The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

For the German Jews alone, not including the Austrian population, it came to an estimate of between 2.2 and 5.15 billion Reichsmarks. Barring a large external loan, this was many times the hard currency reserves of the Reichsbank.114 In light of this disparity, it is hardly surprising that the Reich imposed punitive taxes on would-be emigrants. And as the Reich’s foreign exchange situation deteriorated after 1936, these financial penalties escalated.115 Perversely, the very fact that Jews were being encouraged to emigrate made them prima facie suspects of wishing to smuggle capital out of the country. Rather than facilitating emigration, the bureaucracy of foreign exchange and emigration became an additional means of harassment and discrimination.116 Having been closely involved in questions of foreign exchange since 1936, Reinhard Heydrich and the SD were in no way naive about the financial obstacles to ‘voluntary emigration’. In the summer of 1938, the SD was in direct negotiations with the RWM in the hope of procuring more hard currency for this purpose.117 But, not surprisingly given the Reichsbank’s situation, they were disappointed. The SD’s anti-Jewish