Second Squeeze

One year ago that Prussian aristocrat, Nazi Finance Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, was given the highly congenial task of plucking the Jews of Germany of $400,000,000, one-fifth of their estimated wealth. This capital levy was decreed by Economic Four-Year Plan Commissioner Field Marshal Goring as "punishment" for the assassination in Paris of German Embassy Secretary Ernst vom Rath by one Herschel Grynsz-pan, a young Polish Jew (TIME, Nov. 21).

Fortnight ago, Grynszpan, still awaiting trial in Paris, unsuccessfully petitioned to be allowed to join the French Army "so that I could kill some more Germans." And last week in Germany, his race had once again to pay for his crime. All during 1939 Jews in Germany have frantically sold their property at ruinous prices in efforts to pay their $400,000,000 fine. On Aug. 15 they made "final payments," but last week Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk announced that this has proved "not enough."

Nazis unofficially estimated the amount plucked from the Jews at about $300,000,000--a sum nearly twice as great as the total German charity collections of all kinds during the year. Nazis even admitted that, had not forced selling depressed the value of Jewish property and securities, the sums realized would probably have totaled the $400,000,000 originally demanded. Jews were informed last week that they must now "make up the difference for lost values," and Count Krosigk prepared to strip the Jewish community of about five per cent more of its wealth.

In thus cracking down on the Jews, the Fuehrer apparently has secured sufficient funds to be able to forego the 20% capital levy on all German property threatened last February but which never materialized. However this year the immense Hitler Winter Relief Fund, to which Gentiles as well as Jews are virtually forced to contribute, is being spent at the discretion of Nazi bigwigs not only for charity but in prosecuting the war. Another money squeeze is the Volkswagon subscription. Since the summer of 1938 the organization created to manufacture Adolf Hitler's famed Volkswagon or "People's Car" has been collecting $2.00 per week from 180,000 German instalment buyers, promising they will all get delivery by 1942, but the People's Car Works may have been converted to make munitions. Thus far the Fuehrer has not thought it worth-while to risk further overstraining of the German financial structure by trying to float a war loan.

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