On 7 November 1938, a seventeen-year-old Pole, Herschel Grynszpan, who had grown up in Germany but was currently living in Paris, discovered that his parents were amongst those who had been deported from Germany to Poland. Grynszpan obtained a revolver and marched into the German Embassy, where he shot the first diplomat he came across: a junior official called Ernst vom Rath, who was seriously wounded and taken to hospital. The political atmosphere of early November 1938 was already heavy with antisemitic violence, as the regime and its most active supporters continued to step up the pressure on Germany’s Jews to emigrate. It was not surprising that Goebbels decided to make the incident into a major propaganda exercise. That same day, the Propaganda Ministry instructed the press to give the incident a prominent place in its reporting. It was to be described as an attack by ‘world Jewry’ on the Third Reich that would entail the ‘heaviest consequences’ for Germany’s Jews. This was a clear invitation to the Party faithful to act. Goebbels instructed the regional propaganda chief in Hesse to launch violent attacks on the synagogues and other buildings of the Jewish community to see whether a more widespread pogrom was feasible. While the stormtroopers swung into action, the SS and Gestapo were roped in to support the action as well. In Kassel the local synagogue was trashed by brownshirts. In other Hessian towns, as well as in parts of adjacent Hanover, there were also attacks and arson attempts on synagogues and on the houses and apartments of the local Jewish population. These acts of violence expressed, the orchestrated press declared on 9 November, the spontaneous rage of the German people against the outrage in Paris and its instigators. The contrast with the murder of a regional official of the Party, Wilhelm Gustloff, by David Frankfurter, a Jew, in February 1936, which did not elicit any kind of violent verbal or physical reaction from the Party, its leaders or its members because of Hitler’s concern to keep international opinion sweet in the year of the Olympics, could not have been greater. It showed that the assault was the pretext for what followed, not the cause of it.149
By chance, when Grynszpan fired his shot on 7 November 1938, Hitler was due to address Nazi Party Regional Leaders and other senior members of the movement in Munich the next day on the eve of the anniversary of his failed putsch in 1923. Conspicuously, he did not mention the Paris incident in his speech; he was clearly planning action to follow vom Rath’s death, which would surely not be long in coming. On the evening of 9 November, while the Party leaders were making their way to the main hall of the Munich town hall, Hitler was informed by his personal doctor, Karl Brandt, whom he had sent to keep watch by vom Rath’s Parisian bedside, that the embassy official had died of his wounds at half-past five, German time. Thus the news reached not only him but also Goebbels and the Foreign Office late in the afternoon of 9 November. Hitler immediately issued instructions to Goebbels for a massive, co-ordinated, physical assault on Germany’s Jews, coupled with the arrest of as many Jewish men as could be found and their incarceration in concentration camps. This was the ideal opportunity to intimidate as many Jews as possible into leaving Germany, through a terrifying, nationwide outburst of violence and destruction. Vom Rath’s death would also provide the propagandistic justification for the final, total expropriation of Germany’s Jews and their complete segregation from the rest of German economy, society and culture. Having taken these decisions, Hitler agreed with Goebbels that they should be presented to the Party faithful, in a calculated act of theatrical deception, as a spur-of-the-moment reaction to the assassination of vom Rath, taken in a spirit of sudden shock and anger.150
Over dinner at the town hall, where they could be observed by many of the participants, Hitler and Goebbels were accosted at around nine o’clock by a messenger, who announced to them what they had in fact already known since late afternoon, namely that vom Rath had succumbed to his wounds. After a brief, intense conversation, Hitler left for his private apartment, earlier than usual. Goebbels now spoke to the Regional Leaders, at around ten o’clock, announcing that vom Rath was dead. A subsequent report by the Party’s Supreme Court took the story up at this point:On the evening of 9 November 1938 the Reich Propaganda Leader Party Comrade Dr Goebbels informed the Party leaders who had gathered at the Old Town Hall in Munich for an evening of comradeship, that there had been demonstrations against the Jews in the regions of Electoral Hesse and Magdeburg-Anhalt, in the course of which Jewish shops had been destroyed and synagogues set alight. The Leader had decided on hearing his report that such demonstrations should neither be prepared nor organized by the Party, but that no obstacles should be placed in their way if they took place spontaneously . . . The Reich Propaganda Leader’s verbal instructions were understood by the Party leaders who were present to mean that the Party should not appear publicly as the organizer of the demonstrations, but that it should in reality organize them and carry them out. The instructions were immediately - i.e. a good time before the sending of the first telegram - relayed by telephone in this sense by a large part of those Party comrades who were present to the offices in their regions.151
