Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (34 page)

FROM THE perspective of the majority of French Jews, it was French citizens and special French agencies that were responsible for the everyday reality of Aryanization. Germans took direct control only of the assets of Jewish igrants from Germany and Austria and, as of the fall of 1942, of nonnaturalized Jews from Poland and Bohemia and Moravia, and of Jewish citizens and residents of hostile nations.
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(These exceptions accounted for 50,000 Jews out of a total Jewish population of 330,000 in France.) To administer the wealth of French Jews, Department Wi I/1 of the Military High Command in France appointed Ferdinand Niedermayer as general administrative commissioner. He sold off Jewish businesses and ensured that the proceeds “were secured in the interest of the Reich.”
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Niedermayer assumed his post in August 1941, serving “on the one hand as general commissioner and on the other as a special representative of the party to involve Germans in viable [Jewish] businesses.”
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Niedermayer’s office letterhead read, “Military Commander in France, Finance Division, German Jews.”
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The Finance Ministry ordered “that revenues generated be transferred to the Reich treasury.”
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Even after France was liberated, Niedermayer was still in a position to transfer securities, jewelry, and stamps valued at 60 million reichsmarks to the Reich treasury.
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To utilize enemy wealth, including major assets owned by Jews, the military administration had established the “Trust and Auditing Office of the Military High Command” in December 1940. Lieutenant Hans Kadelbach was charged with organizing this rapidly expanding administrative division. In February 1941, he suggested turning over the entire system of disposing of enemy and Jewish wealth to a private auditing company, Treuverkehr Deutsche Treuhand AG in Berlin. Kadelbach sat on the board of directors of the company, which was also associated with Deutsche Bank.
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The wholesale transfer of authority to a private company was one of many instances of outsourcing in the Third Reich.

The office where the personnel of the Treuverkehr company worked was never formally established or defined. Those involved considered it “a fiscal construct, . . . a convenient point for collecting money, of a temporary nature” and “without fixed legal form.”
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In fact, it was another shell company. In keeping with orders issued by Michel in May 1942, the office took on the following responsibilities:

a. maintenance of a card catalog in which lists of Jewish businesses, their custodial administrators, and other units are kept and continually updated

b. collection of Jewish contributions ordered by my deputy at the General Commission for Jewish Questions for the purpose of de-Jewifying the economy; regular reporting on revenues; and regular consulting with the aforementioned deputy about the amount of money that should be taken in

c. participation in approval proceedings in Aryanization cases by means of short assessment reports (so-called file checks) to be delivered to the responsible offices, as designated by me.

The military administration deemed the Treuverkehr company “essential to the war effort,” since it “administer [ed] Jewish and enemy assets valued at several billion francs.”
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French administrators headed the General Commission for Jewish Questions, but the Wehrmacht maintained an office at the commission for its own deputy. The deputy was le for overseeing the removal of Jews from the French economy and, though he was a German and a Treuverkehr employee, he was also a member of the ostensibly French-run Service du contrôle des administra-teurs provisoires (SCAP), an organization that had been created in December 1940.
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The filing system maintained by Treuverkehr to document the Aryanization of the French economy was housed in rooms 649 and 649a at the Hotel Majestic in Paris and was “constantly tended to by one male and two or three female employees.” According to a Treuverkehr report, the catalog contained regularly updated note cards for more than 10,000 companies and more than 1,500 administrators. (In total the Commissariat général estimated “the number of Jewish businesses in occupied France at around 22,000.”)

