Among the duties of the Jewish section was the compilation of a card index that would locate and identify every Jew living in Germany—name, address, occupation, racial classification, memberships in clubs and organizations. Where possible, the SD also unearthed the names of friends and associates for cross-reference. An effort was also made to catalogue all Jewish organizations still operating in Germany and their possible connections to similar organizations abroad. A second Jewish card index was created to determine the most important Jews in foreign countries and the contacts they might have with German Jews. The zealous ideologues of the SD, many of whom were in their twenties or early thirties—Himmler was but thirty-two, Heydrich thirty—were convinced that an international network of Jewish conspirators existed and was plotting world domination. They repeatedly uncovered evidence, all of it imaginary, of Jewish plots to assassinate Hitler, Schleicher, and other Nazi leaders, large and small.
The SS/SD claimed to prefer a policy of “rational anti-Semitism,” not the emotional, violent anti-Semitism found among the Storm Troopers and party militants. It was a point Hitler had made in Mein Kampf and in numerous party gatherings before 1933. The SS/SD’s solution to the Jewish problem at this time was “the complete emigration of the Jews.” An SD memorandum underscored that position in the usual cold-blooded language of the SS: “The life opportunities of the Jews have to be restricted, not only in economic terms.” The “old generation may die off . . . but . . . the young generation should find it impossible to live, so that the incentive for emigrating is constantly in force. Violent mob anti-Semitism must be avoided. One does not fight rats with guns but with poison gas.”
Throughout this relatively quiet period, the violent anti-Semitic rhetoric of the regime remained as scurrilous as ever, and after a comparative lull, persecution of the Jews was once again ratcheted up. In November 1937 the largest anti-Jewish exhibition, The Eternal Jew, opened with great fanfare in Munich at the Deutsches Museum, with Goebbels and Streicher giving speeches to launch the exhibit. Goebbels’s bloodcurdling rhetoric set the tone: The Jew “is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity. . . . This Jewish pestilence must be eradicated. Totally. None of it should remain.” By the close of 1937 a palpable radicalization of tone and content was evident in Nazi propaganda and actions toward the Jews, with increasingly shrill threats and occasional violence against the small and shrinking Jewish community on the rise.
The extremist rhetoric rose to an almost hysterical pitch, contributing palpably to an air of crisis that hung over the country through much of 1938. A mounting fear of war prevailed. The Austrian crisis in February and March and the attenuated and far more dangerous confrontation with Czechoslovakia in the late summer produced a virtual state of emergency. Germany, the Social Democratic secret reports emphasized, was suffering from a “war psychosis,” which together with a sharp escalation in radical anti-Semitic action by local and regional party formations, left the population perpetually on edge.
* * *
At the same time, the regime was becoming more self-confident, more radical, more confrontational both at home and abroad. From 1936 onward, moderating influences on Hitler began falling away. In the following year he removed prominent conservatives in both the administration and the military who had acted as a restraint on Nazi radicalism. With the brakes, such as they were, removed, and all the high offices of the state and military now firmly in the hands of committed Nazis, Hitler could pursue a far more aggressive policy, one that would lead to expansion in Eastern Europe, confrontation with the West, and a concomitant surge of violent anti-Semitic activity at home. Those developments converged in dramatic fashion in the winter of 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, a move that set the international community on edge and was accompanied by a profound radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy. The announcement of the Anschluss in March triggered a storm of ferocious anti-Semitic activity by Austrian Nazis and other Jew haters that far exceeded anything that had yet occurred in Germany. Given “freedom of action” by Hitler, party radicals immediately went on the offensive, smashing Jewish houses and shops, torching synagogues, parading Jews through the streets. Public humiliations of Jewish men—and women—became an everyday occurrence. Jews, on hands and knees, scrubbing the sidewalks in front of their shops while obviously satisfied spectators surrounded and taunted them, became a shameful part of life in Austrian cities. Nazi leaders at every level simply seized Jewish property, enriching themselves in a noxious display of avarice and corruption.
Pressure on the Jewish community in Germany escalated steadily as 1938 progressed. A new wave of discriminatory decrees began with a law requiring all Jews to turn in their passports—new ones would be issued only to those who were about to emigrate. In July the regime decreed that all Jews must apply to the police for an identity card, which was to be carried at all times and produced on demand. In August, the regime decreed that beginning in January 1939 Jews whose names did not appear on a list authorized by the state—names that any German would presumably recognize as Jewish—were required to add Israel or Sara to their names.
Eichmann, head of the SD’s Zionist section, was dispatched to Vienna to manage the emigration of Jews, at this time still the SS’s preferred solution to the “Jewish problem.” That problem was becoming acute. By the close of 1937 some 60,000 German Jews had emigrated, roughly 20,000 per year; now the Anschluss brought an additional 195,000 Jews into the Reich. Eichmann’s solution was forced emigration, developing a system whereby wealthy Jewish emigrants were extorted to subsidize poorer Jews who were desperate to get out of Austria. Eichmann created a Bureau of Emigration to organize the forced emigration. It worked, with staggering corruption at its sinister core, as Nazi officials coerced money from frantic Jews. By late November, Eichmann was able to boast that his policy had resulted in 350 Jews leaving Austria per day. The numbers were no doubt inflated, but impressive nonetheless to Heydrich and the SD. Later in the year, Himmler established a similar bureau in Berlin based on Eichmann’s Austrian model.
