The Reichsbank was required by its statutes to provide migrants with the foreign currency needed to meet visa requirements abroad. But if prosperous Jewish families had emigrated en masse from Germany in 1933 and 1934, the effects on the Reichsbank’s foreign currency reserves would have been disastrous. At a conservative estimate German Jewish wealth in 1933 came to at least 8 billion Reichsmarks. Transferring even a modest fraction of this amount was clearly beyond the Reichsbank.
