The Hindu : International : Hitler was a tax dodger

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 19, 2004

International

International

Hitler was a tax dodger

Berlin: Among many things, Adolf Hitler was also an inveterate tax dodger, it emerged on Friday. He systematically evaded paying his tax both before and after he became Germany's dictator. According to new records discovered in a Munich archive, by the time he became Germany's Chancellor in 1933, Hitler owed more than 400,000 Reichsmarks in unpaid taxes. The money — the equivalent of about Euros 6 million today — was written off the following year under a secret deal with the tax authorities. Hitler's previously hidden records also document that he first aroused the suspicions of German officials in 1921, shortly after he became Nazi leader. The Munich tax office politely asked him where he had got the money from after he bought a luxury car. Hitler replied evasively and said he earned only a ``modest'' income from newspaper articles. Two years later, after his failed Munich putsch, Hitler was sent to prison, where he wrote his best-selling anti-Semitic autobiography, Mein Kampf. Klaus Dieter-Dubon, who discovered the documents in Munich's state archive, said, ``Hitler paid virtually no income tax. He preached to the nation to put public welfare before self-interest, but behaved himself in the opposite way.'' After the Nazis took power, the tax authorities dropped their campaign. —

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