The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  * The agreement was dated September 29, though not actually signed until the early-morning hours of September 30. It stipulated that the German occupation “of the predominantly German territory” should be carried out by German troops in four stages, from October 1 through October 7. The remaining territory, after being delimited by the “International Commission,” would be occupied “by October 10.” The commission was to consist of representatives of the four Big Powers and Czechoslovakia. Britain, France and Italy agreed “that the evacuation of the territory shall be completed by October 10, without any existing installations having been destroyed, and that the Czechoslovak Government will be held responsible for carrying out the evacuation without damage to the said installations.”

  Further, the “International Commission” would arrange for plebiscites, “not later than the end of November,” in the regions where the ethnographical character was in doubt and would make the final determination of the new frontiers. In an annex to the accord, Britain and France declared that “they stand by their offer … relating to an international guarantee of the new boundaries of the Czechoslovak State against unprovoked aggression. When the question of the Polish and Hungarian minorities … has been settled, Germany and Italy, for their part, will give a guarantee to Czechoslovakia.”85

  The pledge of plebiscites was never carried out. Neither Germany nor Italy ever gave the guarantee to Czechoslovakia against aggression, even after the matter of the Polish and Hungarian minorities was settled, and, as we shall see, Britain and France declined to honor their guarantee.

  * The reference is to Disraeli’s return from the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

  * Even Hitler became at least partly convinced of this after he had inspected the Czech fortress line. He later told Dr. Carl Burckhardt, League of Nations High Commissioner of Danzig, “When after Munich we were in a position to examine Czechoslovak military strength from within, what we saw of it greatly disturbed us; we had run a serious danger. The plan prepared by the Czech generals was formidable. I now understand why my generals urged restraint.” (Pertinax, The Grave Diggers of France, p. 5.)

  13

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA CEASES TO EXIST

  WITHIN TEN DAYS of affixing his signature to the Munich Agreement—before even the peaceful military occupation of the Sudetenland had been completed—Adolf Hitler got off an urgent top-secret message to General Keitel, Chief of OKW.

  1. What reinforcements are necessary in the present situation to break all Czech resistance in Bohemia and Moravia?

  2. How much time is required for the regrouping or moving up of new forces?

  3. How much time will be required for the same purpose if it is executed after the intended demobilization and return measures?

  4. How much time would be required to achieve the state of readiness of October 1?1

  Keitel shot back to the Fuehrer on October 11 a telegram giving detailed answers. Not much time and not very many reinforcements would be necessary. There were already twenty-four divisions, including three armored and four motorized, in the Sudeten area. “OKW believes,” Keitel stated, “that it would be possible to commence operations without reinforcements, in view of the present signs of weakness in Czech resistance.”2

  Thus assured, Hitler communicated his thoughts to his military chiefs ten days later.

  TOP SECRET Berlin, October 21, 1938

  The future tasks for the armed forces and the preparations for the conduct of war resulting from these tasks will be laid down by me in a later directive.

  Until this directive comes into force the armed forces must be prepared at all times for the following eventualities:

  The securing of the frontiers of Germany.

  The liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

  The occupation of the Memel district.

  Memel, a Baltic port of some forty thousand inhabitants, had been lost by Germany to Lithuania after Versailles. Since Lithuania was smaller and weaker than Austria and Czechoslovakia, the seizure of the town presented no problem to the Wehrmacht and in this directive Hitler merely mentioned that it would be “annexed.” As for Czechoslovakia:

  It must be possible to smash at any time the remainder of Czechoslovakia if her policy should become hostile toward Germany.

  The preparations to be made by the armed forces for this contingency will be considerably smaller in extent than those for “Green”; they must, however, guarantee a considerably higher state of preparedness since planned mobilization measures have been dispensed with. The organization, order of battle and state of readiness of the units earmarked for that purpose are in peacetime to be so arranged for a surprise assault that Czechoslovakia herself will be deprived of all possibility of organized resistance. The object is the swift occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the cutting off of Slovakia.3

  Slovakia, of course, could be cut off by political means, which might make the use of German troops unnecessary. For this purpose the German Foreign Office was put to work. All through the first days of October, Ribbentrop and his aides urged the Hungarians to press for their share of the spoils in Slovakia. But when Hungary, which hardly needed German prodding to whet its greedy appetite, spoke of taking Slovakia outright, the Wilhelmstrasse put its foot down. It had other plans for the future of this land. The Prague government had already, immediately after Munich, granted Slovakia a far-reaching autonomy. The German Foreign Office advised “tolerating” this solution for the moment. But for the future the German thinking was summed up by Dr. Ernst Woermann, director of the Political Department of the Foreign Office, in a memorandum of October 7. “An independent Slovakia,” he wrote, “would be weak constitutionally and would therefore best further the German need for penetration and settlement in the East.”4

