The main action of what has come to be known as Reichskristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, occurred after the celebrations for the fifteenth anniversary, which began with a traditional march to the Feldherrnhalle on the 9th. There was the usual backbiting among Hitler’s men. Lutze poured his scorn for the SS into Goebbels’ ear. His SA was to do the spadework later. Göring took his place among the marchers on what was a grey November day but at 7.30 that evening he boarded a train and returned to Berlin. Goebbels had by now begun to take a keen interest in Rath’s deteriorating condition. In Kassel in Hessen the ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ continued as well as in Dessau in Anhalt; some Jews were attacked by a hostile crowd outside the French tourist office in Berlin.
Hitler was talking war in his Munich flat when Rath expired at 4.30 that afternoon but registered very little interest. Two minutes’ silence was observed when the wireless announced the diplomat’s death, instructions that must have been issued by the Minister for Propaganda. Goebbels seized his moment.
Now the dish is cooked [he wrote in his diary]. I go to the Party reception in the Old Town Hall. A huge crowd. I brief the Führer on the matter. He decides to let the demonstrations go on. The Jews should feel the wrath of the people once and for all. That is right. I immediately hand out fitting instructions to the Party and the police . . . The Führer has ordered that 25-30,000 Jews should be arrested at once.15
Goebbels informed the Party leaders that they must not appear involved in the pogrom. It was to be the ‘demonstration’ that they had been unable to enact at the time of Gustloff’s death. At 10 p.m. Goebbels called for hate and revenge. It has been suggested that Reichskristallnacht was a test of Hitler’s ability as an actor, and that he passed the audition with flying colours.16 He successfully kept his own role a secret, even going so far as to voice his condemnation of the excesses. Hitler was sensitive to the effect that association with the actions might have on his international image. German goods had been boycotted since March 1933 and that meant an ever-worsening balance of payments. Goebbels had been told to postpone his campaign against the Jews in Berlin until after the Rome trip in early May. Again, in mid-June, the special mini-pogrom organized by Goebbels in Berlin was called off because Hitler was worried about opinion abroad.
As was often the case, he was candid with his friend Winifred Wagner. He confirmed to her that getting the Jews to emigrate had been the point of Kristallnacht, and that justified the extreme violence. When her children asked him about it, he changed his tune and blamed it all on Goebbels.17 In September Hitler insisted that the laws passed removing Jewish lawyers from practice should be kept quiet until the storm over the Sudetenland had passed. Goebbels was a more than willing mouthpiece for his master and was anxious to accelerate the persecution of the Jews with the usual objective: to encourage them to go more speedily.
Goebbels’ pogrom caught everyone off guard: neither of the SS leaders Wolff and Heydrich had been informed. At midnight Heydrich was drinking in the Nobel Hotel in the Maximilianstrasse when Gestapo Müller called to tell him that in Berlin Jewish businesses were being destroyed by roving gangs. Heydrich decided to call on Himmler, who was in Hitler’s flat in the Prinzregentenstrasse preparing to swear in a detachment of SS-officers at the Feldherrnhalle. Wolff was to take Himmler there after the session with Hitler. They discovered Himmler had not been told either. When Hitler heard what was going on he appeared beside himself with rage. ‘Unbelievable . . . I completely disapprove.’ Wolff believed to the end of his life that Hitler had not ordered the pogrom.18
Hitler turned to Himmler and told him: ‘Find out immediately who issued the orders. I don’t want my SS involved in any of these actions under any circumstances.’19 The times the orders were issued also give a further idea of how pluralistic the command structure of the Third Reich was: the Party (Goebbels) was told to move at 10.30 p.m.; the SA (Lutze) at 11; the police (Himmler) at midnight, and the SS at 1.30 a.m. The SS were told they were to wear mufti. Himmler made no bones about his disapproval:
The order comes from the Reich’s propaganda leadership, and I suppose that Goebbels in his empty-headedness and in his hunger for power – something that struck me long ago – has launched this campaign in what is, foreign politically speaking, the most difficult time.20
Heydrich’s instructions to the police and SD that night make curious reading. It was to be a well-mannered pogrom: German lives and property were not to be endangered and where a synagogue abutted on to an Aryan property it was to be left unmolested; there was to be no looting – any pilfering would be answered with arrest; care was to be taken to make sure no damage was caused to non-Jewish commercial properties; foreigners were to be left in peace – even foreign Jews. Heydrich also gave instructions that historical documents found in the synagogues were to be preserved and handed over to the SD. On the other hand, in keeping with Hitler’s wishes, Heydrich ordered his men to arrest male Jews, especially wealthy ones, and to hold them in police cells prior to transferring them to concentration camps. They were only to arrest ‘healthy male Jews’. ‘Particular care must be taken that Jews arrested on the basis of this directive are not mistreated.’ Now was the moment to put some of Eichmann’s methods into practice in the old Reich.
