Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (33 page)

In November 1941, the German Currency Protection Command in France ordered state obligations that had come due to be paid out only on the express request of the holder of the debts. In the case of government bonds placed in receivership, including all bonds owned by Jews and enemies of the Reich, the securities were frozen.
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This measure had the immediate effect of relieving pressure on the treasury.

This system of financing the war was in all likelihood the one used by all German commissioners at the central banks of German-occupied countries. Between 1941 and 1942, Germany and allies such as Hungary and Romania officially “collected” (that is, confiscated without compensation) all government bonds voluntarily or involuntarily acquired by Jews. It made little difference whether or not confiscation was accompanied by a piece of legislation. Even when assets were not legally expropriated, the freezing of bonds when they came due still provided considerable financial flexibility for countries waging World War II.

THE WEHRMACHT had anottechnique for raising money quickly. When the Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, Germany and Italy invaded Vichy France and Tunisia. Within a few weeks, the Wehrmacht demanded payments of 3 billion francs a month “for the protection” of the French colony.
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The French government did not have nearly enough money to cover this additional expense.

Immediately on landing in Tunisia, the Wehrmacht arrested Moïse Borgel, the leader of Tunisia’s Jewish community, and a number of prominent Jewish community members. They were soon released—on the condition that the Jewish community provide forced laborers for the construction of Luftwaffe bases. Tunisia’s Jews were also required to pay more than 31 million francs for the upkeep of those laborers. According to historian Michael Laskier, “In order to meet the various German demands, the Jewish leadership was compelled to mortgage real estate and to use the property of affluent Jews as guarantee for bank loans. Thus, the terror organized against the Jews had a significant financial aspect.”
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The situation was hardly atypical. The practice of forcing Jews to mortgage property or other assets as security for war loans was a common means of theft used by Wehrmacht officials. Few specific details are available about the extent of this practice, but evidence suggests that the intendant director of occupied Belgium discussed instituting similar policies with the official responsible for Jewish affairs in the Reich Finance Ministry. Because the auctioning off of Jewish assets had foundered on the opposition of Belgian financiers and the reluctance of ordinary Belgians “to purchase formerly Jewish-owned property from the military command,” the Wehrmacht officer suggested “taking out the highest possible compulsory mortgages in the name of Jewish owners.” Sufficient credit was available, the officer argued, and “the monies raised could then be confiscated. In this way, the Reich would quickly be able to realize at least part of the value of this property without having to sell it off below its actual value.”
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In Germany, too, discussions were held about compulsory mortgages on Jewish property “in the interests of financing the war.”
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As was the case almost everywhere else in occupied Europe, the dispossession of Jews in France evolved in a series of individual measures: the estimation of the value of assets, restrictions on the owners’ control over them, and the imposition of trustee administrators, who then liquidated those assets. On October 16, 1940, Walther von Brauchitsch held a meeting in the Ritz Hotel in Paris with the head of the economics division of the Wehrmacht High Command, Elmar Michel; the head of the administrative division, Werner Best; and the former minister of Würtemberg, Jonathan Schmid. The minutes included a summary of the meeting’s agenda: “Ministerial Director Michel is to report on the state of the measures we have planned concerning Jewish businesses in occupied French territory in light of the ordinances that have already been prepared.” Brauchitsch welcomed “across the board” suggestions on “an acceleration of those measures since it is unclear whether we Germans will be in a position in a couple of months to carry out or forcibly implement those measures we have deemed proper for Jews in France.” In response to a question, he “said he actively supported the idea of mostly appointing French citizens as trustees.”

In light of the diligence displayed by the Wehrmacht in;s generals and the occupation authority’s leading economist, SS officer Werner Best—who would have normally been responsible for enforcing anti-Semitic ideology—apparently felt it unnecessary to deliver the standard lecture on the Jewish question. (He restricted his remarks to comments on road traffic.)
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But his silence did not indicate a lack of interest. In a previous conversation with the German ambassador in Paris, Best had sketched out some “inspirations” he had on how to “gauge whether Jewish property in occupied territories can be expropriated.”
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On October 27, 1940, eleven days after the meeting at the Ritz, the Wehrmacht High Command ordered the mandatory registration and classification of all Jewish-owned businesses in France. The ordinance, which had been proposed by Michel, also applied to businesses that were only partially owned by Jews and included all branches of commerce, banking, trade, and industry. The firms thus identified were to be put as quickly as possible into the hands of provisional custodians. The German military commander in the country wished “to cleanse France of Jewish influence” and place the “existing resources of those businesses” at the disposal “of the German home front, the Wehrmacht, and the French people.”

