The National Socialist German Workers Party was founded on a doctrine of inequality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality amon… - Götz Aly

[A]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.All told the state collected the considerable sum of 8.1 billion reichsmarks (in today’s currency the equivalent of around 100 billion dollars) in additional revenues in 1942-43. The financial newspaper Bankwirtschaft hailed the windfall as ‘a satisfactory result in terms of both limiting consumer spending power and improving the state budget.

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 [German] 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.

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 [Substanzwerte] 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.