The first acts of hooliganism occurred in Munich itself, where a drunken band of members of the Stosstrupp Hitler went on the rampage and wrecked the synagogue in the Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. Goebbels claimed that he tried to stop it going up in smoke, but that he had not succeeded.21 The city’s Gauleiter, Adolf Wagner, had to be goaded, as his heart was not in it and Goebbels was obliged to transmit the order personally to destroy the synagogue in the Fasanenstrasse in Berlin. He smugly noted the ‘blood red sky’ in Munich. ‘In the future, the dear Jews will think twice before they go about shooting German diplomats.’ Before he turned in that night he parodied Hamlet in his diary: ‘Continue to wield our arms, or bring it to a halt? That is the question.’22
The 9th was the most important feast day in the Nazi calendar; many of the men were drunk. The SA-men had a job starting fires and no one had laid down stocks of incendiary material. In Rüdesheim the SA-men managed to set fire to themselves rather than the synagogue.23 Some were mere boys, big on destruction but often small in courage. In Feldafing on the Starnberg Lake, the youths were armed with bricks.24
It did not all happen as Heydrich had foreseen. There were accounts to settle too. In Erfurt, the baptized lawyer Flesch was tortured, because he had appeared against an SA-man in a divorce case.25 In Aschaffenburg the killing of Jewish businessmen had all the hallmarks of settling scores.26 Heydrich was not heeded in Frankfurt either, where rioters tore up the old books in a Jewish library. In Vienna they arrested all the Jews queuing for visas outside the British consulate.27 They demolished the Jewish hospital in Nuremberg and the Jewish children’s home in Caputh, near Potsdam. Five Jews were shot in Bremen (Goebbels called them ‘unlovely excesses’28).
In Munich the ‘demonstrators’ made straight for Schloss Planegg, the home of the Jewish Baron von Hirsch, and destroyed it.29 Five hundred Jews were arrested in the city, and the banker Emil Kraemer apparently committed suicide by hurling himself out of the window of his flat, although he had been unable to walk for two years. The archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber, lent the Rabbi Leo Baerwald a lorry so that he might rescue the contents of his synagogue.
The destruction was generally the work of the SA, occasionally encouraged by local Party officials and carried out by local boys who knew the Jews they were attacking. In some rural parts of Germany the purge was half-hearted. The Jews were too well known and the locals did not want to be seen joining in the destruction. It was often necessary to bus the thugs in from elsewhere. Although Jew-baiting was a long-established custom in the German countryside, the disparities between religious and racial antisemitism were shown in stark relief. You were supposed to love your neighbour. There was also a fear that the Catholics would be the next victims, an
d in some instances thugs destroyed Church property when nothing Jewish was to hand.30
In Buttenhausen in Württemberg the synagogue was torched by boys from nearby Münsingen, but the local fire brigade put the blaze out and rescued the contents of the building. The Münsingen thugs came again the next day and set the building alight again. This time they locked the mayor in his office to stop him getting in the way. The wreckers who came to Oberdorf issued from Ellwangen. When they told the local SA chief, Böss, to set fire to the synagogue he refused: ‘I can’t do this in Oberdorf, because I’ve grown up with these people, gone to school with them and seen active service with them on the battlefield.’ The Ellwangen SA returned the next day, but Böss was adamant. He was stripped of his command, but later restored to it because they could find no one else prepared to do the job. When the Ellwangen SA finally got the fire going, local people arrived to put it out. The SA nonetheless managed to take some Jews away and kill one.
