On the Wealth of Jews
(and how it was legally stolen by the Nazi regime)
Theobald Hirschkind, the person named at the top of the document above, was my father’s uncle – his father’s brother. Theobald’s wife was Lily Kupfer – not only my father’s aunt by marriage, but also his mother’s sister (and part-owner of the silk factory I describe in my memoir, The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story).
These very close members of my family were well-off people, but not wealthy in the Rothschild way one could imagine when one thinks of the wealthy Jews despoiled by the Nazi regime. It turns out the Nazis stole all the money from all the Jews.
This document is just one of hundreds of similar documents contained in the archives of the German city of Wiesbaden. It is entitled – ironically enough – Description of the Wealth of Jews.
Why ironically?
Because the document describes, in unstinting detail, exactly how much this Jew (and every Jew in Wiesbaden and throughout Germany) was forced to pay in taxes to maintain surveillance over Jews, and how much this Jew (and every Jew) was forced to pay for being Jewish, and for the stars of David they were forced to wear, and for the changes to their names that they were forced to make, and for many other privileges they enjoyed, including the privilege of traveling overseas while being Jewish (even – or especially -- when that travel was mandated by the state and had as its terminus the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka or Sobibor).
When the Jews weren’t being forced to pay taxes, they were being tricked into buying their “freedom”. The most egregious of these tricks was the offer of a “retirement community” for Jews in Theresienstadt, where all their needs would be met, in exchange (here was the lie) for simply agreeing to leave Germany, and of course, for an investment of tens of thousands of Reichsmarks.
Here’s the Wikipedia description of that scheme:
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role.
My aunt and uncle, and my father’s mother Dora, thus agreed to pay RM81,400 for the privilege of traveling to their own deaths.
Adding to the wickedness, my family “overpaid” by a further RM99,500 – an amount, in addition to the “purchase price” of their new home, which was paid into a mysterious account called “Konto H” – literally “Account H.”
This account was used to fund activities of the SS, the officers of which felt they were being stiffed by the rest of the German high command. So they invented this scheme and diverted a huge part of the funds to their own secret account.
The accounts were handled by Commerzbank, a German bank that today disavows any knowledge of what happened way back then, and has no idea of the identity of the holder of Konto H because those records were destroyed during the war.
They’re pretty sorry, though, for any inconvenience we may have suffered!
Going back to the Wealth of the Jews, it should be noted that a lot of people – normal German people – were involved in normalizing this theft: bank managers and clerks, insurance agents, lawyers, and accountants, notaries and other facilitators of the state, who ensured that accounts were accurate and that payments were made in accordance with legal provisions.
I note this as we Americans slink into an uncertain future. If Donald Trump were to be reelected president of the United States, as seems increasingly possible, then, there will be all manner of new laws and regulations legalizing what would heretofore have been considered extra-legal activities.
And then we scribes, we lawyers, we accountants, notaries, actuaries and insurance agents, we facilitators of the state, will be forced to either become complicit in these dealings, hoping and waiting for the day that the regime will end, or, we will have to resist.
I hope enough of us will have the courage to resist, because the alternative will be a legacy as despicable as that of the agents of the German state who from 1936 (at least) until the end of the war (at least) facilitated the extortion, impoverishment, and annihilation of the European Jewish population, and of whom we wonder, how could they have allowed this to happen?