In the regional Party headquarters, officials telephoned stormtrooper commanders and Party activists in the localities, passing down the chain of command the order to burn down synagogues and wreck Jewish shops, houses and apartments. When Hitler and Himmler met in Hitler’s rooms shortly before the traditional swearing-in of SS recruits at midnight, they briefly discussed the pogrom. As a result, another central command was issued, this time more formally, by telex at five minutes to midnight. It came from Heinrich Müller, Himmler’s subordinate and head of the Gestapo, and it transmitted Hitler’s personal order, also recorded by Goebbels in his private diary the following day, for the arrest of a large number of German Jews, to German police commanders across the country:Actions against Jews, in particular against their synagogues, will very shortly take place across the whole of Germany. They are not to be interrupted. However, measures are to be taken in co-operation with the Order Police for looting and other special excesses to be prevented . . . The arrest of about 20-30,000 Jews in the Reich is to be prepared. Propertied Jews above all are to be chosen.152
A further telex sent by Heydrich at twenty past one in the morning ordered the police and the SS Security Service not to get in the way of the destruction of Jewish property or to prevent violent acts being committed against German Jews; it also warned that looting was not to be allowed, foreign nationals were not to be touched even if they were Jewish, and care was to be taken to ensure that German premises next to Jewish shops or synagogues were not damaged. As many Jews were to be arrested as there was room for in the camps. At 2.56 in the morning, a third telex, issued at Hitler’s instigation from the office of his deputy, Rudolf Hess, reinforced this last point by adding that it had been ordered ‘at the very highest level’ that no fires were to be raised in Jewish shops because of the danger to nearby German premises.153
By this time, the pogrom itself was in full swing. The initial orders telephoned from Munich to the Regional Leaders’ officers were rapidly transmitted further down the chain of command. A typical example was that of the SA leader for the Northern Mark, Joachim Mayer-Quade, who was in Munich to hear Goebbels’s speech, and telephoned his chief of staff in Kiel at 11.30 in the evening. He told him:A Jew has fired a shot. A German diplomat is dead. In Friedrichstadt, Kiel, Lübeck and elsewhere there are completely superfluous meeting-houses. These people still have shops amongst us too. Both are superfluous. There must be no looting. There must be no manhandling. Foreign Jews must not be touched. The action must be carried out in civilian clothing and be concluded by 5 a.m.154
Mayer-Quade had got Goebbels’s message. His subordinates had no difficulty in understanding what this meant. Nor did others who received similar orders elsewhere. All over Germany, stormtroopers and Party activists were still celebrating the anniversary of the 1923 putsch in their headquarters when the orders arrived; many of them were drunk, and not inclined to take the warnings against looting and personal violence particu
larly seriously. Gangs of brownshirts sallied forth from their houses and headquarters, mostly in mufti, armed with cans of petrol, and made for the nearest synagogue. Soon virtually every remaining Jewish house of prayer and worship in the country was in flames. Alerted by the brownshirts, local policemen and fire services did nothing except protecting adjacent buildings from damage. Social Democratic agents later estimated that 520 synagogues were destroyed in this orgy of violence, but their information is likely to have been incomplete, and the true figure well over a thousand. After 10 November 1938 it was virtually impossible for Germany’s remaining Jews to carry out their normal religious acts of public worship any more.155
