Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

Ethnic conflict and the economics of social cooperation 231by refusing to deal with this ethnic minority (Fonseca 1995). This resembles theFirst Case Scenario described above. The only work the Gypsies get is manuallabor, such as toilsome road work, where they are segregated into teams easilyoverseen by the C-types. Gypsies remain downtrodden to this day, and after theNazi campaign against them during the later 1930s and 1940s, which annihilatedmany Gypsy groups in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary (Crowe 1994),their population has steadily dwindled. The fear of Gypsy occupation of newEuropean regions has again reared its ugly head as part of the debate over theenlargement of the EU on May 1, 2004 (Sailer 2004).Another revealing case involves the war against the European Jewish community,especially those Jews that had already assimilated in Germany – “taken on themanners, dress, and idiom of Modern Germany” (Goldhagen 1996: 81) – at thetime of Adolf Hitler’s election in 1933. According to the sensational thesis of DanielJonah Goldhagen, nearly the entire German population believed that the Jews intheir midst had “been given every possible chance to become good Germans – andfailed” (ibid.). Many believed that German Jews, together with all other Jews,participated in a gigantic “world conspiracy” and that they had to be routed outand destroyed like a bacillus (Cohn 1996: 225). The necessity of eliminating theJews from German society was a national priority, and it was Adolf Hitler that gavepolitical expression to that norm (Hitler 1943 [1925]). As Goebbels proclaimed to aNuremberg rally in 1937:Europe must see and recognize the danger . . . We shall point fearlessly to theJew as the inspirer and originator, the one who profits from these dreadfulcatastrophes . . . Look, there is the world’s enemy, the destroyer of civilizations,the parasite among the peoples, the son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, theferment of decomposition, the demon who brings about the degeneration ofmankind.(cited in Cohn 1996: 225)This process of eliminating the Jew from civil society was well underway byOctober of 1933, when a German court concluded that a special law would beneeded for a Jew to administer an estate (Goldhagen 1996: 97). German citizenswere encouraged to boycott Jewish stores and businesses, thereby foregoing whatmight otherwise have been advantageous trades. The rule of law in which all menand women are equal and “free to choose” gave way in Germany to the brutal logicof race and ethnicity. The Nuremberg laws that were passed in 1935 “defin[ed]precisely who was to be considered a Jew, or a partial Jew, and enact[ed] a broadset of prohibitions that provided a good measure of coherence to the . . . program”designed to eliminate all the Jews from Europe (Goldhagen 1996: 97). The violenceof 1938 known as Kristallnacht, in which countrywide violence turned against Jewsand their personal and business property, signified the “crowning moment in thewild domestic terror that Germans perpetrated upon Jews” (Goldhagen 1996: 99).Many German citizens abhorred Kristallnacht, but not because it violated thehuman rights and dignity of other ( Jewish) German citizens. Many journalists