In the summer of 1938 Jewish emigration from the Third Reich was a matter of growing international concern, and an international conference to deal with the problem was held in the French spa Evian-les-Bains. Called on the initiative of President Franklin Roosevelt, the conference drew thirty-two participating nations and ended in utter failure. Although virtually all the participants expressed humanitarian concerns and agreed that the problem was pressing, all showed remarkable reluctance to accept Germany’s Jews. The Nazis were beside themselves with glee. The Western powers that so sanctimoniously condemned Nazi anti-Semitism had revealed themselves as hypocrites of the first order. Headlines in the Völkischer Beobachter screamed: “Nobody Wants Them.”
Against this backdrop of growing intimidation and violence, the Nazis moved decisively to expropriate the assets of Germany’s Jews. Beginning in January a series of edicts emanating from Göring’s Office of the Four Year Plan, a powerful ad hoc agency created in 1936 to organize and oversee the economy, aimed at assessing the extent of Jewish wealth in the country. All Jewish assets of over 5,000 RM were to be reported to Göring’s office; another regulation forbade Jews from changing family names to escape detection. It seemed ominously clear that the regime was conducting an inventory of Jewish assets in preparation for their seizure by the state. But what was a Jewish business? For small family shops determination of ownership posed few problems, but in larger enterprises, with multiple stockholders and Aryan managers or CEOs, the situation was more complex. Some Jewish owners had also struck upon the tactic of shifting the titular management of the business to a trusted “Aryan” employee or associate, some of whom proved not so trustworthy after all. Soon a decree against the camouflaging of Jewish businesses was put in place.
Many Jewish firms had already closed—“Aryanized,” w
as the operative term—their owners liquidating properties in bankruptcy; others, deemed too large, were being prepared for Aryanization. Corruption was epidemic. At every opportunity local Nazi leaders swooped in and bought up properties from Jewish owners, paying a mere fraction of their value. Aryanization of Jewish businesses was a moneymaker, not only for the state and the party but for individual Nazi leaders whose goal was more venal than ideological. The situation became so untenable that Göring was forced to remind party leaders that Aryanization was not intended as “a charitable scheme for incompetent party members.”
But it was a completely unforeseen event that would once again radicalize Nazi Jewish policy. On the afternoon of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, entered the German embassy in Paris and asked to meet with the ambassador on a passport matter. Only days before he had received a postcard from his sister bringing him distressing news that the family, which had lived in Germany since 1918, had been “relocated” and were living in deplorable conditions in a refugee camp on the German-Polish border. They were among some seventeen thousand Jews with Polish citizenship who were arrested and prepared for deportation to Poland. But the Polish government refused to take them in, and so, dumped in a dismal refugee camp, they waited, stateless, unwanted, without a country.
Grynszpan had been living in Paris with an uncle since 1936, but his Polish passport and German exit visa had expired in August, and the French authorities had ordered him to leave within four days. Powerless and despondent, he went into hiding. He decided to take a bold, desperate step. To his uncle, he wrote: “Jews have the right to protest. In a way that the whole world hears, and with your forgiveness this I intend to do. With god’s help, I couldn’t do otherwise. My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy and that of the 12,000 [sic].”
The German ambassador was not available, and so Grynszpan was ushered into the office of Ernst vom Rath, a minor Foreign Service official. There he pulled out a revolver and shot Rath at point-blank range. He made no effort to escape and was arrested by French police on the spot. To them he sobbed, “Being a Jew is not a crime. I am not a dog. I have a right to live and the Jewish people have the right to live on this earth. Where I have been I have been chased like an animal.” Berlin demanded that Grynszpan be turned over to German authorities, but the French, noting that he was not a German citizen, refused. He would be held in France until his legal status could be clarified. Rath, mortally wounded, did not succumb immediately and while he lingered on the verge of death, Goebbels sensed a propaganda gold mine. He portrayed the attempted assassination in Paris as an act of war against the Reich by international Jewry, and the German press sizzled with white-hot fury.
November 9 was the fifteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, and the party had gathered in Munich for the annual celebration. A social gathering for party leaders in the ornate Old Town Hall was to take place in the evening before the annual midnight swearing-in ceremony of new SS recruits. In the late afternoon, Goebbels received a telephone call from Dr. Brandt in Paris informing him that Rath had died. Goebbels passed on that information to Hitler, and the two held a lengthy discussion about some sort of nationwide action against the Jews—an assault against synagogues, businesses, homes, and individual Jews. Although Goebbels’s propaganda network would initiate the action, his agents were to do so in civilian clothes. The uprising was to appear to be a spontaneous action of an enraged nation.
