Making it marginally harder to steal wealth from Jewish people would have only slightly abated the negative effects of the holocaust, but it would not at all solve any of their problems.

That works as long as you already have liquid assets you can just flee with. The flip side is that bitcoin would have been the SS’ dream for punishing anyone who transferred funds to fleeing Jews and, of course, the ability to taint entire chains of transactions would mean that anyone hiding in country wouldn’t be able to use those funds like they would cash or gold. I also don’t like the possibilities were, say, refugees trying to buy passage suddenly hit with the German government reporting all of their accounts as stolen.

It’s an interesting thought exercise but ultimately the lesson is “don’t let fascists gain power” because technology can’t save you.

You are badly missing the point in a very fundamental way by focusing on the assets lost by Jewish people during WW2. Two out of Three Jews died. Most Jewish people died, often horribly.

The greater awareness these days of efforts to repatriate some relatively minor bits of lost wealth to Jewish descendants has perhaps distorted the problem space of those times quite a bit for an unfortunately vocal group of strong crypto advocates who hold up theft from the Jewish people as a pillar of reasoning in favor of crypto.

It’s fantastic when repatriation can happen, less so (in my mind) for monetary reasons and more so for the symbolism of regaining at least some small bit of what was lost in the horror and injustice.

But focusing on ww2 in the way some crypto folks do… the closes analogy I can think of (and maybe not a great one) is that it’s like focusing on the people caught in the twin towers on 9/11, but below the impacts and able to escape. And then saying “My goodness, they lost all their laptops and computers! If only they’d had VM cloud desktops!