Mises e os nazis

Por Jeffrey M. Herbener.

When the Nazis annexed Austria in March of 1938, one of the first stops made by the Gestapo in Vienna was the apartment of Ludwig von Mises. Finding it unoccupied, they packed Mises’s belongings into 38 crates and carted them away.

Mises was no secret agent, war planner, or armament designer, but an economist. The Nazis took special interest in him because he was widely-known in Europe as a foremost intellectual enemy of collectivism in both its socialist and fascist forms. In 1922, he had demonstrated, in his path-breaking book, Socialism, that government planners could not run an advanced, capitalist economy. Instead of a workers’ paradise, socialism would end in retrogression, poverty, and death. So great was the force of Mises’s work that it converted many European intellectuals, including the future Nobel Laureate in economics F.A. von Hayek, from socialism to free markets. Hayek’s famous argument in his popular 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, that fascism was the twin of its collectivist brother socialism, he held with Mises.

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Not content with having seized his library and papers in Vienna, the Nazis began to pressure the Swiss for the man himself. As pressure mounted, Mises and his newlywed bride fled Geneva for freedom in America, taking a harrowing, overland journey to Lisbon and then a much calmer sea voyage to New York City.