The division of labor among the economics division of the Military High Command, the Treuverkehr company, and the Commissariat général followed set rules. The French side submitted Aryanization projects for approval to the Treuverkehr deputy. He passed them on to be vetted by an officially designated commercial auditor. Finally, the trustee approved the sale of Jewish businesses, often attaching certain conditions.
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For the military administration it was important “that French authorities operate freely and autonomously in applying German ordinances within their areas of responsibility.” For this reason, German auditors stamped Aryanization applications not as “approved” but rather as “in accordance with regulations.”
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An ordinance dated June 21, 1941, stipulated that Jews were allowed to open their bank safety deposit boxes only with the express permission of the Service du contrôle—in other words, of the German occupation administration. Reichsbank director Leopold Scheffler, whom the military administration had put in charge of overseeing French financial and credit matters, warned: “I will hold bank directors personally responsible should there be evidence of any violations of this ordinance.”
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In contrast to their Belgian counterparts, “the overwhelming majority” of French bank directors “timorously followed German regulations.”
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ONE MONTH later, on July 22, 1941, the Vichy government issued law no. 3086,
“aux enterprises, biens, et valeurs appartenant aux juifs”
(regarding all companies, goods, and valuables belonging to Jews).
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The law came into force on August 26. It closely followed the spurt of dispossession procedures Germany instituted between 1938 and 1941: Jewish assets in all forms were transferred to a trustee
(administrateur provisoire)
, who sold them off and converted the proceeds into government securities. French Jews were never officially dispossessed. Article 1, paragraph 1, defined the law’s purpose as to “erase any and all influence by Jews on the national economy.” In practice, however, the law was aimed chiefly at using nearly all the assets of French Jews to fill the German war chest. Jews in Vichy France and in France’s North African colonies, although those territories were not initially occupied by German forces, also surrendered their property to the French state—and thus ultimately to the German war chest—because they belonged to the overall French fiscal system.

Article 1 of the law exempted all French state securities and bonds issued by local municipalities or state-run companies from compulsory ll>Na>administration. This was logical, since the law, like its German predecessor, was aimed at converting the largest possible percentage of Jewish assets into state bonds. To achieve this aim, which was never explicitly spelled out, article 12 allowed administrators of Jewish businesses to sell off any assets under their control, including those that were subject to third-party claims. Article 18 left no doubt that the main thrust of the legislation was assets liquidation. If an administrator was slow to sell off assets, it was within the jurisdiction of the president of the relevant commercial court to appoint a more compliant liquidator.

The uncompromising clarity of the law’s intent seems to contradict the general principle laid out in article 7, according to which the trustee was to manage assets in the spirit of a benevolent father
(“L’administrateur provisoire doit gérer en bon père de famille”)
. But this familial responsibility was defined not as maintaining the welfare of Jews but rather as advancing the interests of the French finance minister.

Another crucial issue addressed by law no. 3086 was what to do with the revenues generated by this massive liquidation of assets. The law decreed that all proceeds from the sale of assets subject to compulsory trustee administration were to be paid into the state deposit account
(Caisse des dépôts et consignation)
. There they were converted into French government securities, which helped finance the German war effort.

It was hardly a coincidence, then, given the financial impetus behind the law, that the Commission for Jewish Questions was located on the place des Petits-Pères, just fifty yards from the main entrance to the Banque de France. Article 17 decreed that purchasers of Jewish assets were to pay, whenever possible, in cash. (This was also the case for Aryanization transactions in Germany itself and later in Hungary.) The money then had only to be taken the short distance to the Banque de France, where it was converted, perfectly legally, into state securities.
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The liquidation of Jewish assets peaked in 1942. As the amount of Jewish property available for sale diminished, proceeds fell by more than half in 1943.
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Nevertheless, the Treuverkehr company continued to charge hefty fees for its auditing services, in addition to keeping revenues from businesses still in trusteeship and setting its own profit margins. Profits from assets in trusteeship were also converted into French treasury bills (
bons du trésor
). The German Enemy Assets Administration later characterized the situation this way: “Following guidelines from the military administration, [trustees] deposited the proceeds in medium-term accounts at offices of major enemy banks that were under German administration. At regular intervals, when enough capital had accrued, they then bought French treasury bills.”
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At the insistence of the German commissioner at the Banque de France, who wanted to maintain good relations with his French colleagues, claims of “enemy” creditors were also converted into French, and not German, state bonds.

