The original text seems to link the mistrust to the ancestry and money rather than anything else.
Herr Ries starts by saying that he has to give the government very specific details of his ancestors and where the ‘fortune’ could be ‘at the moment’.
There’s then all the stuff about asking various people for information but getting nothing.
Specifically - Kugler knowing nothing either. That sentence in the original runs on with a comma into the “people are indulging themselves in speculations” bit and “the one regards the other with suspicion” rather than ending in a full stop with the speculation and suspicion stuff being a new sentence.
German sentences do tend to go on and on. And on.
Together with the bit at the end about how he could really use the inheritance, it sounds to me as though there was some pot of money which Ries thought he might have a claim on - provided he could satisfy the authorities that he was sufficiently related to somebody or other.
That wouldn’t surprise me given the amount of assets being seized and redistributed by the Nazis. Something similar happened after the Wall came down (and of course -quite rightly - after the war by the descendants of those who had their stuff taken by the Nazis).
That and/or it’s to do with the law requiring people to notify the state of any assets belonging to them outside Germany:
Given he says he lost 500,000 Reichsmark, he must been quite rich at some point. Assuming I’ve worked this chart out correctly, that equates to around EUR 2,050,000 or about 2.4 million US dollars.
The letter reads to me very much as though it’s the money he’s actually writing about. The stuff about the Jews and how wonderful life is now the Fuehrer is in charge strikes me like the equivalent of “little Mary got her GSCE results and old Mr. Frottelhelm broke his hip” tacked on out of concern for social niceties. All the more revealing for that of course.
The spelling also seems to get worse during the rant about Jews. I get the picture of him hammering away at the typewriter, spittle-flying as he gets worked up about the poor German girls being degraded by those nasty Jews… 
@beschizza - Do we/ does Prof. Shaughnessy know anymore about Mr Ries?
