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 re… - Götz Aly

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.

By exploiting material wealth confiscated and plundered in a racial war, Hitler’s National Socialism achieved an unprecedented level of economic equality and created vast new opportunities for upward mobility for the German people.

The fact that those affected by the real estate inflation had paid 4.5 billion reichsmarks of the levy in cash temporarily throttled the circulation of hard currency. Representatives of property owners’ associations agreed to the measure because the state again promised to get rid of the tax once and for all. Nevertheless, many property owners feared they would be ‘fleeced’ by government rent controls, compulsory reserve funds, or increases in the basic real estate tax… And in early 1944, Reich economists began discussing new ways ‘to better exploit property ownership to cover state debts.’ Polemics against landlords continued to appear in party organs such as Das schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS… Since the start of the war, landlords had been legally prevented from renovating their properties. Nevertheless, rents still included tenant contributions towards rebuilding work…. Discussions of the property tax were framed by the general principle that materially better-off Germans were to bear a considerably larger share of the burden of war than poor ones.