As I said in my previous post on Wife of a Nazi OfficerI see economics everywhere. This book is no different.
Here are two.
First, some background is first. In April 1941, Edith Hahn Beer was forced to sign a contract that bound her to go to an asparagus farm in Germany to do slave labor. He and his fellow Jews were forced to wear yellow stars at all times. But during their free time they wanted to go to the city to buy things. That presented a problem.
You write:
The police told us that we had to write yellow stars for Vienna, and that when they arrived, we had to wear them at all times. But if we did that, no shopkeeper in town would wait for us. So we didn’t wear them. Our management at the farm didn’t seem to care at all. I believe that their path had already begun [sic] they want to keep us satisfied to continue working for them by obeying, rather than pleasing the police.
Incentives at work. Economic self-interest on the part of managers, who were trying to reach their own production rate, prevailed over obedience to government regulations.
The second is about the adjustment of Hitler’s price controls.
Farmers outside the city made a fortune from the trade, because people brought their most valuable goods to trade for other carrots, maybe a slab of bacon, or fresh cheese. People used to joke that the farmers now had so many Persian coats that they put them in the cowsheds.
By the way, I wrote in detail about how this trade continued after the war in response to the Allies continuing to enforce Hitler’s price controls. In “German Economic Miracle,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Exchanges ended as soon as price controls ended–and the German economic miracle began.
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