Along with the synagogues, stormtroopers and SS men also targeted Jewish shops and premises. They smashed the display windows, leaving the pavements outside covered in a deep layer of broken glass. With their characteristically bitter, ironically understated humour, people in Berlin soon came to refer to 9-10 November as the ‘Reich Crystal Night’, or night of broken glass. But the stormtroopers smashed more than shop windows; everywhere, they broke into Jewish premises, trashed the contents, and looted what they could.156 And then they made for the homes and apartments of Jewish families, with the same intent. In Dusseldorf, it was reported that ordinary Jews were awakened by the feared knock on the door from the Gestapo in the early hours of the morning:While the Gestapo were searching the house, the SA men outside occupied themselves by demolishing the window-panes and the doors. Then the SS turned up, and went inside to carry out their work. Almost everywhere, every piece of furniture was smashed to smithereens. Books and valuables were thrown around, the Jewish inhabitants were threatened and beaten. Scenes of genuine horror were played out. Only now and again was there a decent SS-man who let it be clearly known that he was only doing his duty, because he had received an order to break into the flat or house. Thus we have been told that two students in SS uniform smashed one vase each and then reported to their superior: ‘Orders carried out!’157
In many towns, gangs of stormtroopers broke into Jewish cemeteries and dug up and smashed the gravestones. In some, groups of Hitler Youth also took part in the pogrom. In Esslingen, brownshirts dressed in everyday clothes and armed with axes and sledgehammers broke into the Jewish orphanage at between midnight and one in the morning and destroyed everything they could, throwing books, religious insignia and anything else combustible onto a bonfire they lit in the yard. If they did not leave immediately, one stormtrooper told the weeping children, they too would be thrown onto the fire. Some of them had to walk all the way to Stuttgart to find accommodation.158 All over Germany, shops and homes were looted, jewellery, cameras, electrical goods, radios and other consumer goods stolen. Altogether at least 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were destroyed, out of a total of no more than 9,000 altogether. The insurance industry eventually put the damage at 39 million Reichsmarks’ worth of destruction caused by fire, 6.5 million Reichsmarks’ worth of broken windows, and 3.5 million Reichsmarks’ worth of looted goods. Only in the course of the morning of 10 November 1938 did policemen appear and stand guard before the ransacked premises to ensure there were no further thefts. 159
What happened in the town of Treuchtlingen was not untypical of events in antisemitic Franconia. Just after midnight on 10 November 1938, the district SA commander, Georg Sauber, received a phone call instructing him to destroy the local synagogues in his area and arrest all male Jews. By 3 a.m. he had driven to Treuchtlingen and ordered the town’s stormtroopers to be hauled out of bed and report to the fire station. Some of them went to the nearby synagogue, where they gathered outside the door of the adjacent house, shouting at its occupant, the synagogue’s cantor Moses Kurzweil, to open up or be burned to death. Breaking down his door, they went from his house into the synagogue and set it alight. Within a short space of time it had been completely destroyed. The fire brigade arrived and began spraying water on the adjacent, Aryan-owned houses. Some local people gathered at the scene and, shouting encouragement to the brownshirts, went with them to a series of Jewish-owned shops, where they helped smash the windows and loot the contents. They moved on to Jewish homes, breaking and entering them and rampaging at will. One local Jewish man, Moritz Mayer, later reported that he was woken up between four and five in the morning of 10 November by the sound of footsteps in his garden: looking out of the window, he saw eight or ten stormtroopers, armed with axes, hatchets, daggers and revolvers, who broke into the house and were already smashing washbasins, mirrors, doors, cupboards and furniture by the time he had woken his family. Mayer was hit in the face and his glasses were broken; he was thrown into a corner and pelted with pieces of furniture. In the kitchen, the brownshirts smashed all the crockery, then, descending into the cellar, where Mayer’s family were cowering in terror, they forced the women to break all the wine-bottles and preserving-jars. No sooner had they gone than local inhabitants and youths arrived on the scene, looting everything they could. Mayer and his family packed some clothes quickly and fled, accompanied by the derisive laughter of the mob, to the local train station, where they boarded a train to Munich, along with most of the rest of the town’s ninety-three Jewish inhabitants.160
I I
The extreme violence and deliberate, demeaning humiliation meted out to the Jews during the progrom was familiar from the behaviour of the brownshirts in the early months of 1933. But this time it went much further, and was clearly more widespread and more destructive. It demonstrated that visceral hatred of the Jews had now gripped not only the stormtroopers and radical Party activists but was spreading to other sectors of the population as well, above all, but not only, to the young, upon whom five years of Nazism in the schools and the Hitler Youth had clearly had an effect.161 Going out onto the streets of Hamburg the morning after the pogrom, Luise Solmitz found ‘silent, astonished and approving people. A hateful atmosphere. - “If they shoot our people dead over there, then this action has to be taken” decided an elderly woman.’162 In the Saarland Jews were said to have been too frightened to go out onto the street in the days following the pogrom:As soon as one appears in public, swarms of children run after him, spit after him, throw dirt and stones at him or make him fall over by “pecking” at his legs with bent sticks. A Jew who is persecuted in this way dare not say anything or he will be accused of threatening the children. The parents lack the courage to hold the children back, because they fear this will cause difficulties.163
