The business considerations that frequently worked to limit the extent of involvement in “aryanization” – were there moral constraints as well? it is hard to tell – in the pre-March 1938 borders of Germany largely fell away when it came to the expansion of Germany that followed after the Austrian Anschluss. There was no longer any fear of tearing apart an existing business community. Quite the contrary, such a “reordering” gave new entrants into the banking scene substantial advantages. The behavior of occupation authorities, of industrial and financial companies in occupied Europe, also influenced the actions of the same figures when they dealt with German problems after 1938. It is often noted that the Anschluss marked a new phase in the radicalization of economic anti-Semitism. The rapidity and brutality with which the Jews who fell under German power in March 1938 were expropriated created a model for Germany itself to follow later in the year, and which was then applied in the countries of occupied Europe. Most clearly, perhaps, in the Netherlands, where the leading plunderers of 1938 in Austria, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Hans Fischböck, played a leading role in running the German occupation.

One of the remarkable features of the great German trade expansion to southeastern Europe in the 1930s had been that it was accompanied by almost no investment flows.