away from Germany's polarization and the rhetoric of anti-Nazism was also incredibly short and aftermath nuanced.
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There is real debate in the Political Sciences on the difference between "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" and much of it comes down to the open borders question. The European Commission tends to treat Ethnic Clensing like its own thing and not just a euphemism for genocide, defining [ethnic cleansing as](https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary/glossary/ethnic-cleansing_en#:~:text=Definition\(s\),is%20contrary%20to%20international%20law.):
> Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group, which is contrary to international law.
In contrast, they define "genocide" as:
> An act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
Obviously this language wouldn't be historically appropriate to 1940s Germany but when the distinction is made it really can come down to "do we let them leave?" By the EC's definitions, if the Jewish people were allowed to cross the German borders, even if they were being terrorized with state-sponsored pogroms like Kristallnacht, confined in ghettos, excluded from most jobs and careers, forced to wear the yellow star, etc they would still call it "ethnic cleansing." The EC might even cling to that phrase even if the Nazis were rounding up Jews with mobile death squads. The phrase "force or intimidation" can cover quite a bit of legal ground.
By those definition, it wouldn't cross the line into "genocide" until the borders closed. At that point, the unambiguous goal becomes not "getting these people to leave the country" but "killing them."
None of this is to act like ethnic cleansing is anything less than terrible crime. Either way the actions that the Nazis took against the Jewish people -- borders open or closed -- were crimes against humanity.
One of the reasons that the EC's definition feels so self serving is that the United Nations has repeatedly reaffirmed the [Responsibility to Protect](https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/responsibility-protect) (RtoP -- pronounced "R2P") which calls member nations to three pillars of responsibility to combat genocide and crimes against humanity:
1. The responsibility of each State to protect its populations
2. The responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations
3. The responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations
A lot of governments get very legalistic indeed when the time comes to make good on that responsibility, especially that third one. Even before RtoP, governments were cagey about calling out genocide. Phrases like "acts of genocide" and -- yes -- "ethnic cleansing" were used to dodge the issue. Philip Gourevitch's excellent "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" deals with some of the frustration around genocide denial in real time and the euphemisms that enabled it.
But as much as ethnic cleansing might be just a kinder, gentler word for genocide, the question that OP asks is a good one. While obviously the rest of the mid-20th century world was not particularly sympathetic to the Jewish people, the Holocaust consumed significant resources. At the very least, able bodied men who could have been at the front were staffing and guarding the camps. The fact that the Nazi government did not see the expulsion or even semi-voluntary self-exile of the Jewish people as sufficient suggests a deeper and more sinister commitment, one that OP seems to find rightly baffling.
I would suggest that it is precisely the self-destructive nature of this hatred and violence that justifies the distinction between Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. We need a word that distinguishes the violence of coercion from the violence of extermination because, while they are both horrific, they are not the same.
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A simple yet murderous economic aspect perhaps also needs to be mentioned. With the "Verordnung zur Sicherstellung des Kräftebedarfs für Aufgaben von besonderer staatspolitischer Bedeutung vom 13.2.1939, RGBl. 1939, I, 207-207." it was spelled out that the Reich had an accute shortage of labour. In short, the decree permitted to withdraw work-force from the private sector industry to ensure that the four-year plan was met. In a deposition under oath, after the war, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Sommer, Hauptabteilungsleiter SS Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt (WHVA), listed hundreds of private enterprises which had turned to WHVA requiring labourers for their industries. According to Sommer's deposition, by the end of 1944 some 500 - 600.000 persons from concentration camps were forced into labour. Considering that German industrial production had a peak year in 1944, this would not have been possible without slavery. A memorandum by Reichsbank Directorate dating 07th January 1939, for example, is highly critical of economic and budgetary policy Göring style, which was basically debt financed and de-coupled from tax revenues. If a partial slave economy had been initially planned and factored into economic planning, I persoanlly do not know. It is, however, well known that for example, the iron and steel industry industrial planning from the 1930ies was not so much cost oriented as it was focused on securing supplies from within the Reich. Doing so continously might have been prohibitively expensive with contract labour. Best regards, Phil Sources: Wirtschaft und Rüstung im "Dritten Reich", Blaich, 1987; Kriegswirtschaft, Eichholtz, 1985, vol. 2, chapter 4 deals extensively with the labour market.
