The idea was not new in itself. In the 1880s, one of the pioneers of popular anti-Semitism, the orientalist Paul de Lagarde, had advocated resettling Jews on Madagascar in conjunction with German expansion in eastern Europe, and since the 1920s, this “solution to the Jewish question” had been propagated by anti-Semites in various countries. In June 1926, for instance, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a front-page article by Englishman Henry Hamilton Beamish, who wrote: “Where is the paradise granted to the Jews, where they can live in happiness and peace, keep themselves pure and pursue…their ideals? It’s Madagascar.” The cynicism of Beamish’s appeal was difficult to top since both he and the other advocates of the idea knew that conditions on the island were so forbidding that the majority of Jews deported there would die. The SS hate newspaper Der Stürmer openly acknowledged the genocidal aspect of the Madagascar idea in the 1930s. Its New Year’s edition in 1938 opened with the headline “Madagascar” and a caricature of a horrified Jew with his back pressed to a globe. The caption read: “He sees the end coming.”50
Hitler had not reached a decision—Goebbels’s words “Madagascar or someplace like it” suggest that the dictator was considering a number of options—but it is clear that he considered it an absolute necessity to drive all Jews from Germany. In mid-August 1938, he told a small circle that the Nuremberg Laws were “actually too humane.” As his army attaché recalled: “He was considering the use of additional laws to so restrict Jewish life in Germany that the vast majority of the Jewish population simply would not want to stay in Germany. That would be the best way of getting rid of them.”51 In late September 1938, with the threat of a large-scale European military conflict over the “Sudeten question” temporarily averted by the Munich Agreement, new anti-Semitic unrest flared up. The fear of war that had taken hold of many parts of the German populace that spring vented itself in heightened aggression towards the Jewish minority. In numerous places, particularly in southern and central Germany, synagogues and Jewish institutions were attacked. The violence had “a semi-pogrom character,” according to a Security Service report in October 1938. Many party activists were convinced that the “moment of finally liquidating the Jewish question had come.”52 Presciently, Willy Cohn wrote in his diary on 4 November 1938: “I think the remaining Jews in Germany are in for some very tough times.”53 The pogrom throughout the Reich a few days later hardly came from nowhere. It was the culmination of the anti-Semitic violence that had grown ever more radical over the course of 1938. Once again it was Hitler who gave the decisive signal for Germans to give free rein to their hatred and destructive desires.
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On 7 November, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew who had grown up in Germany but who was a Polish citizen, shot and seriously injured the legation secretary of the German embassy in Paris, Ernst von Rath. The attack was an act of revenge. In late October, German police and SS men had rounded up some 17,000 Polish Jews who lived in the Third Reich and taken them to Germany’s Polish border. Among the people deported, who had to exist for days under pitiful conditions in no man’s land between the two countries, were Grynszpan’s parents and siblings. “My heart bleeds when I think of our tragedy,” Grynszpan wrote in a message to his uncle. “I had to protest in a way that the whole world would hear.”54
Grynszpan’s act of desperation gave the Nazi regime a welcome excuse to strike a coordinated blow against German Jews and what property they had left. Goebbels in particular saw a chance to repair his personal relationship with the Führer, which had been damaged in the previous months by his love affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, by demonstrating his exceptional zealotry.55 On the evening of 7 November, the Propaganda Ministry instructed the press to report very extensively on the attack and to publish editorials making clear that it “would have to have the most serious consequences for Jews in Germany.”56 On 8 November, the Völkischer Beobachter published an editorial with the headline “The Criminals” that all but came out and called directly for a pogrom:
