Goebbels then described the destruction of synagogues in Munich. He gave orders to make sure that the main synagogue in Berlin, on Fasanenstrasse, be destroyed. He continued: “I want to get back to the hotel and I see a blood-red [glare] in the sky. The synagogue burns…. We extinguish only insofar as is necessary for the neighboring buildings. Otherwise, should burn down…. From all over the Reich information is now flowing in: 50, then 70 synagogues are burning. The Führer has ordered that 20–30,000 Jews should immediately be arrested…. In Berlin, 5, then 15 synagogues burn down. Now popular anger rages…. It should be given free rein.”
Goebbels went on: “As I am driven to the hotel, windowpanes shatter [they are being smashed]. Bravo! Bravo! The synagogues burn like big old cabins. German property is not endangered. At the moment nothing special remains to be done.”13 The main Munich synagogue, on Herzog-Max Strasse, was not among those Goebbels saw burning. Its demolition had been started a few months before, on Hitler’s explicit orders.14
At approximately the same time as the propaganda minister was gleefully contemplating a good day’s work, Hitler gave his instructions to Himmler and informed him that Goebbels was in overall charge of the operation. On that same night Himmler summed up his immediate reaction in writing: “I suppose that it is Goebbels’s megalomania—something I have long been aware of—and his stupidity which are responsible for starting this operation now, in a particularly difficult diplomatic situation.”15The Reichsfuhrer was certainly not opposed to the staging of a pogrom; what must have stung Himmler was the fact that Goebbels had been the first to exploit the shots fired at Rath to organize the action and obtain Hitler’s blessing. But he may indeed also have thought that the timing was not opportune.
The propaganda chief concluded his November 10 diary entry by alluding to some of the events of that morning: “Throughout the morning, a shower of new reports. I consider with the Führer what measures should be taken now. Should one let the beatings continue or should they be stopped? That is now the question.”16
Still in Munich on the eleventh, Goebbels kept writing about the previous day: “Yesterday: Berlin. There, all proceeded fantastically. One fire after another. It is good that way. I prepare an order to put an end to the actions. It is just enough by now…. Danger that the mob may appear on the scene. In the whole country the synagogues have burned down. I report to the Führer at the Osteria [a Munich restaurant; Hitler later left for the Obersalzberg]. He agrees with everything. His views are totally radical and aggressive. The action itself took place without the least hitch. 100 dead. But no German property damaged.”
What follows shows that some of the most notorious orders given by Göring during the conference that was about to take place on November 12 were decisions made by Hitler on the tenth: “With small changes, Hitler agrees to my decree concerning the end of the actions,” wrote Goebbels, and he added: “The Führer wants to take very sharp measures against the Jews. They must themselves put their businesses in order again. The insurance companies will not pay them a thing. Then the Führer wants a gradual expropriation of Jewish businesses…. I give appropriate secret orders. We now await the foreign reactions. For the time being, they are silent. But the uproar will come….17
“Information arrives from Berlin about enormous anti-Semitic riots. Now the people move ahead. But now one has to stop. I give the requisite instructions to the police and the Party. Then everything will be calm.”18
The pogrom was much less coordinated than Goebbels claimed. According to one reconstruction of the sequence of events, after Goebbels’s initial order “the Gauleiters started around 10:30 P.M. They were followed by the SA at 11:00, by the police shortly before midnight, by the SS at 1:20 in the morning, and again by Goebbels at 1:40.”19 Heydrich’s orders to the Gestapo and the SD were precise. No measures endangering German life or property were to be taken, in particular when synagogues were burned down; Jewish businesses or apartments could be destroyed but not looted (looters would be arrested); foreigners (even when identified as Jews) were not to be molested; synagogue archives were to be seized and transferred to the SD. Finally, “inasmuch as in the course of the events of this night the employment of officials used for this purpose would be possible, in all districts as many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing jails. For the time being only healthy men not too old should be arrested. Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately, in order to confine them in these camps as fast as possible. Special care should be taken that the Jews arrested in accordance with these instructions are not mistreated.”20
The November 10 telephone report from SA Brigade 151 in Saarbrucken was concise and to the point: “During the past night, the synagogue in Saarbrucken was set on fire; the synagogues in Dillingen, Merzig, Saarlautern, Saarwillingen, and Broddorf were also destroyed. The Jews were taken into custody. The fire brigade is engaged in extinguishing the fires. In the area of Brigade 174, all synagogues were destroyed.”21
On November 17 Hitler attended Rath’s funeral in Düsseldorf.