  Here is a new turning point for the Third Reich. For the first time Hitler is on the verge of setting out to conquer non-Germanic lands. Over the last six weeks he had been assuring Chamberlain, in private and in public, that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe. And though the British Prime Minister was gullible almost beyond comprehension in accepting Hitler’s word, there was some ground for his believing that the German dictator would halt when he had digested the Germans who previously had dwelt outside the Reich’s frontier and were now within it. Had not the Fuehrer repeatedly said that he wanted no Czechs in the Third Reich? Had he not in Mein Kampf and in countless public speeches reiterated the Nazi theory that a Germany, to be strong, must be racially pure and therefore must not take in foreign, and especially Slav, peoples? He had. But also—and perhaps this was forgotten in London—he had preached in many a turgid page in Mein Kampf that Germany’s future lay in conquering Lebensraum in the East. For more than a millennium this space had been occupied by the Slavs.

  THE WEEK OF THE BROKEN GLASS

  In the autumn of 1938 another turning point for Nazi Germany was reached. It took place during what was later called in party circles the “Week of the Broken Glass.”

  On November 7, a seventeen-year-old German Jewish refugee by the name of Herschel Grynszpan shot and mortally wounded the third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath. The youth’s father had been among ten thousand Jews deported to Poland in boxcars shortly before, and it was to revenge this and the general persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany that he went to the German Embassy intending to kill the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck. But the young third secretary was sent out to see what he wanted, and was shot. There was irony in Rath’s death, because he had been shadowed by the Gestapo as a result of his anti-Nazi attitude; for one thing, he had never shared the anti-Semitic aberrations of the rulers of his country.

  On the night of November 9–10, shortly after the party bosses, led by Hitler and Goering, had concluded the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, the worst pogrom that had yet taken place in the Third Reich occurred. According to Dr. Goebbels and the German press, which he controlled, it was a “spontaneous
” demonstration of the German people in reaction to the news of the murder in Paris. But after the war, documents came to light which show how “spontaneous” it was.5 They are among the most illuminating—and gruesome—secret papers of the prewar Nazi era.

  On the evening of November 9, according to a secret report made by the chief party judge, Major Walther Buch, Dr. Goebbels issued instructions that “spontaneous demonstrations” were to be “organized and executed” during the night. But the real organizer was Reinhard Heydrich, the sinister thirty-four-year-old Number Two man, after Himmler, in the S.S., who ran the Security Service (S.D.) and the Gestapo. His teletyped orders during the evening are among the captured German documents.

  At 1:20 A.M. on November 10 he flashed an urgent teletype message to all headquarters and stations of the state police and the S.D. instructing them to get together with party and S.S. leaders “to discuss the organization of the demonstrations.”

  a. Only such measures should be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. (For instance synagogues are to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.)*

  b. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted….

  d…. 2. The demonstrations which are going to take place should not be hindered by the police …

  5. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons … Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.

  It was a night of horror throughout Germany. Synagogues, Jewish homes and shops went up in flames and several Jews, men, women and children, were shot or otherwise slain while trying to escape burning to death. A preliminary confidential report was made by Heydrich to Goering on the following day, November 11.

  The extent of the destruction of Jewish shops and houses cannot yet be verified by figures … 815 shops destroyed, 171 dwelling houses set on fire or destroyed only indicate a fraction of the actual damage so far as arson is concerned … 119 synagogues were set on fire, and another 76 completely destroyed … 20,000 Jews were arrested. 36 deaths were reported and those seriously injured were also numbered at 36. Those killed and injured are Jews….

  The ultimate number of murders of Jews that night is believed to have been several times the preliminary figure. Heydrich himself a day after his preliminary report gave the number of Jewish shops looted as 7,500. There were also some cases of rape, which Major Buch’s party court, judging by its own report, considered worse than murder, since they violated the Nuremberg racial laws which forbade sexual intercourse between Gentiles and Jews. Such offenders were expelled from the party and turned over to the civil courts. Party members who simply murdered Jews “cannot be punished,” Major Buch argued, since they had merely carried out orders. On that point he was quite blunt. “The public, down to the last man,” he wrote, “realizes that political drives like those of November 9 were organized and directed by the party, whether this is admitted or not.”*

  Murder and arson and pillage were not the only tribulations suffered by innocent German Jews as the result of the murder of Rath in Paris. The Jews had to pay for the destruction of their own property. Insurance monies due them were confiscated by the State. Moreover, they were subjected, collectively, to a fine of one billion marks as punishment, as Goering put it, “for their abominable crimes, etc.” These additional penalties were assessed at a grotesque meeting of a dozen German cabinet ministers and ranking officials presided over by the corpulent Field Marshal on November 12, a partial stenographic record of which survives.

