Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  destroyed; 59

  ^ on 1 November an arson attack was carried out on the synagogue in

  Konstanz; 60

  ^ in Zirndorf near Nuremberg a synagogue was destroyed on the night of

  4/5 Nov. 61

  In many places windows were smashed and Jews violently attacked. 62

  The further radicalization of the persecution of the Jews was expressed in the

  expulsion of Jewish families, some of long standing, from their homes. Particularly

  in the Gaus of Franconia and Württemberg, according to an SD report for the

  month of October, 63 ‘the Jews of individual towns and villages were forced by the population to leave their homes immediately, taking with them only bare necessities. Most of these actions encouraged by [Party] local branches or district

  leaders and carried out by the Party formations [SA and SS] were mostly purely

  local in character.’

  The anti-Jewish riots in Vienna were also particularly violent. On the night of

  5 October, in various districts of Vienna the Jews living there were forced to clear

  their homes immediately. It was hoped that this threat, which was later with-

  drawn, would unleash a panic-stricken flight of the Jews. 64

  Towards the end of October the riots directed against the Jews were concen-

  trated particularly in Franconia, where the Gauleiter Julius Streicher, according to

  information from the SD, had declared as early as July, with reference to the

  ‘Jewish question’, ‘that the Anschluss has brought the problem to a stage in which

  fundamental decisions can no longer be ignored. The question could now no

  longer be addressed by propagandistic means.’65

  At the end of October, SD regional headquarters South reported that a few days

  previously all Jews had been registered on file on Streicher’s orders: ‘The political

  leaders are expecting a major operation against the Jews within the next few days.’

  On 24 October 1938, the deputy Gauleiter, Karl Holz, was said to have declared at a

  local Nazi rally in Nuremberg that it would ‘even have been desirable if the exodus

  of the Jews had been encouraged a little more quickly in Nuremberg as well’. 66

  In response to an enquiry from SD regional headquarters South on 22 October,

  asking whether the instigators of individual actions ‘should still be treated

  ruthlessly’, the Jewish Department of the SD observed on 3 November ‘that a

  Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

  109

  general ruling cannot be given, as no decision has yet been received from C (¼

  Heydrich)’. 67

  The Pogrom of 9/10 November 1938: Reichskristallnacht

  While the Party activists were, with their violent actions, exerting an even stronger

  ‘pressure to emigrate’ both on Jews living in Germany and on countries outside

  Germany, increasingly alarmed by terrifying reports from Germany, the regime

  decided in the course of October to strengthen its Judenpolitik still further.

  On the one hand the government considered itself compelled by the inter-

  national situation—considerably worsened as a result of its own policies—to

  undertake greater efforts to rearm, for which in turn the remaining assets of the

  Jews were urgently needed, as Goering made plain at a meeting of the General

  Council of the Four-Year Plan on 14 October. Goering declared that he was ‘under

  instruction from the Führer to increase armaments to an abnormal degree . . . He

  faced unimaginable difficulties. The coffers were empty, manufacturing capacity

  was full to the brim with contracts for years ahead . . . He would turn the economy

  around, with violent means if necessary, to achieve that goal.’ Above all the ‘Jewish

  question’ must now ‘be addressed with all possible means, because they must now

  leave the economy’.

  ‘Aryanization’ was not to be seen, however, as it had been in Austria, ‘as a

  welfare system for inadequate Party members . . . It was entirely a matter for the

  state. But he could not make foreign currency available for the evacuation of the

  Jews. If necessary, ghettos would have to be set up in the individual cities.’68

  A note by the leader of Main Department IV of the Reich Economics Ministry

  reveals that Goering had, on 14 October, also ordered the ‘Aryanization’ of the

  entire Jewish bank, stock-exchange, and insurance system, and after 1 January

  prohibited any kind of bank deals by Jews. 69

  In October the regime also found itself confronted by a second problem: it was

  feared that the Polish government might anticipate the deportation of Polish Jews

  from the Reich by expatriating that group. It therefore decided on a major

  deportation of this group. This enterprise was enforced with extraordinary bru-

  tality at the end of October, and marks the transition from anti-Jewish actions

  emanating from the Party base to a centrally directed campaign that was to lead

  on to the November pogrom.