In Würzburg the caretaker of a Jewish teachers’ training college came to tell the girls to flee. He appeared in a full brown Party uniform for the first time. The synagogue in Bayreuth was spared because it was next to the lovely baroque opera house. Both the police and the fire chief stood by to protect it, but could not prevent the SA from wrecking the interior.31 In Fulda the Jews were put in prison to protect them from being sent to a concentration camp, and released when the coast was clear.32 A uniform also came in handy in Schirwindt in East Prussia. The Landrat, Wichard von Bredow, was informed that he had to issue the order to burn down the synagogue. Bredow put on his army fatigues and went to the place where the Nazis were awaiting his orders. He stood before the building and loaded his revolver. The Nazis fled. He was not punished.33
It is easy to exaggerate the efficiency of the operation: the orders had been quickly issued and often only half understood. There is also a danger in believing the many accounts of self-glorification in which righteous Gentiles chase away Nazi thugs who are terrorizing Jewish citizens; but they cannot all be dismissed out of hand. The German journalist Bernt Engelmann remembered the events in Düsseldorf. He had just finished his labour service and was due to join the Luftwaffe. On the night of 9–10 November he was summoned from his bed by the din coming from downstairs where some Jews lived. The Nazis were playing the song Bei der blonden Kathrein at full blast to cover up the noise of their handiwork as they smashed glass and lanced paintings. Apparently one was a Chagall.
He told a neighbour to call the police, but she informed him the police were right outside. His mother finally incited him to act. Like Zuckmayer, Engelmann found the most effective way was to shout at the boys in his best Komissdeutsch or parade-ground German. The destruction ceased while one of the thugs called for his superior. Engelmann continued in a commanding tone, implying that his underlings were indulging in theft. He gave the SA-man the impression that he was a bigger Nazi than he was. The squad dispersed and went on its way. Later he witnessed the killing of a Jewish ophthalmologist who had put up a fight against the vandals. He seems to have taken one of the thugs with him.34
In Berlin children looted a Jewish toyshop. When Gentile women remonstrated with them they were spat upon and manhandled by the mob.35 Over thirty synagogues were wrecked. The author Erich Kästner witnessed the destruction of the city’s best-known shops on the Tauenzienstrasse. He could see the looters’ SS jackboots under their ‘civilian’ clothes. They went about their work systematically and he reckoned that they had each been allotted five shops. Each time he tried to get out of his taxi to remonstrate with them, a man came up and said ‘Criminal Police!’ and slammed the door shut. On the last occasion the driver verbally restrained him: ‘What’s the point? … and apart from everything else it constitutes resistance to the power of the state!’36
The fifteen-year-old Peter Fröhlich rode that way too a few hours later. Façades on the Tauenzienstrasse had ‘been effectively reduced to rubble, their huge display windows shattered, their mannequins and merchandise scattered on the pavement. Evidently more Jewish-owned shops had survived the government’s efforts to “Aryanize” them than I had imagined.’ Much worse was to follow: the shop of his uncle, Fröhlich, the milliner on the Olivaer Platz, had been similarly trashed.37 For Gerhard Beck the destruction was revelatory: he had not always known which shops in the Badstrasse were Jewish-owned – now it was clear. When he went to work on the 10th, the façades of Hemdenmatz,i Bata, Etam and Salamander had been wrecked. He was working for a furrier in the same street. All the furs had been smeared with excrement. As one Jewish shop assistant exclaimed in disgust, ‘What did the SA eat to shit like that?’38
It was not rare for Gentiles to deplore what was happening. There is even an instance of a member of the Gestapo saving a Jew, and the Nazi authorities placed sentries outside a Jewish seminary run by a rabbi who had rendered Germany valuable service in the Great War.39 Klepper went through the Bayrischer Viertel in Schöneberg and noted that the population had not supported the action. His Jewish wife received gestures of support from virtually everyone. The philosemitic Maria von Maltzan said the same. She was driving around that night with friends, upset by the burning synagogues and the sight of laughing SA-men throwing the Talmud scrolls on to bonfires and beating up rabbis. The actual private citizen was not involved in it at all.’40 Most of the synagogues went up in flames, but the SA merely wrecked the one in the Heidereutergasse, as it had recently rented space to the post office.41 It carried on holding services until 1940. The city’s most famous synagogue in the Oranienburgerstrasse was saved by the timely intervention of the head of the local police, who informed the arsonists it was an historic building.42