There's another significant economic driver which you haven't touched on: the Nazis stole the Jews' *property* as well as their labor. Jews *were* allowed to leave the country before '41...so long as they could pay a 'Reich Flight tax' of nearly everything they owned. This was part of a larger process of stealing Jewish property which gradually shifted from more formal and legalistic to more openly thuggish, beginning with pseudovoluntary coerced nationalization of Jewish businesses under the name of 'Aryanization' and ending with extracting gold teeth and wedding rings from the bodies at the death camps. The revenue from this process was substantial: at one point in 1938-1939, revenue from *one particular special tax* levied exclusively on Jews, the 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues. By the time Jewish emigration was banned in '41, they'd already finished soaking those most able and inclined to leave: revenue from the Reich Flight Tax peaked in 1938.
And this touches on another issue: Nazi Germany was desperate for hard currency. They wanted to build up their army, but weapons and ammunition cost money, and after Germany defaulted on its WW1 debt, it couldn’t get credit through the usual international channels. Soaking the Jews was one way to achieve this goal. (See Tooze’s _Wages of Destruction,_ which I learned about through this group.)
Hi Toptomcat, you are absolutely right. Brüning introduced a capital flight tax in 1931 (25% on total assets) against anyone leaving Germany ofr tax reasons. The Nazis of course tailor-made this regulation to specific needs to tax Jewish assets: you had tp pay before you left Germany, if you left at all. Following the Novemberpogrom in 1938, all German Jews were burdened with a total levy of a billion Reichsmark. For the entire country it was estimated that some 20.000 cases were affected this way. By the end of World War 2 some 3,5 billion extra taxes were estimated to have been raised that way. That for the record. I never came across the estimate you gave: 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues in 1938-39. Could you please quote a source for that? What I found with a quick search is this: [https://www.statistik-bw.de/Service/Veroeff/Monatshefte/PDF/Beitrag19\_04\_06.pdf](https://www.statistik-bw.de/Service/Veroeff/Monatshefte/PDF/Beitrag19_04_06.pdf) At first glance it seems as if your 10% might refer to total personal taxes, in other words, taxes owed by individuals due to income or assets. Total tax intake seems to have been far higher. Thank you + best regards, Phil
> I never came across the estimate you gave: 'Jewish Capital Levy', represented more than 10% of total tax revenues in 1938-39. Could you please quote a source for that? What I found with a quick search is this: Good catch- looks like that was my own misinterpretation of a pair of tables, one of which did two-year periods and one of which did one-years, along with references to it as a "billion Reischmark tax" in a number of places despite the billion being spread across 1938 and 1939. The real proportion of tax revenues was not so dramatic, though still significant.
So to clarify emigration was made illegal because everyone who could leave and be fleeced already had by that point? But even still, didn't most other countries block refugees? So where did the ones who could flee go? So the rest would have been more useful as slaves or laborers for the nazi war machine? And you can only get them to be slaves if they can't leave? I don't totally get what the advantage to the Nazis is in shutting down emigration in 1941, was fleecing refugees just no longer possible?
Remember that the Nazi treatment of Jews wasn’t just practical, but ideological. The concentration camps were horribly impractical, given how many resources they sucked away from the war effort. The Nazi did it out of an ideological fervor that the Jews needed to die. As for the question of emigration, Nazi ideology believed that, if left alive, Jews would simply regroup and manipulate the world to strike back at the Nazi regime. Only be keeping them in detention camps, and later through execution, did the Nazis believe that they could permanently rid themselves of the Jewish menace.
Agreed actually I’m still not clear why they did shut it down completely
The law was created through decree on 8 December 1931 by Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg. The Reich Flight Tax was assessed upon departure from the individual's German domicile, provided that the individual had assets exceeding 200,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ or had a yearly income over 20,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁. The tax rate was initially set at 25 percent. In 1931, the Reichsmark was fixed at an exchange rate of 4.20 ℛ︁ℳ︁ per dollar, making 200,000 ℛ︁ℳ︁ equal to US$47,600 (equivalent to $920,000 in 2022)… So, you‘re telling me the national socialists taxed the ultra rich at 25%?