  With its new State Citizenship Law, which came into force on 31 March 1938,

  the Polish government had created the possibility of withdrawing state citizenship

  from Polish citizens living abroad for a long period of time. From the point of view

  of the Nazi regime, this produced the prospect of the 70,000 Polish Jews living in

  Germany (and many of whom had been born there) becoming stateless people. 70

  Consequently, since May deportations from Poland had been occurring on a

  larger scale and in August the Decree regarding the Special Police Department for

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  Foreign Nationals was tightened, unambiguously focusing on Jews. When the

  Polish Minister of the Interior decreed on 6 October that henceforth admission

  would be granted only to Poles from abroad who were able to show a special note

  in their passports, but that this could be withheld by the consulates if there were

  reasons to deny state citizenship, at the end of October the German police

  launched the operation to deport all Polish Jews, which had already been in

  preparation for some time. On the evening of 27 October and the two days that

  followed, Polish Jews were arrested all over the Reich, brought to collection points

  and transported under inhuman conditions in sealed and strictly guarded special

  trains to the border with Poland. The trains stopped just before the Polish border,

  which had been closed since the run-up to the action and their passengers were

  driven over the border. After the Polish side had initially turned these people away

  and thousands of them were wandering back and forth in no-man’s-land, intern-

  ment camps were set up in Polish border towns. The action, which led overall to

  the expulsion of around 18,000 Polish Jews, ended on 29 October, after Poland had

  threatened the deportation of German citizens.

  Herschel Grynspan’s attempt on the life of the Legation Secretary of the

  German embassy in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, on 7 November, was an act of revenge

  for the brutal expulsion of Grynspan’s Hanover-based parents to Poland that has

  no historical causal link with the pogrom on 9 November. Grynspan, who had

  fatally injured vom Rath, merely provided the Nazi regime with an excuse to

  launch a pogrom which at least parts of the Party base had been urging since the

  sprin
g of 1938. This pogrom was to form the precondition for a new wave of anti-

  Semitic laws which had also been prepared since spring 1938 and which, in the

  view of the Party leadership and in the face of the precarious situation in

  armaments, urgently had to be put into force. A pogrom would also unleash a

  new mass exodus among the Jews of the ‘Great German Reich’ and at the same

  time exert the necessary pressure upon foreign governments finally to hold the

  negotiations for an international solution of the ‘Jewish question’ in Germany.

  On the same day of the assassination attempt, 7 November, the Nazi press,

  following the instructions of the Ministry of Propaganda, announced that Gryn-

  span’s crime, an attack by ‘world Jewry’, would have unforeseeable consequences

  for the situation of the Jews in Germany. 71 Particularly in Hesse, on 7, 8, and 9 November Party activists organized anti-Jewish riots in which synagogue interiors were destroyed and shops with Jewish owners were smashed. 72

  The actual pogrom was unleashed a few hours after Rath’s death on 9 November

  by an intensely anti-Semitic speech by Goebbels at a meeting of leading Party

  members in Munich’s Old Town Hall, held as it was every year in memory of the

  National Socialist putsch in 1923. The speculation frequently encountered in the

  literature that the news of Rath’s death arrived during the meeting, and that Hitler

  immediately informed Goebbels, who immediately seized the initiative and possibly

  went beyond the goal assigned him by Hitler is, however, an exaggerated account

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  of events. 73 In fact the news of Rath’s death arrived before the start of the event in the Rathaussaal in Munich, as Goebbels’s diaries reveal: ‘In the afternoon the death

  of the German diplomat vom Rath is announced. That’s good . . . I go to the Party

  reception in the old Rathaus. Terrific activity. I brief Hitler on the affair. He decides: allow the demonstrations to go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews should feel the

  people’s fury. That’s right. I issue appropriate instructions to police and party. Then

  I give a brief speech on the subject to the Party leadership. Thunderous applause.

  Everyone dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act. ’74

  After the speech by the Propaganda Minister the senior party officials present at

  the meeting immediately informed the headquarters of the Gaus and the SA

  Group staffs that troops of Party members and members of the SA wearing

  civilian clothes were to destroy synagogues and demolish Jewish shops during

  the night. 75 The orders that reached the lower echelons were thus inevitably inconsistent. 76

  The most senior Party court of the NSDAP, which, following the November

  pogrom, had to deal with a whole series of serious crimes such as murder,

  mistreatment, and rape established the following with regard to the nature of

  the order on 9 November:

  The instructions of the head of Reich Propaganda, issued orally, have probably been

  understood by all Party leaders present to mean that the Party should not appear as the

  instigators of demonstrations, but in reality organize and carry them out . . . The examination of the conditions under which the orders were issued has revealed that in all these cases a misunderstanding has occurred in some link of the chain of command, especially

  because of the fact that it is obvious to active National Socialists from the Kampfzeit that actions which the Party does not want to appear to have organized are not ordered in a clear and detailed manner. Consequently they are accustomed to reading more into such orders

  than is expressed literally, as it has also in many respects become customary for the person issuing the order, in the interests of the Party—and especially if the order concerns illegal political demonstrations—not to spell out everything and only to suggest what he wishes to achieve with the order.