The pogrom in Vienna was predictably the most savage of all. It was organized on the ground by the head of the Jewish department of the Gestapo, Dr Lange. Skorzeny was commissioned to destroy the remaining synagogues, tasting blood for the first time. Despite the damage inflicted in October a further forty-two prayer houses were burned to the ground or blown up with hand-grenades, together with the halls in the Central and New Cemeteries. The efficiency of the operation is clear from the report of the fire brigade, which had to be present in case the flames spread to Aryan properties. The action started at 8 a.m. on the 10th. By 9.30 they had destroyed the synagogue at Neue Weltgasse 7 in Hietzing, inflicting 100,000 RM worth of damage, but they ensured that the neighbouring buildings were safe.ii Half an hour later the fire brigade was in the Jewish Leopoldstadt. The damage at the synagogue was only half as great. Half an hour later, in the Untere Viakduktgasse, a mere 3,000 RM; a minute later, another synagogue in the Sixth District, 10,000 RM; half an hour later in the Fifth, 150,000 RM, the biggest prize to date. It was still burning although it had been made safe. Fifteen minutes later it was the turn of the Grosse Schiffgasse in the Second – 100,000 RM – and similar damage was done to the synagogue in the Fifteenth half an hour later. It took the fire brigade nearly an hour to reach the Eighteenth, and by that time the arsonists had notched up 80,000 RM worth of damage. The synagogue in the Seitenstettengasse in the First District was not to be torched: the Gestapo feared for the valuable archive material housed in the neighbouring buildings of the IKG.43
The Sophiensäle concert halls were turned into a temporary prison. The violence was followed by 680 suicides on 10 November or later.44 There was dancing on the Torah rolls, and in prisons like the Karajangasse eighty-eight Jews were badly hurt and twenty-seven killed. For the first time women were the targets of violence. They were locked in cells with whores and forced to perform orgiastic acts. In Brigitenau 200 Jewish women were obliged to perform a goosestep march in the nude. One who refused was strapped to a table and the others had to spit in her face.
Using violence to accelerate the tempo of emigration was not particularly popular in Vienna either. From Styria the SD reports showed that the people preferred the ‘legal’ persecution. The same report showed how counter-productive the destruction had been. Papers had been incinerated that w
ould now have to be reissued, and that meant that the targets for emigration would not be met. In at least one instance the thugs destroyed a restaurant that had already been transferred to the ownership of a Party member.45 In Innsbruck four prominent Jews were murdered, three of them in front of their families. The anti-Jewish measures had been popular up to now, but in the wake of the pogrom citizens openly expressed their sympathy for the Jews. Similar sentiments were expressed in Vienna.46 The jails were filled with Jews. Eichmann addressed the prisoners in the Karajangasse, issuing dark warnings: if the emigration could not be speeded up he would find other means.47 The pogrom was followed by a wave of confiscations: nearly two thousand Jewish homes were seized, and their inhabitants forced to find shelter either in Judenhäuser or with their relatives.
AFTERMATH
Hitler and Goebbels had met for lunch on the 10th at the Führer’s favourite restaurant, the ‘Osteria Bavaria’ in Munich’s Schellingstrasse.iii Goebbels gave Hitler a report on the night: ‘He approves of everything. His views are wholly radical and aggressive. The measure itself went off without a hitch.’48 Hitler now wanted the Jewish businesses appropriated. There was no question of their claiming for the damage on their insurance policies. Hitler continued to keep his role a secret, but some people realized that he was involved. When the Prussian Minister of Finance, Popitz, complained to Göring, he told him the perpetrators should be punished and tried to resign. Göring replied, ‘My dear Popitz, do you wish to punish the Führer?’49
Hitler and Goebbels were alone in seeing the pogrom as a universal success. The Finance Minister Funk was one of the angriest of his critics, calling the riots Schweinereien, a shambles.50 Ribbentrop called the Propaganda Minister a ‘little beast’: ‘Goebbels smashes the windows and I have to mend the foreign situation.’51 Hefty criticism from all round moved Goebbels to make an announcement at 5 p.m. on the 10th, calling the party to an end.iv Exhausted looters and arsonists went home, often carrying baskets filled with food, wine and valuables. Goebbels was disappointed at the outcome and thought the number of people who had participated in the vandalism had been miserably small.52
1938: Hitler's Gamble Page 29
