My son, in third grade, was regularly chased home from school, and if caught, his shoelaces were tied together. His mother may not have know of this and it was not his stepfather's problem to solve. Thus, my words, "I will pay you $10 for every bloody nose you bring me."
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Hitler's department heads demanded that the Jews turn over their clothes, furniture, homes, and money...all Hitler had to do was to give the order (Aly, 2005). Hitler also, by means of taxes, redistributed income from the elite strata to the middle class. The frau, for the first time in a decade, could buy ham, wheat, and butter.

Stealing from Jewish cooperators led to ever more demands on them. Hitler's bureaucrats wanted apartments, private homes, and furniture for German families displaced by Allied bombs. Hitler wanted to be sure that German's did not pay the costs of their new war.

New orders were issued and the least defiant peoples on this planet, given an order, reported to the train station and marched into box cars where they experienced days in an unheated box with 150 other people, without room to sit or to fall, and without water, a bathroom, food, or knowledge of where family members were. The cars unloaded at Auschwitz and all the guards had to do was to give an order and 95 percent marched docilely to their deaths. (Such outcomes are as selective as any flood or geographic isolation and might qualify as an "evolutionary bottleneck.")

Hitler eventually used up all that he stole. He next sent the German army into Austria, Czechslovakia, Poland, France, and Russia wherein the Germans set exchange rates between marks and native currency. The effect: German corporals and privates could pay more for a ham or a cheese, clothes, perfume, or a picture and send it home to their mother or wife. Those deals and steals led to caravans of gifts from a conquered land to the homeland.

Not all Jews were cooperators: those who could pass themselves as Polish or German escaped from the ghettos and disappeared or perhaps migrated south and east. Those migrants, however, were a self-selected crew. Was Israel the product of non-cooperators, willing to lie, steal, and fight their way to a new life? And have the socialist persuasions - genetic or cultural - that gave in so easily to Hitler now surrender easily to Palestinians?* And does nutty George use Condi and do to the Jews what the Germans already did and reasons of legacy rather than justice?

As for my kid: I paid one sawbuck, for perhaps the best purpose imaginable. His problem was solved and I felt remarkably free...


JimB

*Hitler chose his targets well. Michael Wex explains that Jews are the special people of a Messiah who is in no great hurry to return! Degradation proves their value to God. And they handle their thicket of rules by endless debates over the best strategy for doing what they want to do.

References:

Aly, Götz (2005) Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. NY: Holt. (Frightening cover photograph: a large crowd of plumpish, well-dressed German men and women, smiling while they threw up a hand toward the sky! Aly also challenges the staid notion that WW I reparations pushed Germany into WW II. The issues could have been more ones of pride...but being poor will unite any people. Progressives smell power and stir up the hive by means of disasters. From this perspective, good news is definitely bad news!)
Wex, Michael (2006) Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in all Its Moods. NY: HarperCollins.