  Because of orders that were ‘not always felicitously formulated’ many sub-leaders

  assumed that ‘Jewish blood must flow for the blood of Party comrade vom Rath,

  and that, at any rate according to the will of the leadership, the life of a Jew was of

  no consequence’.

  For these reasons the Higher Party court had also recommended that in the

  fourteen cases of crimes of killing already heard, proceedings before the state

  courts be quashed and in most of these cases Party court trials should

  be abandoned, or only insignificant sentences passed. Only in two cases of rape

  was the case to be pursued further before the state courts. 77

  This kind of indirect command, to be understood intuitively, was typical of the

  National Socialists and had the advantage that the issuer of the order assumed no

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  legally demonstrable responsibility, but it did involve the risk that some of the

  subordinates did not correctly understand the meaning of the instruction in

  question and either did not act radically enough or in their over-eagerness

  overshot the mark. This factored-in vagueness in the Party leadership’s orders

  was, as we have seen, typical of the tactic of the ‘individual actions’ of the Party

  since 1933, particularly for the anti-Jewish riots in spring and summer 1935 as well

  as in the spring/early summer of 1938: in the Party base there was always a certain

  uncertainty as to whether the official Party prohibitions on these individual

  actions were ‘meant seriously’ or only intended to mislead the public, so that

  especially radical activists very often contravened the Party line. But such calam-

  ities were an inevitable element of the tactic of indirect command, and they could

  only have been avoided if the Party leadership had compromised itself with clear

  orders in writing. But the internal Party contradictions that repeatedly arose as a

  consequence of hidden orders were primarily shaped by this tactic and not the

  result of profound contradictions within the NSDAP about the course of the

  Judenpolitik or an expression of the Party’s incapacity for goal-oriented action.

  The curious aspect of this kind of hidden order was that because of the

  calculated vagueness, corrective action always had to be taken from above.

  In the case of the November pogrom this task fell to the Security Police and the

  SD. The execution of the pogrom was unambiguously a Party matter; the state and

  Party security apparatus, united in the person of Heydrich, clearly surprised by the

  action, and yet immediately ready to act, had first of all to perform flanking

  manoeuvres and adapt to accommodating the large number of prisoners driven

  together by Party activists. 78

  As they had been ordered to do, in the night of 9/10 November SA and SS

  troops, mostly in civilian clothes and backed up by Party members, forced their

  way into synagogues, smashed up the interiors, looted or destroyed the ritual

  objects, and finally burned down the houses of God. The fire brigades were

  commanded only to prevent the flames from spreading to the surrounding

  houses. Likewise, Jewish shops were destroyed, had their windows smashed in,

  and their storerooms looted or thrown into the street. In many places the Party

  activists led actual processions, generally accompanied by a curious crowd, roar-

  ing anti-Jewish slogans and marching from one object of destruct
ion to the next.

  The terrorist units forced their way into apartments inhabited by Jews, destroyed

  the furniture, and made off with valuables. The residents of the apartments were

  mocked, humiliated, and physically mistreated, in many cases in the most cruel

  and shocking way; and the 25,000–30,000 Jewish men arrested during the night

  also had to endure inhuman harassment and torture, which was intensified during

  their subsequent concentration-camp detention. 79

  The precise number of fatalities who fell victim to these acts of violence is

  not known; officially the figure was given as ninety-one, 80 but to this there should be added a large number of suicides, as well as the hundreds of Jews who were

  Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

  113

  killed in the following weeks and months in the concentration camps, or died as

  a result of their detention. In Buchenwald alone 227 of the prisoners delivered

  died in the first six weeks; 400 Jews involved in the pogrom died in all the

  camps. 81

  The damage caused between 8 and 10 November, according to Reich Insurance

  Group in 1939, came to 49.5 million Reichmarks. Of this, over 46.1 million was to

  Jews of German citizenship, over 1.7 million was to ‘Aryans’, and more than 1.6

  million to foreign Jews. 82 A survey of twenty-four private insurance companies showed that their disbursements for break-in damage caused during the November

  pogrom were 3.3 million RM higher than the sum that the companies had paid

  throughout the whole of the rest of the year for that offence. 83

  The individual elements of the pogrom, smashed windows, destruction of

  synagogues, forced entry to dwellings, looting, mistreatment, even murder, were

  not new, but they were part of the anti-Semitic repertoire of the Party activists.

  The pogrom represented a culmination of the anti-Jewish riots that had been

  going on for years; it was an expression of the fundamental radically anti-Semitic

  mood at the grass roots of the NSDAP.

  Outside the circle of Party activists and supporters of the NSDAP, the

  pogrom met with little sympathy, but overall the population—doubtless intimi-

  dated by this unfamiliar level of violence—responded passively. 84 This acceptance of the pogrom by the majority of the population must have seemed like the