Nonetheless, these funds, too, ultimately ended up in the German war chest. By and large, the revenues generated by Jewish assets remained in France as long as they were paid into Treuverkehr accounts. The German administrators preferred this procedure so as to reduce French inflation and allow the country to pay the staggering occupation costs Germany had imposed. When, in 1943, some trustee revenues were transferred directly to the Reich treasury inrlin instead, they amounted to the relatively small sum of 22.5 million reichsmarks.
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The Reich also took in significant revenue from its allies, usually in the form of contributions to help underwrite Germany’s military campaign in World War II. The countries in question raised that money, in turn, by dispossessing their Jewish populations. Yet often, German financial demands put the economies of allied countries under such strain that the Reich was forced to intervene with subsidies of its own—paid for with the proceeds from the dispossession of German Jews and Jews in occupied countries. In terms of financial exploitation, however, it ultimately made little difference whether a country was occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany. Where defeated enemies were compelled to pay occupation costs, Germany’s allies were forced to make so-called contributions to the German war effort.

A case in point was Slovakia. Slovakia owed its existence as an independent country of 2.65 million inhabitants to Hitler’s Germany, which between 1938 and 1939 divided Czechoslovakia into two states. The ideology of the Slovakian People’s Party, which dominated the new nation, was a mixture of anti-Semitic and class-warfare propaganda. Alexander Mach, the country’s interior minister, who managed to maintain contact with communist functionaries, exemplified this ideology. Shortly after the nation was formed, he declared: “Everywhere else, Jews who possess gold, gemstones, and riches have been swept out, and we will do the same. Slovakia’s strength is labor. People here who don’t work don’t eat. Wealth that has been accumulated by theft will be taken away! That’s the practical solution to the Jewish question.”
¹
The newspaper
Slovenska Politika
echoed these sentiments in July 1940: “The issue here is, above all, the Jewish question. Without a radical solution to this question, we cannot improve basic social conditions.”
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A Slovakian government ordinance defined who was to be considered a Jew. In general the law barred those who matched the legal description from public employment and partially or completely banned them from certain academic professions.
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In 1939, in an attempt to improve conditions for the rural poor, the Slovakian government issued a decree requiring Jews to register property used for agriculture or forestry. A few months later, a law was passed that nationalized those properties and stipulated how they were to be divided up and allocated in the interests of social “equity.” The legislation subjected 101,423 hectares (250,000 acres) owned by Jews to nationalization—enough land to provide 20,000 landless Slovaks with small farms. (At an average family size of six, that meant that 120,000 people—or almost 5 percent of the total population—stood to benefit.) On April 25, 1940, a law explicitly aimed at creating “a strong Slovakian middle class” ordered the Slovakization of Jewish-owned businesses.
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In the summer of 1940, following the passage of laws that had dispossessed Jewish farmers, merchants, and business owners, a plan was conceived to deport Slovakian Jews to Madagascar. The government in Bratislava was the only one among Germany’s allies to support the idea, which had originated in Berlin. Slovakia’s support of the proposal was largely due to the effort of Dieter Wisliceny, whom Adolf Eichmann had sent to Bratislava in August 1940 as his point man for Jewish affairs. Wisliceny’s first priority was to remove Jews from the Slovakian economy, and he served as an occasional consultant on questions of Aryanization. Using the German model, he set about to redraft Slovakian laws, at the same time overseeing the creation of a special bureau to promote Slovakization, the Central Economics Ministry. The ministry was patterned after the special agencies that had been set up for the purposes of confiscation and deportation in Vienna and Prague. Wisliceny also helped establish a fund ostensibly to be used to promote Jewish emigration. The fund, similar to the one set up in Germany, was in reality an account created to receive the massive profits made from selling off Jewish assets. The notion that it was an emigration fund was a transparent pretense, since the Slovakian finance minister was the only one who had access to it. On September 2, 1940, the minister ordered Jews to report their assets to the government for the express purpose of “fixing” their value.