Much production in East Germany was dismantled to prevent competition with West German firms. This was especially evident when collective agriculture was broken up to protect the heavily subsidized and less productive private farms of West Germany.8 Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in the GDR, including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system—assets worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history.
