A Major Element of Exploiting Occupied Countries Is the Manipulation and Devaluation of the Official Exchange Rates

From the very beginning, a major element in Germany’s successful exploitation of occupied countries was the manipulation of official exchange rates. In France, German occupiers lowered the exchange rate for 100 francs from 6.6 to 5 reichsmarks—a devaluation of just under 25 percent. This automatically raised soldiers’ salaries, which were paid in francs but calculated in reichsmarks. (The franc would, of course, have inevitably become softer under German occupation, but even in late 1942 the exchange rate in Zurich was 16 percent higher than the one set by German occupiers.) Similar action was taken with the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Czech crown remained the official currency but was devalued by a third. In 1939 the Reich also intervened in Poland and in 1943 in Nazi-occupied northern Italy, where the exchange rate between the lira and the mark was lowered from 100 to 13.1 to 100 to 10. But even that is dwarfed by the 470 percent devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1941. Those responsible for the new exchange rates knew exactly what they were doing. Privately, they acknowledged that the reichsmark was “greatly overvalued in comparison with [other] European currencies.”

—Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 81.