Children, the report added, had often been taught at school to regard the Jews as criminals, and had no compunction about looting their property.164 Nevertheless, while young Germans in the particularly antisemitic region of Franconia and some other areas willingly took part in the pogrom, the story in some parts of Germany was often rather different. ‘Man’, a Berlin transport worker was overheard telling a friend the day after the pogrom, ‘no one can tell me that the people have done that. I’ve slept the whole night through and my workmates have slept as well and we belong to the people, don’t we?’165
In Munich, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen found himself revolted by ‘all this misery and this immeasurable shame’ after witnessing the events of 9-10 November 1938 in Munich. He admitted he was unable to understand it.166 Elswhere, there were isolated reports that policemen had warned Jews in advance in a few places and so enabled them to go into hiding to avoid the violence. The Social Democrats, while conscientiously recording incidents in which local people had participated in the pogrom, concluded on balance that the popular reaction in many places had been one of horror. In Berlin, it was reported, popular disapproval ‘ranged from a contemptuous glance and attitude of repulsion to open words of disgust and even dramatic abuse’.167 The writer and journalist Jochen Klepper, whose wife was Jewish, reported in his diary on 10 November 1938:We hear from the various ‘Jewish’ quarters of the city how the people are rejecting such organized actions. It is as if the antisemitism that was still plentifully present in 1933 had to a large degree disappeared since the excesses
of the Nuremberg Laws. But it’s probably different with the Hitler Youth, which includes, and educates, all young Germans. I don’t know how far the parental home can supply a counterweight there. 168
Melita Maschmann later remembered that she had been taken aback by the damaged shops and the mess on the streets when she had gone into Berlin on the morning of 10 November 1938; asking a policeman what had happened, she had learned that the wrecked premises were all Jewish. ‘I said to myself: The Jews are the enemy of the new Germany. Last night they had a taste of what this means.’ And with that, she ‘forced the memory of it out of my consciousness as quickly as possible’.169
There were many who thought like her. Institutions that claimed to give a moral lead remained silent too. Some individual pastors criticized the violence and destruction, but the Confessing Church took no stand, and when it came some time later to allude to the situation of the Jews, it was only for the Jews of Christian faith that it asked its members to pray.170 A number of Catholic priests cautiously and rather obliquely hinted at their disapproval of the pogrom by giving particular emphasis to the ‘Jewish components in Christian teaching and history’ in their sermons, as regional authorities in Bavaria noted.171 One priest, Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin, declared on 10 November 1938 that the synagogue that had been burned down during the night was also a house of God. But the time when, as in 1933, senior dignitaries of the Catholic Church like Cardinal Faulhaber had spoken out openly against pride in one’s own race degenerating into hatred of another seemed to be long gone.172 Some ordinary Catholics at least feared they might be next. A passer-by in Cologne on the morning of 10 November 1938 encountered a crowd standing in front of the still-smouldering synagogue. ‘A policeman came up. “Move along, move along!” Upon this a Cologne woman said: “Are we not allowed to think about what we’re supposed to have done?” ’173 Nevertheless, the Third Reich had passed a milestone in the persecution of the Jews. It had unleashed a massive outbreak of unbridled destructive fury against them without encountering any meaningful opposition. Whether people’s sensibilities had been dulled by five years of incessant antisemitic propaganda, or whether their human instincts were inhibited by the clear threat of violence to themselves should they express open condemnation of the pogrom, the result was the same: the Nazis knew that they could take whatever further steps against the Jews they liked, and nobody was going to try to stop them.174
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