During the meeting that evening, one messenger after another arrived to confer with Goebbels, and Goebbels left his seat to confer with Hitler. They spoke in hushed tones. Shortly thereafter Hitler left the Rathaus for his private apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse, and at 9 p.m. Goebbels announced to the assembled leaders that Rath had died. Spontaneous riots were occurring throughout the Reich. Neither the SS nor the SA had been informed, and there was considerable confusion and consternation among the leadership about what was to be done. Meanwhile reports were arriving informing the leaders that synagogues were burning in several cities, and crowds of infuriated civilians were taking matters into their own hands, torching Jewish businesses and homes. Jewish men were being arrested by the hundreds. Goebbels also made it clear that the Führer ordered that the police and fire departments were not to interfere except to prevent flames from spreading to adjoining “Aryan” homes and businesses. Party leaders rushed to the telephones, calling their regional chieftains, issuing orders to launch their own operations. Both Göring and Himmler, neither of whom was present in the Old Town Hall, were furious at Goebbels’s failure to inform them of his plans. Himmler complained that “I suppose that it is Goebbels’s megalomania and his stupidity which are responsible for starting this operation now, in a particularly difficult diplomatic situation.”
In city after city crowds gathered in the streets to watch, sometimes in silence, sometimes cheering, as mobs of Storm Troopers, Hitler Youth, and other party radicals attacked every identifiable Jewish institution or dwelling. The scenes of destruction were shocking; rampaging Nazis invaded Jewish homes, smashed the furniture, crockery, ripped bedding, tossed expensive paintings out into the streets. Shards of shattered glass covered streets and sidewalks; the acrid smell of creosote hung in the air. The Swiss consul in Cologne reported seeing gramophones, sewing machines, and typewriters tumbling into the streets. A colleague of his “even saw a piano being thrown out of a second floor window.” Jewish men were dragged out of their beds and paraded through the streets by the mob before being formally placed in “protective custody” and dispatched to concentration camps. The police stood by, watching but not intervening.
Like so many Jews who would never forget that harrowing night, Simon Ackermann from a small town near Baden-Baden vividly recalled the terrifying details of this Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht). In the late afternoon “ten Gestapo men burst into our apartment and turned everything upside down looking for weapons.” A short time later a uniformed policeman and an SS man broke down the door. “The policeman threw my wife to the ground, while the SS man flailed away at me like a madman. The policeman wanted to throw my three year old daughter out the window but I held her tight.” Then he snarled that “he did not yet have an order to shoot, otherwise he would already have shot all the Jews.”
Ackermann was taken to police headquarters, where a crowd of Jewish men had already been assembled. At shortly after nine o’clock they “were led by the police and SS through the streets. At the front of the procession were youths who chanted ‘Jew Perish.’ The whole town was on the streets. Many screamed like drunkards, yelling out ‘Beat the Jews to death.’ They threw stones and spit at us. . . . At the Leopoldplatz the SS men bellowed [to the crowd] ‘Here you have the Jews. Do what you want to do to them.’ In a flash hundreds of people gathered round and began beating us.” The SS then marched the battered men to the synagogue. As they trudged along, they were forced to sing the “Horst Wessel Song,” and once inside the synagogue “the SS led us one after another to the altar where we were forced to read aloud from the Stürmer.” Then the frightened Jews were herded to a local Jewish-owned hotel. The Nazis had disconnected the interior lighting, and the men sat in darkness waiting for the next blow to fall. At 2 a.m. the cantor “was taken from the hotel; he returned after a time covered in blood and cried: “ ‘Our synagogue is burning.’ ”
Meanwhile Ackermann’s wife appealed to the Gestapo chief for permission to leave the house. He refused, telling her that the people were demanding that she and her child be burned alive. Late in the afternoon she slipped away with her daughter and ran to the woods, where they hid until dark. Then they found their way to a friend’s house and took shelter for the night. She had no idea what had happened to her husband. Along with the other Jewish men of the town, he was being beaten on the railway platform, where they waited for a train that would carry them to Dachau.
Sally Schlesinger was a young girl in Koblenz on Kristallnacht.
It was a cold,
dismal morning when I was awakened by a frightful noise in the house. . . . As I came down the stairs I saw several SA men beating my Stepfather and Uncle over the head as they drove them out of the house. . . . They had smashed in the glass house door and the glass door to my parents’ bedroom. My poor little mother stood in the bedroom which was so covered in glass that it was impossible to sit down and dangerous to walk. It was in the dining room where the SA had had their greatest fun. Every glass, every plate was pulled from the breakfront and shattered on the floor. Even the ceiling lamp was ripped down and smashed. Later my parents were held liable for the damages to their apartment and had to pay.
All over Germany, from cities to small villages, it was the same—a nightmarish orgy of violence, arson, looting, and beatings that left 7,500 Jewish stores demolished, 267 synagogues burned, 20,000 Jewish males arrested, and 91 Jews murdered, a figure that does not include the large number of suicides that followed. The Nazis tried to maintain that this nationwide pogrom was a spontaneous explosion of popular rage at the “cowardly Jewish attack on Germany,” but, as was plain to virtually everyone, this was no independent action by local radicals. The night of wanton violence was clearly ordered and coordinated from the top of the National Socialist regime. Now even the law was no protection.
The Third Reich Page 46
