Books The Vampire Economy (1939)

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The Vampire Economy (1939) by Reimann Guenter

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Reimann expert on finance and currencies as founder & editor of International Reports, a New York-based weekly publication he sold to the London Financial Times in 1983. Prior to World War II, he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany and at the forefront of the underground resistance to Adolf Hitler within Nazi Germany. Assumed the position of economics editor for the communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, taking on the pen-name of Günter Reimann.

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Reimann went underground to oppose the new National Socialist regime under the resistance movement of the German social democrats and communists. He fled Germany in 1934, first to France, and then London, as the Gestapo continued zeroing in on his location, finally raiding his house and arresting Hu Lanqi, who later achieved the status as the first female general of the National Revolutionary Army.

Here is a study of the actual workings of business under national socialism. Written in 1939, Reimann discusses the effects of heavy regulation, inflation, price controls, trade interference, national economic planning, and attacks on private property, and what consequences they had for human rights and economic development. This is a subject rarely discussed and for reasons that are discomforting,: as much as the left hated the social and cultural agenda of the Nazis, the economic agenda fit straight into a pattern of statism that had emerged in Europe and the United States, and in this area, the world has not be de-Nazified. This books makes for alarming reading, as one discovers the extent to which the Nazi economic agenda of totalitarian control — without finally abolishing private property — has become the norm. The author is by no means an Austrian but his study provides historical understanding and frightening look at the consequences of state economic management.