From the outside it looked as though Jewish businesses were being required only to register themselves with the occupation authorities. But those in charge saw themselves as performing an “inventory” and considered the simultaneous naming of custodians a sufficiently elastic legal basis “for quickly carrying out the process of Aryanization.”
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German plans for the ultimate expropriation of Jewish wealth foresaw an active role for French legislative and executive institutions. In the short term, this expectation proved problematic. Only “gradually,” with the application of pressure, was the French government “moved to issue its own laws.”
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German officers and officials attached to the Wehrmacht had to push the measures through themselves in the interest of increasing available funds. On several occasions, the military command asked the Security Police to arrest individual Jews to facilitate the seizure of their businesses.
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In October 1940, Michel reported: “The elimination of Jews from the French economy is under way in the occupied territories. . . . Superfluous Jewish businesses have been liquidated, and their inventory has been placed at the disposal of other businesses. Economically necessary businesses have been Aryanized by their provisional custodians.” The measures had been taken, according to Michel, so as to “serve, first of all, the interests of the French people.” The German authorities expected that the Vichy government in nonoccupied France would institute similar measures in the near future.
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For the most part, French citizens acted as custodians. German administrators had to be appointed only in exceptional cases in order to secure sufficient influence over particular businesses.
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This tactic conformed to the policy ordered by Göring, who sought to “play up the participation of French businesses.”
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French collaboration was part of an overarching German political strategy aimed, in the words of the German ambassador in Paris, at “divorcing France from the Jewish world.” In doing, the Reich hoped to sever the French bond with liberalism and Western democracy.
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Thus, from the very beginning, the proceeds from the Aryanization of Jewish businesses “were to flow into the French treasury,” a policy that “alienated” some German occupation officials.
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As long as the dispossession of Jews was carried out as an internal French affair, Germany could claim to be observing—at least superficially—the rules of the Hague Conventions. As early as August 1940, the judicial division of the Military High Command had cautioned that the planned Aryanization of the French economy would have to appear “to the outside world as if it were a private transfer of assets.”
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Two examples illustrate the common French and German interest in
Entjudung
(“de-Jewification”). On March 6, 1941, a certain A. Labbé, an unemployed former representative of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line in the French city of Cherbourg, addressed a letter to Karl-Heinz Gerstner at the German embassy in Paris. Labbé thanked the recipient for his efforts “on behalf of my being used as a provisional custodian or the like” and asked the embassy to intercede with the Military High Command to obtain permission for him “to take over the trusteeship of Jewish or enemy assets.” In September 1941, after some further correspondence and with Gerstner’s help, Labbé was given custodianship over the Hotel Ayoun Mireille in Boulogne sur Seine.

On August 1941, Gerstner asked the Military High Command whether a Frenchman named Lucien Léontard “could be appointed commissioner of a Jewish business.” Gerstner cited Léontard’s knowledge of economics, his language abilities, and his positive attitude toward Germany. The would-be collaborator was then considered “recommended by the German embassy.”
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The German occupiers also used the “atonement” payment demanded of Jews in Paris to stimulate French interest in the theft of Jewish property. On December 14, 1941, the Military High Command levied a collective fine of one billion francs on Parisian Jews.
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The French state apparatus, which was charged with collecting the money, seized a large portion of that sum from stock holdings left behind by the de Gunzburgs and the Javals, two extraordinarily wealthy families who had fled to America.
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There was no need for Nazi Germany “to send specialists to help complete the implementation of the ordinance in the case of nonpayment,” as the Reich Finance Ministry had previously offered French authorities.

To improve German-French relations, the Military High Command wanted to transfer a quarter of the money to the Secours national and other French charity organizations, but the Finance Ministry insisted on the entire sum’s being handed over to the Reich. A compromise of 10 percent was eventually reached. Thus, 100 million francs from the atonement payment went to French people, many of whom had suffered as a result of British air raids on Paris. The funds were distributed by the Comité ouvrier du secours immédiat, a committee formed expressly for that purpose.
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The German occupation administration in Tunisia pursued similar policies during the brief war in Africa. In December 1942, Rudolf Rahn, special ambassador from the German Foreign Office, sent a telegram describing the chaotic conditions in Tunis, where both the city and the port had been badly damaged by British bombing. Rahn reported that local police units and civilian committees had been formed to provide emergency relief. His telegram continued: “Since international Jewry is responsible for Anglo-American attack in North Africa, a sum of twenty million was raised from Jewish wealth by the Security Police and Security Service and given to a mixed Arab-Italian-French committee for the immediate support of air raid victims. Should enemy bombing of the civilian population continue, further sums will be raised.”
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Three months later, Rahn announced by telegraph that the relief committee formed at his behest had “paid out fifty million francs from fines on Tunisian Jews to families, mainly Muslim, victimized by bombings.”
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In the final days of the war, German occupiers also used confiscated Jewish money to provide emergency relief for air raid victims in Italy and Hungary.
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In occupied Kryvyy Rih, Ukraine, the local military commander allocated the apartments of murdered Jews to locals on the basis of poverty and need.
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It wasn’t until 1942 that the German military commander in France ordered a nighttime curfew for Jews and required them to wear yellow stars. But by 1941, when the Vichy government issued a series of anti-Semitic ordinances, he had achieved his main goal in shaping French policy toward Jews. The ordinances included the Jewish Statute, which relegated Jews to second-class citizenship and paved the way for deportations. The Vichy regime also created a special commission, the Commissariat général aux questions juives, to ensure that the ordinances were put into practice. On November 29, 1941, following the German model of the late 1930s, the Vichy regime passed a law requiring Jews to join a newly founded organization, the Union générale des Israélites; at the same time it disbanded all other existing Jewish organizations.
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These and other measures allowed Germans to carry out the theft of Jewish assets with a minimum of personnel. The economics division (Wi I/1) of the Military High Command, which was responsible for the Aryanization campaign, consisted of five military administrative counselors, a chief inspector, a secretary, and three staff assistants. Most of these individuals were assigned to a special subdivision called “the Representative of the Military Commander to the General Commission for Jewish Questions.”
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Together with a handful of auditors from other divisions, they were able to oversee the elimination of Jews from the French economy.

Officially, Aryanization was carried out by the Commissariat général. A special unit of it, Section IX (Direction générale de l’Aryanisation économique), was responsible for dispossessing Jews. Seized securities were managed by the French Finance Ministry, assisted by the Caisse centrale de dépôts et de virements de titres (Central Depository for the Custodianship and Transfer of Securities), founded in May 1941. This institution sold off securities wherever possible and put the revenues into French treasury bills and other government bonds. Its mandate was to keep the German machinery of war and plunder well lubricated with cash.