Only a few hundred Jews lived in the Gau Tyrol-Vorarlberg. Like all other Jews of the Austrian province, they had to leave the country by mid-December or move to Vienna. In October, Eichmann had arrived in Tyrol’s main city, Innsbruck, and issued a personal warning to the community’s three leading Jews: Karl Bauer and Alfred and Richard Graubart. Gauleiter Franz Hofer and the local SD office meant to fulfill Himmler’s orders and have the Gau judenrein within weeks. The night of November 9 to 10 offered an unexpected opportunity. Hofer rushed back from the Alte Kampfer dinner in Munich and set the tone: “In response to the cowardly Jewish assassination of our embassy counsellor vom Rath in Paris, in the Tyrol too the seething soul of the people should, this night, rise against the Jews.”22
The SS had been put on alert by Heydrich’s message. After the midnight swearing-in ceremony of the new SS recruits which on that same night had taken place in Innsbruck as in all other major cities of the Reich, the men reassembled in civilian clothes around 2:30 in the morning, under the command of SS-Oberführer Hanns von Feil. Within minutes a special SS murder commando, divided into three groups, was on its way to No. 4-5 Gänsbacher Strasse, where some of the more prominent Jewish families of Innsbruck still lived. According to SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer, he “received instructions at the Hochhaus in Innsbruck from regional leader Feil to kill the Jews on Gänsbacher Strasse silently.”
At No. 4 Gänsbacher Strasse the engineer Richard Graubart was stabbed to death in the presence of his wife and daughter. On the second floor of the same building, Karl Bauer was dragged into the hall, stabbed, and beaten with pistol butts; he died on the way to the hospital. On Anichstrasse, the turn of Richard Berger, the president of the Jewish community in Innsbruck, came approximately at the same time. Berger was taken out in pajamas and winter coat and pushed into an SS car that was supposedly taking him to Gestapo headquarters. But the car started off in a different direction. According to SS-Untersturmführer Walter Hopfgartner: “We drove west through Anichstrasse, over the university bridge, in the direction of Kranebitten. During the trip, Berger asked where we were going, since this was not the way to the Gestapo. Berger, who, understandably, was somewhat nervous, was calmed down by the men in the back of the car…. Suddenly Lausegger announced, in a voice sufficiently loud so that all could hear him, that ‘no firearms are to be used.’ This upset Berger again and he asked what we wanted from him, but he was quieted down again…. After Lausegger’s statement, I realized immediately that Berger was to be killed.”
At a bend of the Inn River, Berger was dragged out of the car, battered with pistols and stones, and thrown into the river. Against instructions he was shot at, but the subsequent Gestapo investigation established that by then he was already dead.
All the SS men involved in the Innsbruck murders were old-timers fanatically devoted to Hitler, extreme anti-Semites
and exemplary members of the order. Gerhard Lausegger, the man in charge of the squad that killed Berger, had been a member of a student corporation and had “headed the federation of all dueling companies at the University of Innsbruck.” On March 11 he had been among the men who, just before the arrival of the Wehrmacht, seized the provincial administration hall of the city.