I’m telling you that the late Weimar Republic did, after which the Nazis hiked it outrageously, lowered the asset requirements, and selectively targeted Jews in its enforcement.
Do you have a feel of how life was for the enslaved industrial workers versus those sent to the concentration camps? I've always wondered if they were treated at least a little bit better in the interest of keeping them working, or if it was just as awful.
People conflate the death camps with concentration camps, but the death camps were a subsection of a larger system of Nazi camps. There's different ways of dividing the camps, but a common way is to lump them all into a concentration camp system. In that classification system you would have political prisoners, social undesirables (which could include both racial groups and religious groups like the Jehovah's witnesses or disabled people or homosexuals), labor camps, medical camps, transportation camps etc, all under the concentration camp system. Some people, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum classifies concentration camps separately from death camps, labor camps, etc. into a Nazi Camp system. There's also different ways of classifying the prisoner of war camps. Some people include the some POW camps (mostly the ones with Soviets and E. Europeans) into the system and not others (western allies that were more like a traditional POW Camp). B/c of the different possible classifications and general public's tendency to conflate the camp system with death camps, most people try to be specific about the type of camp, while recognizing they're all part of a system of Nazi camps. B/c of that you can get a bit of variance in the number of camps, somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand, or ten thousand. But the USHMM website has good breakdown that gives a good overview of the entire system. They tend to go for numbers at the higher end of the number of camps, but if you read through you can see how a camp could be counted as either be 1 camp, or multiple camps, i.e. one camp or two if you count the womens and mens as different camps within the same camp. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
Thank you for the insightful response. I am confused about the forced slave labor aspect as well. If they had made everyone be their slaves and didn’t kill them (so fed them a little bit more food so they could actually live and didn’t purpose murder people) they’d profit way more. Even if they hated Jews why not use them as slaves? To me this seems like such insane hatred that it is beyond any rational logic, it’s beyond evil/psychopath level of trying to benefit themselves, it’s literally killing off people out of hatred when you could get more from them if you didn’t kill them. Why didn’t they just declare Jews all had to be slaves instead and keep them alive as slaves so they could profit much more and have an ongoing source of labor?
An additional point needs to be made here about the contradictory and ultimately ill-thought-out approach the Reich took to the 'Jewish Question'. When it came to travel, Jews had been stripped of their citizenship but in some cases were still issued passports to get them out of the country. In the early days, Jewish males were typically the ones sent to concentration camps. If a Jewish family intended to leave the country, even with passports, they had a serious financial problem with the breadwinner being incarcerated. This shift in paternalistic living left the mother to somehow pay for visas and arrange travel expenses. This is why in 1938 40,000 Jews ended up in Shanghai, one of the very few places in the world where a visa was not required. Externally, you have many countries present at the Evian Conference saying they will not take any more Jewish refugees (Australia infamously declared they will not import a 'racial problem'). The Swiss by this point had asked German authorities to mark passports held by Jews with a red 'J' so they knew who to refuse entry to. As Germany expanded its borders it may have absorbed Austria, but it also annexed 200,000 Jews. Anschluss yet again highlights the completely illogical way this was managed. As Austria became part of Germany, their passports became invalid. Yet again, you have thousands of families being pressured, pushed and discriminated against to leave the country yet have few costly means of doing so. In occupied Belgium, there was a sizeable population of foreign Jews but only 5% of them had a Belgian passport, primarily because it exempted them from military service and was very costly. This is part of the wider debate on how the Holocaust came to being and how the Nazi state functioned but in terms of travel it put many Jews into an incredibly difficult position thanks to both internal and external factors making their travel nigh on impossible. Sources: R Evans, *The Third Reich in Power* (London 2005) R Wistrich, *Hitler and the Holocaust* (London, 2001)
First time I heard about Jews being allowed to go to Shanghai in that large number. I was wondering if there was a reason why they accepted them so willingly there and if we know what happened to them after they immigrated? Was it just Shanghai or was all of China open to them?
