"Content as most Germans were, there was little chance for a domestic movement that would have halted Nazi crimes. This new perspective on the Nazi regime as a kind of racist-totalitarian welfare state allows us to understand the connection between the Nazi policies of racial genocide and the countless, seemingly benign family anecdotes about how a generation of German citizens ‘got through’ World War II."

“Not surprisingly, some of the first measures enacted after the Nazis came to power were aimed at alleviating the threat, felt by the majority of Germans in the wake of the Depression, of eviction and repossession. Several early Nazi laws restricted the right of creditors vis-à-vis debtors so as to prevent ‘the impoverishment of the people.’ The 1938 Old Debt Eradication Law invalidated hundreds of thousands of titles to collectible debts. The Law for the Prevention of Misuse of Repossession, passed in 1934, was directed against what was seen as the ‘nearly unlimited freedom enjoyed by creditors’ in the past.”

“The policy of plunder was the cornerstone for the welfare of the German people and a major guarantor of their political loyalty, which was first and foremost based on material considerations. The unshakable alliance between the state and the people was not primarily the result of cleverly conceived party propaganda. It was created by means of theft, with the spoils being redistributed according to equalitarian principles among the member of the ethnically defined Volk.”

“The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves than they had enjoyed during either the Wilhemine empire or the Weimar Republic. In practice, this goal was achieved at the expense of other groups, by means of a racist war of conquest. Nazi ideology conceived of a racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims. The ideal of the Volksstaat—a state of and for the people—was what we would now call a welfare state for Germans with the proper racial pedigree.”

“Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

“1942 levy required property owners to pay ten years of the tax in advanced in a single lump sum. Because property owners were prohibited from raising rents, they alone bore the burden. In addition, the Reich appropriated other revenues that had previously belonged to local authorities.”

“Many property owners feared they would be ‘fleeced’ by government rent controls, compulsory reserve funds, or increases in the basic real estate tax. Indeed, a few months later, Economics Minister Walther Funk announced: ‘So-called real value assets will represent an especially lucrative source of state revenue after the war.’ And in early 1944, Reich economists began discussing new ways ‘to better exploit property owners to cover state debts.’ Polemics against landlords continued to appear in party organs such as Das schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS.”