Heydrich’s report of November 11 indicated that thirty-six Jews had been killed and the same number seriously injured throughout the Reich. “One Jew is still missing, and among the dead there is one Jew of Polish nationality and two others among those injured.”23 The real situation was worse. Apart from the 267 synagogues destroyed and the 7,500 businesses vandalized, some ninety-one Jews had been killed all over Germany and hundreds more had committed suicide or died as a result of mistreatment in the camps.24 “The action against the Jews was terminated quickly and without any particular tensions,” the mayor of Ingolstadt wrote in his monthly report on December 1. “As a result of this measure a local Jewish couple drowned themselves in the Danube.”25
For the Würzburg Gestapo nothing was self-evident. In an order issued on December 6 to the heads of the twenty-two administrative districts of Gau Main-Franken (Franconia) as well as to the mayors of Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt, Bad Kissingen, and Kitzingen, the secret police demanded immediate details about Jews who had committed suicide “in connection with the action against the Jews”; question no. 3 required information about “the presumed motive.”26
In a secret letter addressed on November 19 to the Hamburg Prosecutor General about the events of November 9–11, the Ministry of Justice stated that the destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, as well as of Jewish shops and dwellings, if not committed for purposes of looting, were not to be prosecuted. The murder of Jews and the infliction of serious bodily damage were to be prosecuted “only if committed for selfish reasons.”27
The decisions of the courts and the various administrative decrees regarding the (lack of) culpability of the murderers were given their adequate “conceptual framework” in the report prepared by the Supreme Court of the NSDAP of February 13, 1939. The report stated that on November 10, at 2 A.M., Goebbels had been informed of the first killing, that of a Polish Jew. He was told that something had to be done to stop what could become a dangerous development. According to the report, Goebbels’s answer was in terms of “not getting upset because of a dead Jew.” The report then adds the following comment: “At this point in time, most of the killings could still have been hindered by an additional order. As it was not given, this very fact as well as the remarks expressed [by Goebbels] lead to the conclusion that the final result was intended or at least taken into account as possible and desirable. This being the case, the individual perpetrator has put into action not merely what he assumed to be the intention of the leadership, but what he rightly recognized as such, even though it was not clearly stated. For this he cannot be punished.”28
Was the Nazi action perceived by its perpetrators as a step that could hasten the emigration of the Jews from the Reich or possibly as an initiative aimed at furthering some other, more encompassing policy? After the pogrom Göring, on Hitler’s orders, would make the most of the Paris shooting. But despite prior SD plans about the use of violence, nothing systematic seems to have been considered before the unleashing of the action of November 9. At that moment total, abysmal hatred appears as the be-all and end-all of the onslaught. The only immediate aim was to hurt the Jews as badly as the circumstances allowed, by all possible means: to hurt them and to humiliate them. The pogrom and the initiatives that immediately followed have quite rightly been called “a degradation ritual.”29 An explosion of sadism threw a particularly lurid light on the entire action and its sequels; it burst forth at all levels, that of the highest leadership and that of the lowliest party members. The tone of Goebbels’s diary entries was unmistakable; the same tone would suffuse the November 12 conference.
An uncontrollable lust for destruction and humiliation of the victims drove the squads roaming the cities. “Organized parties moved through Cologne from one Jewish apartment to another,” the Swiss consul reported. “The families were either ordered to leave the apartment or they had to stand in a corner of a room while the contents were hurled from the windows. Gramophones, sewing machines, and typewriters tumbled down into the streets. One of my colleagues even saw a piano being thrown out of a second-floor window. Even today [November 13] one can still see bedding hanging from trees and bushes.30 Even worse was reported from Leipzig: “Having demolished dwellings and hurled most of the movable effects to the streets,” the American consul in Leipzig reported, “the insatiably sadistic perpetrators threw away many of the trembling inmates into a small stream that flows through the Zoological Park, commanding the horrified spectators to spit at them, defile them with mud and jeer at their plight…. The slightest manifestation of sympathy evoked a positive fury on the part of the perpetrators, and the crowd was powerless to do anything but turn horror-stricken eyes from the scene of abuse, or leave the vicinity. These tactics were carried out the entire morning of November 10 without police intervention and they were applied to men, women and children.”
