Last month, I read two non-fiction books at my vacation home in Canada, one less than my average. (Because the weather was better than average.) A Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the HolocaustAuthors are Edith Hahn Beer and Susan Dworkin.
I will post at least twice about any piece of content that catches my economist eye.Economics is everywhere.
There is a fascinating discussion here of how the Nazis deployed propaganda against the wealth acquired by the relatively wealthy Jews in Austria.
Nazi radio blamed us for all the filthy evil in the world. They called us subhuman, one minute superhuman, and accused us of plotting to kill them and steal their money and possessions. They They had to conquer the world to stop it. We The radio was saying that everything we owned had to be confiscated — my father, who had died suddenly at work, had not worked for our comfortable apartment, but that we had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, like the leather chairs in our dining room and the earrings in my mother’s ears, and that Austria had a right to take them back.
Did our friends and neighbors really believe this? Of course not. They were not stupid. But they were suffering from depression, inflation and unemployment. They wanted to get rich again, and the quickest way to achieve that was to steal. Making them believe in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews owned. (pp. 56-57)