  A number of German insurance firms faced bankruptcy if they were to make good the policies on gutted buildings (most of which, though they harbored Jewish shops, were owned by Gentiles) and damaged goods. The destruction in broken window glass alone came to five million marks ($1,250,000) as a Herr Hilgard, who had been called in to speak for the insurance companies, reminded Goering; and most of the glass replacements would have to be imported from abroad in foreign exchange, of which Germany was very short.

  “This cannot continue!” exclaimed Goering, who, among other things, was the czar of the German economy. “We won’t be able to last, with all this. Impossible!” And turning to Heydrich, he shouted, “I wish you had killed two hundred Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”*

  “Thirty-five were killed,” Heydrich answered, in self-defense.

  Not all the conversation, of which the partial stenographic record runs to ten thousand words, was so deadly serious. Goering and Goebbels had a lot of fun arguing about subjecting the Jews to further indignities. The Propaganda Minister said the Jews would be made to clean up and level off the debris of the synagogues; the sites would then be turned into parking lots. He insisted that the Jews be excluded from everything: schools, theaters, movies, resorts, public beaches, parks, even from the German forests. He proposed that there be special railway coaches and compartments for the Jews, but that they be made available only after all Aryans were seated.

  “Well, if the train is overcrowded,” Goering laughed, “we’ll kick the Jew out and make him sit all alone all the way in the toilet.”

  When Goebbels, in all seriousness, demanded that the Jews be forbidden to enter the forests, Goering replied, “We shall give the Jews a certain part of the forest and see to it that various animals that look damned much like Jews—the elk has a crooked nose like theirs—get there also and become acclimated.”

  In such talk, and much more like it, did the leaders of the Third Reich while away the time in the crucial year of 1938.

  But the question of who was to pay for the 25 million marks’ worth of damage caused by a pogrom instigated and organized by the State was a fairly serious one, especially to Goering, who now had become responsible for the economic well-being of Nazi Germany. Hilgard, on behalf of the insurance companies, pointed out that if their policies were not honored to the Jews, the confidence of the people, both at home and abroad, in German insurance would be forfeited. On the other hand, he did not see how many of the smaller companies could pay up without going broke.

  This problem was quickly solved by Goering. The insurance companies would pay the Jews in full, but the sums would be confiscated by the State and the insurers reimbursed for a part of their losses. This did not satisfy Herr Hilgard, who, judging by the record of the meeting, must have felt that he had fallen in with a bunch of lunatics.

  GOERING: The Jew shall get the refund from the insurance company but the refund will be confiscated. There will remain some profit for the insurance companies, since they won’t have to make good for all the damage. Herr Hilgard, you may consider yourself damned lucky.

  HILGARD: I have no reason to. The fact that we won’t have to pay for all the damage, you call a profit!

  The Field Marshal was not accustomed to such talk and he quickly squelched the bewildered businessman.

  GOERING: Just a moment! If you are legally bound to pay five millions and all of a sudden an angel in my somewhat corpulent shape appears before you and tells you that you may keep one million, for heaven’s sake isn’t that a profit? I should like to go fifty-fifty with you, or whatever you call it. I have only to look at you. Your whole body seethes with satisfaction. You are getting a big rake-off!

  The insurance executive was slow to see the point.

  HILGARD: All the insurance companies are the losers. That is so, and remains so. Nobody can tell me differently.

  GOERING: Then why don’t you take care of it that a few windows less are being smashed!

  The Field Marshal had had enough of this commercial-minded man. Herr Hilgard was dismissed, disappearing into the limbo of history.

  A representative of the Foreign Office dared to suggest that American public opinion be considered in taking further measures against the Jews.* This inspired an outburst from Goering: “That country of scoundrels! … That gangster
state!”

  After further lengthy discussion it was agreed to solve the Jewish question in the following manner: eliminate the Jews from the German economy; transfer all Jewish business enterprises and property, including jewelry and works of art, to Aryan hands with some compensation in bonds from which the Jews could use the interest but not the capital. The matter of excluding Jews from schools, resorts, parks, forests, etc., and of either expelling them after they had been deprived of all their property or confining them to German ghettos where they would be impressed as forced labor, was left for further consideration by a committee.

  As Heydrich put it toward the close of the meeting: “In spite of the elimination of the Jews from economic life, the main problem remains, namely, to kick the Jew out of Germany.” Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance, the former Rhodes scholar who prided himself on representing the “traditional and decent Germany” in the Nazi government, agreed “that we will have to do everything to shove the Jews into foreign countries.” As for the ghettos, this German nobleman said meekly, “I don’t imagine the prospect of the ghetto is very nice. The idea of the ghetto is not a very agreeable one.”