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government agencies. It broke through the rigidity of established hierarchies. The drudgery of merely following procedure was replaced by meaningful work, in which people were encouraged to think for themselves—and to plan for the future.
     
    This was the spirit in which the Nazis’ finance minister, Schwerin von Krosigk, organized a brainstorming session for his staff in the summer of 1935. The goal was to maximize the amount of money squeezed out of Jews by the tax system. The participants were instructed to rate various proposals as “recommended,” “possible but not recommended,” and “definitely not recommended.” Acting on their own, without pressure from above, they suggested eradicating dozens of tax credits provided that they also benefited Jews. Mindful of the various ordinances in place, they argued that, where Jews were concerned, “an expedient that contravenes the law is already an option toda#8221; 27
     
    In April 1938, the finance minister held a second meeting on the subject, forwarding the ideas suggested to Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick. Tax officials debated the merits of denying Jews—either all Jews or only minor dependents—the allowable exemptions from the wealth tax. They questioned whether guide dogs for Jews who had been blinded fighting in World War I should continue to be exempt from the tax on dogs. One participant drafted legislation imposing a special premium on income and assets taxes for Jews alone. The proposal stipulated that the amount of the premium was “to be flexible so that it can be increased in special cases such as malicious behavior by individual Jews toward the people as a whole.” 28 These initiatives required original thought and belied the cliché that Germans were reflexively obedient to arcane bureaucratic procedure.
     
    Hitler’s inner circle quickly warmed to representatives of the old elite, such as Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who took a constructive attitude toward Nazi anti-Semitism. At the beginning of each new phase of radicalization, Goebbels noted in his diary, von Krosigk may have been “somewhat shaky,” but in the end he always proved reliable. In terms of personality, Goebbels added, von Krosigk was “the sort of civil servant we definitely need in our state.” 29 In 1937, Hitler awarded him the golden insignia of honorary Nazi Party membership. Thereafter, von Krosigk used the official Nazi form of address “Esteemed Party Comrade” when the occasion called for it and didn’t object when he, too, was addressed in that way instead of by his aristocratic title. In 1939, the honorary Nazi earmarked 450,000 reichsmarks (the equivalent today of $5 million) in the national budget for a ministerial apartment befitting his social status. 30
     
    Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk was born in Anhalt in 1887 and was later adopted by an aristocratic Prussian family. He studied at Lausanne and Oxford and received his law degree in Halle, where he passed the German equivalent of the bar exam. Highly decorated in World War I, he retired as a lieutenant colonel. In 1919, von Krosigk joined the reconstituted Finance Ministry and rose rapidly through the ranks. Ten years later he was put in charge of its budget division. Although he wasn’t affiliated with any political party, Chancellor Franz von Papen appointed him finance minister in 1932, and Papen’s successors, Kurt von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler, honored his financial expertise by retaining him in that post. Von Krosigk stayed loyal to the inner circle of the Nazi regime even through the final days of World War II. On May 2, 1945, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, named him director of the short-lived government that negotiated Germany’s surrender. After the war he was given a sentence of ten years in prison, which was commuted in 1951. He died in 1977. 31 An undisputed master of state finances, von Krosigk was known for the ease with which he countered critics,