It is clear that the German people will draw its conclusions from this latest deed. It cannot be that within our borders hundreds of thousands of Jews still dominate whole commercial streets, populate places of amusement and pocket the rent of German tenants as “foreign” property owners while their racial comrades abroad call for war upon Germany and gun down German civil servants.57
On the morning of 9 November, news agencies reported that Rath would die any minute. In Berlin, the young journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich registered “a fearful pressure in the air like before a thunderstorm.”58
During the nights of 7–8 November and 8–9 November, there had already been anti-Jewish outbursts in the city of Kassel and surrounding areas. They had been organised by local NSDAP functionaries who believed they were acting on behalf of the regime by taking the initiative. “In the state of Hesse there were large-scale anti-Semitic events,” Goebbels noted. “Synagogues have been burned down. If we can only unleash popular anger now.”59 That required an unambiguous expression of will by Hitler, which Goebbels did not yet have. In his traditional speech at Munich’s Bürgerbräu beer cellar on the evening of 8 November on the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, Hitler did not mention the attack in Paris. But his unusual silence did not mean that he wanted to play down the matter. On the contrary, it was a clear indication that he was up to something.60 Unlike in the aftermath of the attack on Wilhelm Gustloff in early February 1936, when Hitler had forbidden anti-Semitic violence with an eye towards the Winter Olympics, this time he was determined to lash out at the Jews. But he wanted to wait until Rath died. In the night of 7–8 November, he sent his personal physician Karl Brandt to Paris, together with the head of the Munich Surgical Clinic, Georg Magnus. Both examined Rath and kept Hitler regularly informed about his condition.61
Ernst von Rath died around 4:30 p.m. on the afternoon of 9 November, and the news of his death was communicated to Hitler by telephone in his private apartment in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse.62 The dictator thus had sufficient time to form a clear idea of how to proceed before he headed off at 6 p.m. for the annual commemorative ceremony with the “old fighters” in the ballroom of Munich’s City Hall. As the historian Richard Evans has shown, the events that followed that evening were a drama carefully staged by Hitler and Goebbels.63 Around 9 p.m., over dinner, Hitler was brought a telegram relaying the news of Rath’s death. Hitler feigned surprise, appeared shaken and immediately began talking agitatedly to Goebbels, who sat next to him. Goebbels’s diary entry for this date is extremely terse but still makes it clear that this was the moment when Hitler gave the green light for the Kristallnacht pogrom. Goebbels noted: “He decided to let the demonstrations go on. Withdraw the police. The Jews will be allowed to feel the anger of the people. That is only correct. I immediately gave the relevant orders to the police and the party.”64
Immediately after his conversation with Goebbels, and without giving his customary speech, Hitler left the event and returned to Prinzregentenstrasse. Apparently he wanted to avoid being directly connected with the events to come. Goebbels spoke in his stead. The wording of his speech was not recorded, but the effect it was meant to have was clear from a report published by the Supreme Party Court a few months later. All party leaders had understood the message “to be that to outsiders the party should not appear to be the originator of the demonstrations but that in reality it should organise and carry them out.”65 Goebbels himself noted about the reception of his speech: “Frenetic applause. Everyone ran to the telephone. Now the people will act.”66 This turn of phrase was typical of the central conceit that the Kristallnacht pogrom was an expression of popular fury—which helped the actual instigators, Hitler and Goebbels, remain in the shadows. In keeping with this, the Gauleiter and SA Gruppenführer who had assembled in Munich passed on instructions to subordinate offices throughout the Reich. The commands were then smoothly transferred to district and town directors.
