Well, they did not do so, or rather, no more than any other modern state with a system of taxation facing the increased burdens of running a war economy. Now there is an important caveat here: the Third Reich did not consider German Jews as citizens. The Reich Citizenship Law defined German Jews as "subjects of the state," which had a nebulous connotation. This legal limbo meant Jews and their property were subject to expropriation and seizure. But this seizure was often done within legal norms; for example, German Jews could not access insurance payments and had limits on their access to their savings. These policies often twisted and distorted German law to fleece Jews of their net worth, but from the state's perspective, they were not expropriating German citizens' property, but rather wealth that Jews had allegedly stolen from Aryans. The relationship between the state and Aryans' private property and wealth was more prosaic.

The NSDAP came into power with some of its leaders envisioning a broad restructuring of German society and government including taxation and banking. However, in very typical Nazi fashion, taking on such a complex task was too much for the leadership of the party who were more amenable to patchwork reform and working with the existing system. Hitler inherited from Weimar a system that used a variety of indirect and direct taxation and he did not fundamentally change the system. The Nazi state made some reforms such as lowering the tax on new motor vehicles to encourage motorization or cap on corporate profits, but these reforms could be cancelled out by high taxes on gasoline. The Depression did provide an impetus for the Nazi state to intervene in banking and other sectors of the economy such as imposing a moratorium on collecting farmers' debt. It also arguably intervened more forcefully onto the side of small businesses and shopkeepers than other parties of the Weimar state such as the conservative DNVP. The only real component of the NSDAP's earlier anticapitalist platform of the 1920s that it pursued with any vigor was its campaign against department stores. Not only did these stores compete with the petty bourgeois shopkeepers who were among the bedrocks of NSDAP support in non-urban Germany, but department stores had a strong affiliation with German Jewish ownership.

But while alleviating the Depression was a priority for the state, Hitler's quest for rearmament held an even greater imperative for the state's relationship to private property. The Nazis pushed for a rearmament drive that essentially created a wartime economy in a time of peace. This did create friction between the state and private industry, most famously between the pacifist and SPD advocate Hugo Junkers, but these were the exception. While the expropriation of Junkers's aviation firm did send other German industrialists a message about resistance, the leaders of German capital for the most part were amenable to the new order and its large contracts. There was persistent grumbling in the 1930s over either having to deal with cronies in the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front/DAF) or for German automobile manufacturers to conform to the Schell program. Yet, for all this grousing, capital cooperated with the state. The Third Reich preserved the right of freedom of contract and private corporate governance (outside of Aryanizing companies' leadership). There were some advocates of nationalization within the NSDAP, but these policies generally fell by the wayside and there were few national industries within Hitler's Germany. Even with caps and taxes on profits, corporate earnings did generally go up under Hitler's watch, albeit most of these gains were exclusively in sectors related to rearmament.

The above though does not mean that the pocketbooks and bank accounts of the Reich's Aryan citizens weathered the Third Reich unscathed. While some in the Finance Ministry broached the possibility of higher taxes including a higher personal income tax as a means to pay for rearmament, Hitler balked at such measures as being too domestically unpopular. Instead, the Third Reich opted for wage and price controls as a means to indirectly pay for rearmament. This helped depress the take-home wages for Germans in the resurgent industrial sector as well as preserving increasingly scarce natural resources by not having them diverted into civilian consumer goods. Indirect taxes also increased as the Third Reich classified various activities like horse racing as luxuries sober Aryans could do without. There were also various unofficial forms of revenue extraction such as voluntary contributions to the Winterhilfswerk (Winter Relief) in which Party cronies exerted significant pressure for donations. The advent of war in 1939 saw new taxation measures such as emergency surtaxes, more indirect taxes, and increased rationing and controls, but these measures were not entirely outside the norm when compared to other wartime economies like the UK or USA.

Yet Hitler and other Nazi leaders were acutely attuned to discontent within the domestic sphere. The events of November 1918 cast a long shadow on their decisions vis-à-vis the state and the domestic economy. For all of their talk about a stab in the back in 1918, the Nazis did fear that privation would eat civilian morale and lead to a collapse on the home front. This was why the Third Reich stepped up the fleecing of Jews concurrent to its wages and price controls. Jewish wealth and property could then be redistributed to the Aryan public at bargain-basement prices. Of course, NSDAP cronies often received the pick of the plunder, but this property did make its way back into the general population. The war accelerated this trend as not only did the Reich control territory with millions of more Jews, but it could also displace the burden of its war effort onto non-Germans. Whether through straight-up expropriation or through semi-legal means like controlling exchange rates between the Reichsmark and local currencies, the Third Reich did systematically exploit the countries it occupied. Aryan Germans may have faced more taxation and controls over their money, but the victims of German aggression had it much, much worse.

So in this context, the Nazis really did not go after the wealth of its citizens. However, the state was the one who decided who its citizens were. There was of course a number of Aryan Germans who complained of increased taxation and regulations. A number of contemporary opponents of the regime like William Shirer picked up on this grousing and uncritically repeated them. But complaining about taxes and regulation is one of the hallmarks of the modern economy and these complaints never coalesced into a threat that undermined the regime's popularity. Most Aryan Germans bore the financial burdens of Hitler's policies with a degree of equanimity and more than a few profited from the Third Reich's theft of non-Aryans' wealth.

Sources

Aly, Götz. Hitler's Beneficiaries Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. New York, N.Y.: Holt Paperback's, 2008.

Nicosia, Francis R. Business and Industry in Nazi Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004.

Overy, Richard J. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Tooze, J. Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

Wiesen, S. Jonathan. Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.