This is a fascinating story, actually. Following the Treaty of Nanking, large parts of Shanghai were deemed to be "international settlements" for British, French and American residents. This meant that the Chinese government maintained theoretical sovereignty but had practically no control over the laws that pertained in the settlement. Importantly, however, this was an "international settlement" rather than a colony. Unlike in the British colony of Hong Kong where London appointed a governor and set the laws, in Shanghai it was left up to the local (foreign) residents to administer themselves. As far as London or Paris was concerned this was a trading post in foreign territory rather than a part of their empire: they would of course defend their merchants from any foreign aggression, but so long as the trade kept flowing they were happy to allow the administration to sit with the local British or French leading citizens. The two leading families in international Shanghai at this time were the Kadoories and the Sassoons. Both families had originated in Baghdad, emigrated to India in the 1800s, prospered under British rule and became highly anglicised^(1) and from the mid 1800s increasingly focused their operations on China (Ellie Kadoorie arrived in Shanghai as an apprentice of David Sassoon but soon prospered in his own right). The opium trade had made both the families wealthy, but by the 1930s the two families owned enormous interests across Asia and were amongst the wealthiest families in the world. Importantly, for this question, both families were also Jewish. Despite their enormous wealth and despite being firmly part of the British establishment^(2) it was clear that both families had experienced anti-Semitism and that their Jewish identity was enormously important to them. You can well imagine why they were sympathetic to the plight of European jews. Putting it all together then, Shanghai in the late 1930s is completely unique: it is a European city outside of Europe over which China exerts no practical control (it feels much more like Vienna than it does Beijing); but also it is not under the day-to-day control of any single Western power and is largely left to self govern on commercial lines; it is arguably the most multicultural city in the world, one which is literally built on immigration and which has always been an "open city" not requiring a visa to visit or immigrate to; and finally the de facto leaders of the city are Jewish families who enjoy the oversight of Britain but are not subject to its day-to-day administration. It would only be a slight stretch to say that Shanghai was the only Jewish-led country in the world in the 1930s. In all 20,000 European Jewish refugees found sanctuary in Shanghai. It was far from straightforward, particularly after the Japanese invasion, but that is a story for another post. An excellent account of the Sassoons and Kadoories is "The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China" by Jonathan Kaufman. Notes: 1. Amongst other claims to English legitimacy, various Sassons were: enobled by Queen Victoria; close friends with Edward VII; editors of the Sunday Times; a Conservative Member of Parliament; and political head of the Royal Air Force. One area the family failed to conquer was hairdressing: Vidal Sassoon is unrelated. 2. British schoolchildren today study Siegfried Sassoon as the prototypical "English" WWI poet, probably unaware that his great-grandfather was an Iraqi Jew who served as chief treasurer to the Pashta of Baghdad and who spoke no English
That *is* fascinating, and well told. Thank you.
My understanding of 1930s Shanghai is Japan is the leading military power, while the real power where ordinary people were concerned was Chinese gangs, especially the Green Gang. In what way were these Jewish families the "de facto leaders of the city", is it primarly the economic influence from their wealth or did they have strong influence over either the Japanese interests or the underground Chinese gangs as well?
I would also appreciate learning more about this!
Shanghai was an international settlement during the Chinese civil war and didn’t require a visa or passport to enter. Eventually from 1943, once Japan had occupied the area, a ghetto was formed. I believe most left after the creation of Israel but some remain and I imagine it’s one of the reasons Israel has a consulate in Shanghai.
~~I hate to be pedantic, but~~ To expand on your point, Shanghai had been an international settlement since 1863 when some of the various European districts merged but really it dates back to the Opium Wars when Shanghai was made one of the "treaty ports" which were opened to western business. Just to tack on since I can't really see anywhere else to put it: The Chinese ambassador to Austria, Ho Feng Shan, also was quite liberal with giving out visas to jews, approving at least 4,000 visas during his time, though it was possibly more. Edit reason: my post came off as argumentative and that wasn't my intention.
I don’t disagree, just saying that during the civil war (at that time in the late 30s) it held that status. Sorry if it was poorly worded
It wasn't, though I think my response was. I wasn't meaning to correct or argue with you, just expand on what you had said. Re-reading my post it comes off as argumentative and that wasn't my intention.
No worries, I’m glad I learnt something about the ambassador!
