The Judenvermögensabgabe ("Jewish Capital Levy") was an arbitrary special tax imposed on German Jews under the Nazi dictatorship.
[2]: 112 In August 1936, Hitler proclaimed in a "secret memorandum on the Four-Year Plan" that, in order to achieve Germany's military policy goals, a law was to be enacted, among other things, "which makes all Judaism liable for all damage caused by individual incidents of this criminality to the German economy and therefore to the German people".
[3] On December 18 of the same year, Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, confidentially informed Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht that Hitler had "in principle approved the raising of a Jewish tax" and ordered "to accelerate the preparations of a corresponding draft law in such a way that it would be possible to already promulgate the law after the end of the Gustloff trial".
[3] These plans prospered up to a bill which imposed special surcharges on all Jews for the accounting year 1937 on wage and property taxes.
For foreign policy reasons, however, but also because of the ministerial bureaucracies reservations, Hitler refrained from implementation "obviously with the intention of waiting for a more favorable situation".
[2]: 114 On November 10, 1938, Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk learned from Joseph Goebbels that Hitler ordered to eliminate all Jews from the German economy.
Göring said during this meeting: "I will choose the wording that the German Jews in their entirety will be imposed a contribution of 1 billion as punishment for the nefarious crimes, etc., etc.
[7]: 61/62 A representative of the Foreign Office noted after an internal speech by Göring on 18 November 1938: "Very critical state of the Reich's finances.
Victor Klemperer writes in his diaries of 13 November 1938 and 6 December: "In Leipzig we also experienced the billion-dollar fine that the German people had issued the Jews.
[7]: 56 According to the secret domestic political reports raised by the Security Service, parts of the population criticized the senseless destruction of material assets during the "Reichskristallnacht".