Topics Ethics

Question Was it ethical for Jews to evade taxes in Nazi Germany? Professor Robert McGee asked this question in a recent survey of international business professors and they seem to think that it was unethical. The abstract of the study is posted at http://ssrn.com/abstract=803964. The full study may be downloaded by hitting the DOWNLOAD button.

Accepted:
October 5, 2005

Comments

It is an interesting question how far living in a state which persecutes a group of people justifies their retaliation by not obeying the law. Of course, as far as the practicalities of these things go, the choice to pay or not pay taxes is not much of a choice, since one has to pay them, and the consequences of not doing so were no doubt especially harsh in Nazi Germany. The Jews were of course particularly singled out through the tax system, especially if they wished to emigrate, and their assets were rapidly denuded through the legal system of the Third Reich. Might this not mean that they were morally allowed to break the law in situations where it was in their interests and possible to do so? I think one has to be careful here. Many laws are just worth keeping because they make common life in the state bearable. Other laws though do not have this general character and might be regarded as only valid if they are part of a reasonably benign system. I was told by an elderly relative of mine who was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany that the socialists who fought with the police at demonstrations during the Weimar Republic debated long and hard among themselves whether when retreating from charging police officers they could run over lawns which bore notices forbidding access. Their point was that it was in everyone's interests for the grass to be healthy and nothing the state could do would invalidate that fact. This is perhaps the standard by which the tax question could be judged. Was it in everyone's interests in Germany for taxes to be paid? The answer is probably negative, and if the regime could have been weakened by non-payment then so much the better. I think in this case the moral exigencies of the case and our intuitions both pull in the same direction.