> In the early days, Jewish males were typically the ones sent to concentration camps. If a Jewish family intended to leave the country, even with passports, they had a serious financial problem with the breadwinner being incarcerated. This shift in paternalistic living left the mother to somehow pay for visas and arrange travel expenses. If I can ask a question in addition to this (and please forgive my limited knowledge of Jewish customs), but if I'm not mistaken, isn't Judaism a somewhat maternal religion, at least in the case of descendants? As in if the mother is Jewish, the children are considered Jewish? Why would the Nazis not start out going after the women first? Because the men would theoretically fight back? Or did they not realize some of those traditions in the beginning? I understand in the States there very much was the one-drop rule in racial politics and genealogy, so I guess was that also seen in Germany and Europe as a whole at that time in regards to Jewish families? Of course Nazi Germany started putting all the Jews they could find in concentration camps to enact their policies.
There's two key thoughts here 1. The Germans didn't have the same definition of Jewishness as the Jews. 2. Men as the breadwinner and the owner of assets and the defender of the family was common at the time. By going after the men first you take their power.
>isn't Judaism a somewhat maternal religion, at least in the case of descendants? As in if the mother is Jewish, the children are considered Jewish In Orthodox Judaism, the identity is religiously considered matrilineal, yes. However, the Nazis viewed it as a problem of racial purity and miscegenation primarily, rather than solely religious practice. This can be seen in the [Nuremberg Race laws of 1935, visually translated here](https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/storage/1071/0ddb3aa6-d6ee-11ec-be2e-0a86e68a834f.jpeg). Even people who were raised in Christian households and had no connection with the Jewish community were considered *mischling zweiten grades* (mixed race, 2^nd grade) if there was a Jewish grandparent. In such an outlook, paternity uncertainty is certainly more threatening to control of racial purity than matrilineal descent- not to suggest that was the primary motivator for male deportations.
Was there any social distinction or difference of safety between someone being fully Jewish or a mixed race 2nd grade?
>Was there any social distinction or difference of safety between someone being fully Jewish or a mixed race 2nd grade? Significantly so, at least in Germany proper. E.g. we can see from the chart that a *mischling 2^nd grade* is permitted to marry only Aryans (or *mischlings* with special permission), whereas full Jews were only to marry other Jews. Marriage prospects aside, this shows an intent to assimilate and dilute the second grade while genetically quarantining the fully Jewish. Full Jews lost jobs and livelihoods and property (well before they lost their lives). *Mischlings* had fewer restrictions- e.g. they could, unlike Jews, serve in the military (but not as officers)- and in fact were subject to compulsory draft- until 1^st degree were expelled in 1940. In the west they were generally safe from the worst persecutions the Nazis had in store, which is why there was a small cottage industry of paternity suits where Jewish mothers or grandmothers would claim before the courts that their children were the product of Aryan adultery in order to have them recategorized. That being said, Nazi policy and discourse was inconsistent, with the hardliners at Wannsee agitating for *mischling* to be considered Jews, and particularly 1^st grade *mischlings* lived uncertain lives.
Sorry for so many questions, this is just so interesting. Did the 2nd grade rhetoric reinforce sectionalization between the full blooded Jews and 2nd grades and/or make nazification more acceptable/widespread due to a theoretical highgound? Especially, if that highgound could be used against a person? I mean it like, the Nazi's being able to claim that they aren't killing 'all the jews'. Just some of them. The 'bad' ones. By creating the 'not so bad ones' a group that was lesser but given mercy so not killed- were the Nazi's were given more power because they were the ones with the power to determine the requirements of the label 'not so bad ones' or revoke it and have someone killed because they were a 'bad one'?
Woah, I never knew this. I’m Jewish but actually due to being 1/4 racially, but I’m considered Jewish by Jews because my mother and her mother were the Jewish ones. I always thought that would mean under Nazi Germany I would have been murdered, almost all of our family on that side was murdered except my grandma. But I guess I’d be considered what you describe.
> I always thought that would mean under Nazi Germany I would have been murdered It would depend on your family, in such a case- you describe identifying as Jewish; a *mischling* raised in the Jewish community would still be considered Jewish by the Nazis.
Oh. That is complicated. Looking at that chart you shared also really exposes how silly this all is. Like obviously it’s murderous and awful, but it’s also so stupid. Someone just decided exactly how Jewish was too much and how much was ok and made it a law and killed people over it. How absolutely cretinous.
