Economic Vignettes from The Nazi Officer’s Wife

As I said in my previous post on The Nazi Officer’s Wife, I see economics everywhere. This book is no exception.

Here are two.

First, some background for the first one. In April 1941, Edith Hahn Beer was forced to sign a contract obligating her to go to an asparagus farm in Germany to do slave labor. She and her Jewish fellow workers were forced to wear yellow stars at all times. But in the times they had off, they wanted to go into town and shop for things. That presented a dilemma.

She writes:

The police told us we must write to Vienna for the yellow stars, and that when they arrived, we must wear them at all times. But if we had done so, no shopkeeper in town would have waited on us. So we didn’t wear them. Our supervisors on the farm seemed to care not at all. I  believe that in their way they had began [sic] to want to keep us content enough to go on obediently working for them, even more than they wanted to please the police.

Incentives at work. Economic self-interest on the part of the supervisors, who were trying to reach their production quota, overcame obedience to government rules.

The second is about adjustment to Hitler’s price controls.

The farmers outside the city made fortunes from bartering, because people would bring their most valuable furnishings to trade for some carrots, maybe a slab of bacon, or some fresh cheese. People joked that the farmers now owned so many Persian rugs that they put them in the cowsheds.

By the way, I wrote in some detail about how this barter continued after the war in response to the Allies continuing to enforce Hitler’s price controls. It’s in “German Economic Miracle,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. The barter ended as soon as the price controls ended–and the German economic miracle commenced.

 

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