Aly makes the case that although goods and gold, stocks and bonds, real estate and savings accounts stolen from murdered Jews accounted for at best 5 percent of the Third Reich’s operational revenues, this 5 percent was often the essential piece that stabilized the vulnerable economies of the occupied nations. The money allowed the regime to pass the costs of war and occupation onto the occupied while keeping the local populations and the German soldiers alike quiescent and complacent — and ultimately to benefit Germans back home. Many Germans hardly thought twice before moving into apartments that had belonged to deported German Jews, or furnishing those apartments with beautiful objects that had belonged to Jews of other nations.

This was grand larceny on a scale seldom seen in the modern world. From Tunisia to Greece, Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands, France and Italy to Serbia and Romania, Aly walks us through the Aryanization process. He demonstrates how Jewish property was first nationalized via a variety of tricks (like declaring the assets of deported Jews “ownerless” and therefore state property) and then funneled into German government coffers, and eventually into keeping the working and lower middle classes satisfied. He also shows that in a number of instances the urgency of the thievery process hastened deportations and killings.

“Hitler’s Beneficiaries” is based on a wealth of military and economic documents, and it is chock full of data on consumer spending power, money-laundering techniques, and bankers’ and civil servants’ inventiveness in making theft look legal — or invisible. The book also makes clear that even with the money and goods plundered in the occupied territories from both Jews and non-Jews, only a German military victory would have let the German economy survive the enormous debt burden it had accrued. The evidence is powerful on its own terms. Yet the connections Aly draws are not equally persuasive.

When “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” first appeared in Germany in 2005, scholars challenged Aly’s figures. Yet the discrepancies in the balance sheets of revenues and expenses they uncovered are explicable by the different calculation methods used, and Aly’s rebuttals to his critics have been included in this English edition. Readers can make up their own minds.

The more significant problems have to do with interpretation. First, there is Aly’s monochromatic notion of human nature — the assumption that Germans under Nazism were moved primarily by material self-interest (rather than, say, feeling thoroughly enthusiastic about Nazi militarism as long as it was successful, and unconcerned that Jews were demoted to second-class citizens — and then disappeared).

The second difficulty has to do with assumptions about causation. It is Aly’s great accomplishment to demonstrate that World War II could not have gone on for as long as it did, nor the German populace kept content for as long as it was, without the expropriation of the property and monies of slaughtered Jews. But correlation is not causation, and illustrating connections does not prove motivation.

The historian Jonathan Petropoulos has written, “The Nazis were not only the most notorious murderers in history but also the greatest thieves.” “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” offers stark proof that the murder and the theft were in many cases integrally linked. The Holocaust was unquestionably accompanied by outrageous greed. Yet this fact cannot make us conclude that greed alone drove the Holocaust.