Historically would you in fact have lost everything in a longterm position in the German stock market in World War I and II? Not necessarily. It certainly wasn’t a good place to invest, but there are companies such as Daimler that predate World War I and still exist today. Personal risk, of course, might depend on citizenship and ethnicity. I’m not sure if foreign investors (neutral, allied, or axis) were treated differently. E.g. I don’t know whether a young German/Swiss/British citizen who bought and held shares in Daimler in 1910 would still have owned them in 1960 absent an explicit sale or not. But I suspect at least some subset of hypothetical 1910 shareholders would not have lost everything over the ensuing 50 years.
Historically would you in fact have lost everything in a longterm position in the German stock market in World War I and II? Not necessarily. It certainly wasn’t a good place to invest, but there are companies such as Daimler that predate World War I and still exist today. Personal risk, of course, might depend on citizenship and ethnicity. I’m not sure if foreign investors (neutral, allied, or axis) were treated differently. E.g. I don’t know whether a young German/Swiss/British citizen who bought and held shares in Daimler in 1910 would still have owned them in 1960 absent an explicit sale or not. But I suspect at least some subset of hypothetical 1910 shareholders would not have lost everything over the ensuing 50 years.