Until WWI, it was common practice for the winning country to loot the treasury and take items of value back to their home country. If you check the major museums for example the Louvre in France received many of its treasurers from Napoleon’s successful wars in Italy. Other museums have similar stories. At present, we expect the museum either to buy or receive donations from its patrons. In WW II, besides the desire for Germany to conquer Europe, underneath the effort was to kill or eliminate Jewish Europe. Similar to all campaigns, it started small with a few inconveniences and then ramped up to forcing remaining Jews to have no contact with the rest of the citizens of the country through the use of ghettos and sending people on a one way ticket to a camp (where many were killed by gas or hunger or disease or being broken or slave labour or….) The more important aspect of the Nazi campaign was how did non German countries react. The book Pack of Thieves by Richard Z. Chesnoff published by Doubleday, NY,1999 outlines countries did not offer much fight and for most part the citizens did not seem to mind. There was only a handful which fought or tried to help.

If you look around, people accumulate things and some have wealth but most are getting by for they have hope either their children will do better or maybe they will win the lottery. For the wealthiest percentage, the Nazi’s targeted their homes and possessions and had a deliberate policy of taking all their possessions. Some of the possessions which could be sold, were sold to help pay for the cost of the military. The Nazi’s were good bureaucrats who ensured everything was written down, to be sent to the storage facilities to eventually be allocated. The policy was very effective across Europe.

The issue which the book examines is when the war was over, the Germans had surrendered, the military machine was shut down, what happened? It turns out although there was many records of taking possessions, because receipts were not given very few people returned anything. Home and apartments were not given back; insurance companies did not want to pay; governments did not want to offer any considerations particularly financial; it was if people and their institutions said they did it under distress, but we are glad we did it, so start your life somewhere else. In some cases in Poland, Jews had lived in the community for 900 years and there was little humanitarian concern after the war.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies and their people make mistakes (it is why every company has a lawyer or lawyers), however how they react to the mistakes is often a defining moment for shareholders. There are always two methods – delay and hope it goes away or be proactive. There are plenty of examples of both and generally we believe governments and insurance companies like the delay feature. How should the company react and how does the myth when it does act properly goes into play is how we see the company is doing.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.