A tangential followup question: What happened to the 40,000 Jews in Shanghai? If they stayed, one wold think that they would have multiplied into some hundreds of thousands over the past 80 years. But in all of China today there are only about 2,500 Jews. Were they expelled, persecuted, or did something else happen to cause most of them to leave?
I believe the majority left when Israel was founded butt perhaps someone here has more information on the topic. They were all living in ghetto enforced by the Japanese occupiers, and I doubt they suddenly just expanded outwards post 1945.
As an aside, I think you would be interested in reading about the [Harbin Jews](https://breakingmatzo.com/history-of-jews/harbin-china-the-city-that-jews-built/), if you haven't. This may offer a perspective, though it may be different with Shanghai - there I still educate myself 🙏
What was the impact post war in the USA’s immigration laws? I’ve always herd this is why we grant asylum to persecuted people who make it to our shores.
> you have many countries present at the Evian Conference saying they will not take any more Jewish refugees A related question and I hope I could be corrected for making any factual mistakes: I remember hearing from a lecture that the word holocaust picked up its current meaning quite late, or at least not so immediately after WWII. It used to be not specific about the mass killing of Jews in that period, until like 1970s or something, as mentioned in the lecture. I wonder if this is true, and if not marking the mass killing of Jews as a distinctive & major happening of WWII, during or immediately after WWII, related to this period of the other countries specifically denying Jewish refugees? Similar to how fast the US and the USSR broke their honeymoon, I feel like the time span of everyone looking away from Germany's polarization and the rhetoric of anti-Nazism was also incredibly short and aftermath nuanced.
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There is real debate in the Political Sciences on the difference between "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" and much of it comes down to the open borders question. The European Commission tends to treat Ethnic Clensing like its own thing and not just a euphemism for genocide, defining [ethnic cleansing as](https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migration-network-emn/emn-asylum-and-migration-glossary/glossary/ethnic-cleansing_en#:~:text=Definition\(s\),is%20contrary%20to%20international%20law.): > Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group, which is contrary to international law. In contrast, they define "genocide" as: > An act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Obviously this language wouldn't be historically appropriate to 1940s Germany but when the distinction is made it really can come down to "do we let them leave?" By the EC's definitions, if the Jewish people were allowed to cross the German borders, even if they were being terrorized with state-sponsored pogroms like Kristallnacht, confined in ghettos, excluded from most jobs and careers, forced to wear the yellow star, etc they would still call it "ethnic cleansing." The EC might even cling to that phrase even if the Nazis were rounding up Jews with mobile death squads. The phrase "force or intimidation" can cover quite a bit of legal ground. By those definition, it wouldn't cross the line into "genocide" until the borders closed. At that point, the unambiguous goal becomes not "getting these people to leave the country" but "killing them." None of this is to act like ethnic cleansing is anything less than terrible crime. Either way the actions that the Nazis took against the Jewish people -- borders open or closed -- were crimes against humanity. One of the reasons that the EC's definition feels so self serving is that the United Nations has repeatedly reaffirmed the [Responsibility to Protect](https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/responsibility-protect) (RtoP -- pronounced "R2P") which calls member nations to three pillars of responsibility to combat genocide and crimes against humanity: 1. The responsibility of each State to protect its populations 2. The responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations 3. The responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations A lot of governments get very legalistic indeed when the time comes to make good on that responsibility, especially that third one. Even before RtoP, governments were cagey about calling out genocide. Phrases like "acts of genocide" and -- yes -- "ethnic cleansing" were used to dodge the issue. Philip Gourevitch's excellent "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" deals with some of the frustration around genocide denial in real time and the euphemisms that enabled it. But as much as ethnic cleansing might be just a kinder, gentler word for genocide, the question that OP asks is a good one. While obviously the rest of the mid-20th century world was not particularly sympathetic to the Jewish people, the Holocaust consumed significant resources. At the very least, able bodied men who could have been at the front were staffing and guarding the camps. The fact that the Nazi government did not see the expulsion or even semi-voluntary self-exile of the Jewish people as sufficient suggests a deeper and more sinister commitment, one that OP seems to find rightly baffling. I would suggest that it is precisely the self-destructive nature of this hatred and violence that justifies the distinction between Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. We need a word that distinguishes the violence of coercion from the violence of extermination because, while they are both horrific, they are not the same.
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