The same scenes were repeated in the smallest towns: the sadistic brutality of the perpetrators, the shamefaced reactions of some of the onlookers, the grins of others, the silence of the immense majority, the helplessness of the victims. In Wittlich, a small town in the Moselle Valley in the western part of Germany, as in most places, the synagogue was destroyed first: “The intricate lead crystal window above the door crashed into the street and pieces of furniture came flying through doors and windows. A shouting SA man climbed to the roof, waving the rolls of the Torah: ‘Wipe your asses with it, Jews,’ he screamed while he hurled them like bands of confetti on Karnival.” Jewish businesses were vandalized, Jewish men beaten up and taken away: “Herr Marks, who owned the butcher shop down the street, was one of the half dozen Jewish men already on the truck…. The SA men were laughing at Frau Marks who stood in front of her smashed plate-glass window [with] both hands raised in bewildered despair. ‘Why are you people doing this to us?’ She wailed at the circle of silent faces in the windows, her lifelong neighbors. ‘What have we ever done to you?’”31
Soon the Jewish masses of occupied Poland would offer the choicest targets to the unquenchable rage that, stage by stage, propelled the Greater German Reich against the hapless European Jews.32
Once again Hitler had followed the by-now familiar pattern he had displayed throughout the 1930s. Secretly he gave the orders or confirmed them; openly his name was in no way to be linked with the brutality. Having refrained from any open remark about the events on November 7–8, Hitler also avoided any reference to them in his midnight address to SS recruits in front of the Feldherrnhalle on November 9. At the time of his address, synagogues were already burning, shops being demolished, and Jews wounded and killed throughout the Reich. A day later, in his secret speech to representatives of the German press, Hitler maintained the same rule of silence regarding events that could not but be on the mind of every member of the audience;33 he did not even speak at Rath’s funeral. The fiction of a spontaneous outburst of popular anger imposed silence. Any expression of Hitler’s wish or even any positive comment would have been a “Führer order.” Of Hitler’s involvement the outside world—including trustworthy party members—was, at least in principle, to know nothing.
However, knowledge of Hitler’s direct responsibility quickly trickled out from the innermost circle. According to the diaries of Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Rome and an early opponent of the regime, many conservatives were outraged by the events, and the minister of finance of Prussia, Johannes Popitz, protested to Göring and demanded the punishment of those responsible for the action. “My dear Popitz, do you want to punish the Fuhrer?” was Göring’s answer.34
At the low end of the party hierarchy some justifications were rapidly concocted
. On November 23 a Hüttenbach Blockleiter (block leader), who was also the chronicler of party history in his town, was ordered by his district party leader to collect incriminating evidence against the local Jews. Only two days later he had completed his research and could report that the task had been accomplished: “Herewith,” the Blockleiter wrote, “I am sending some material about the Jews in Hüttenbach. I don’t know whether I hit upon the right things. I couldn’t do it more quickly, if what was wanted was an overview of these racial foreigners and about how they behaved in Hüttenbach.” At that point the Blockleiter, with engaging openness, voiced some doubts about his own qualifications as a full-fledged historian: “I may have more material here, but I cannot become a historian along with my professional work and in any case the necessary documentation is missing.”35
Incidentally, the same local historian had not yet exhausted his efforts, or his worries, regarding the events of November 9 and 10. On February 7, 1939, he announced to his district party leader that he had completed the chronicle for the year 1938. The November events he memorialized as follows: “During the night of November 9, 1938, Party member v. Rath died in Paris as a result of the cowardly aggression perpetrated by the Jew Grünspan. During the same night all the Jews’ synagogues went up in flames all over Germany; Party member Ernst v. Rath was avenged. Early, at 5 in the morning, District Party Leader Party Comrade Waltz and Mayor Party Comrade Herzog, District Propaganda Leader Party Comrade Büttner and Sturmführer Brand, arrived and set the Jewish temple on fire. Party members from the local section gave energetic help. But this sentence was criticized by a few Party members: it should not be written that Party members Walz, Herzog, and Büttner/Brand set the synagogue on fire, but the people did it. That’s right. But as the writer of a chronicle I should and I must report the truth. It would easily be possible to take this page out and to prepare another entry. I ask you, my District Party Leader, how should I prepare this entry and how should it be worded? Heil Hitler.”36
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution Page 36
