Baron Louis de Rothschild himself was later able to buy his way out of Vienna by turning over his steel mills to the Hermann Goering Works. Perhaps half of the city’s 180,000 Jews managed, by the time the war started, to purchase their freedom to emigrate by handing over what they owned to the Nazis. This lucrative trade in human freedom was handled by a special organization set up under the S.S. by Heydrich, the “Office for Jewish Emigration,” which became the sole Nazi agency authorized to issue permits to Jews to leave the country.
