Whether Jewish citizens stayed in Germany and Austria or left, they were doomed to lose much, if not all, their property. Just under half of those assets went directly to the German state. According to Hayes, in the national budget for 1938-1939, an entire 5 percent came solely from wealth confiscated from Jews. The rest of the assets went to non-Jewish citizens, in the form of houses, businesses and goods sold for vastly less than their value.
This left Jewish citizens without means of supporting themselves, without homes, and without any connection to their previous lives. As
historian Lisa Silverman writes of the edict’s effect in Austria, “The failure of law to protect their property was one of the first steps toward the erasure of both the present and future identities of Austrian Jews.”
And ordinary citizens were more than willing to participate in the looting of Jewish property. “
When the Nazis wipe out the Jewish inhabitants of a village in eastern Poland [later in the war], one of the first things they would do is distribute all the property to the locals,” Hayes says. “This was a way of winning popular support. It created a complicity between the occupiers and the occupied, and a common interest, and the Nazis exploited that.”
