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Government leaders and tax avoidance: the German example. Today: Hitler. Hitler should have paid 300.000 Reichsmark income tax in 1934. He never did. Here the full story.
After he had become Chancellor of the Reich, sales of Mein Kampf increased dramatically, giving the author an extremely handsome income. Although his salary as Reich Chancellor had already been made tax-free because Hitler had promised to donate it to a fund
for the "Fallen of the Movement" from the ranks of the SA and SS, the amount of tax payable remained substantial. If Hitler had paid income tax of RM 12,130 on a net income of RM 64,639 in 1932, his income rose to RM 1.2 million in 1933 even without the chancellor's salary.
His income had thus increased almost twentyfold. Hitler was thus one of the top earners in Germany and would now have had to pay 297,005 RM in income tax according to his tax assessment.
Julius Schaub, Hitler's adjutant in charge of finances, then obtained from Fritz Reinhardt, State Secretary for Finance, that half of Hitler's income was made tax-free on the grounds that this share was needed for professional expenses.
But even the reduced tax rate was still too high for Hitler. After his adjutant's renewed appeal to Reinhardt, the Reich Ministry of Finance finally made Hitler tax-free. After becoming Reich Chancellor, Hitler no longer paid a penny in income tax.
Gradually, other Nazi leaders took this as a model. Tax avoidance was encouraged by instructions issued by the Reich Ministry of Finance, according to which the tax returns of Reich ministers and NSDAP leaders could only be processed by the tax offices in Berlin and Munich.
According to the former head of the Berlin-Mitte tax office, Joseph Goebbels made about four hundred thousand Reichsmarks of his income tax-free by claiming an undocumented twenty percent of his income as business expenses.
