Nazis 'paid for 30 per cent of war with stolen Jewish cash'

A new study by the German finance ministry has found that Nazi officials plundered 120 billion reichsmarks -- more than 12 billion pounds -- by looting and through confiscation laws, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

The study was carried out to uncover its crimes while the Nazis were in power, from 1933 to 1945.Hans-Peter Ullmann, a Cologne University history professor who is heading the three-year investigation, said that under the Nazis the tax authorities "actively worked to destroy Jews financially".

Tax laws discriminated against Jews from 1934, while some who managed to leave Germany before the Holocaust had much of their wealth confiscated through an "exit tax".
The Nazis exterminated some six million European Jews during World War II. Nearly two-thirds of the population of nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust were killed.

Nazi officials seized and sold the property of Jews who left or were sent to extermination camps, both in Germany and in the nations conquered during the Second World War, says the study.

Professor Ullmann said: "Conservatively, their money financed at least 30 per cent of the German war effort."Christiane Kuller, of Munich University, who is working on the study, said tax offices built hierarchies of bureaucrats "who discovered dwellings and bank accounts and emptied them"