Among the
“old fighters” celebrating in the Bürgerbräu beer cellar were thirty-nine members of the “Storm Troop Adolf Hitler,” which had been run as a veterans’ organisation after its ban in 1924. A short time after Goebbels’s incendiary speech, they were on a rampage through Munich’s streets, destroying a number of businesses and setting fire to the Ohel Jakob Synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse. (The city’s main synagogue on Herzog-Max-Strasse had already been torn down in June.) Goebbels, who accompanied the Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, to Gau headquarters on Prannerstrasse, was able to inspect the destruction with his own eyes. “The storm troop went about its work,” he noted. “And it was very thorough.” One of the vandals was Hitler’s personal assistant Julius Schaub. “Schaub shifted into high gear,” Goebbels remarked. “His storm-trooper background was reawakened.”67
Before he administered the traditional midnight oath of loyalty to new SS recruits, Hitler agreed with Heinrich Himmler that the SS would not participate in the pogrom. Reinhard Heydrich called the head of the Berlin Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, who sent a memo informing all state police offices that “very soon operations against Jews, especially against their synagogues, will be taking place throughout Germany.” The operations were “not to be disturbed,” but “plundering and other special excesses were to be stopped.” Moreover, the Gestapo was to take 20,000–30,000 Jews around the Reich into custody.68 Goebbels’s diary makes it clear that these orders went directly back to Hitler himself.69 In an urgent telegram that went out at 1:20 a.m., Heydrich added specifics to Müller’s instructions: “Only such measures as do not entail any danger to German lives or property are to be taken.” Rioters were only allowed to destroy, but not plunder, Jewish businesses. Archival material from all synagogues and official Jewish sites was to be confiscated and handed over to local Security Service offices. The police and the Security Service in all districts were instructed to take into custody as many Jews, especially the better off, as there was space to hold them: “After their detention has been completed, contact needs to be established with the responsible concentration camps to quickly accommodate the Jews.”70
In the meantime the pogrom had already commenced in many parts of the Reich. Everywhere SA men and party activists, mostly out of uniform, marched with canisters of petrol to the nearest synagogues, where they ransacked and set fire to the buildings. As ordered, local police did nothing, and fire brigades only intervened to prevent the flames from spreading to neighbouring buildings. At the same time, other troops of thugs attacked Jewish businesses, throwing their goods out on the street and smashing windows, so that the following morning the pavements glistened with broken glass; Berliners thus coined the euphemistic phrase “Reich Crystal Night” to describe the pogrom. Other vandals forced their way into Jewish families’ houses, smashed the furniture and abused the inhabitants. There had not been such a massive outbreak of unfettered anti-Semitic violence in Germany since the Middle Ages.71
On the morning of 10 November, Goebbels conferred with Hitler about how to proceed. “To keep going or put a stop to it?” he noted. “That’s the question now.” The two men agreed to halt the “operation,” at least temporarily. “If we allow it to continue, there is the danger of a mob forming,” Goebbels wrote, explaining their decision.72 On Hitler’s order, he wrote a text “strictly calling upon” the German populace to “desist from all further demonstrations and acts of retribution in any form against Jewry.” Goebbels promised: “Jewry will be given the ultimate answer to the Jewish assassination in Paris in the form of legislation and ordinances.”73 Hitler approved the text that noon in Osteria Bavaria.74 The message was broadcast in the afternoon on German radio and was published on the front pages of newspapers the following day. Simultaneously, Goebbels ordered the press to be judicious in reporting the pogrom. German newspapers were not to run front-page headlines or pictures of the events.75 That evening, in a speech to press representatives in the new “Führer Building” on Königsplatz, Hitler did not mention the events of the previous night at all. On 17 November, he took part in a memorial ceremony for Ernst von Rath in Düsseldorf, but unlike at Wilhelm Gustloff’s funeral two and a half years previously, he chose not to speak. This was intended to maintain the illusion that he had had nothing to do with the pogrom.76
A report published by the Jewish division of the Reich Security Main Office on 7 December 1938 put the number of Jews killed at thirty-six. The figure was later revised upwards to ninety-one. In fact, the number was considerably higher, if suicides and those who died in or en route to concentration camps are included. More than 1,000 synagogues and prayer rooms were set on fire, and 7,000–7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and plundered. The damage done in the violence was estimated at around 50 million reichsmarks.77
Even worse than the material damage was the humiliation and harassment Jews suffered. Just as in Vienna the previous March and April, Jews were subject to an “explosion of sadism.”78 They were forced to kneel in front of synagogues and sing religious songs, dance or prostrate themselves and kiss the ground, while SA men punched and kicked them. In many places, Jewish men were herded through the streets in broad daylight before being taken away to concentration camps amidst jeers and insults from local officials, SA and SS men and Hitler Youths. Large crowds usually watched the demeaning spectacle. “They stood packed together and watched us pass,” a Jewish department store owner from the city of Hanau recalled. “Hardly anyone said anything, and only a few people laughed. You could see pity and horror in many people’s faces.”79
In total more than 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, where they were subjected to horrific mistreatment by SS guards. As soon as they arrived, kicks and blows rained down upon them. Many were forced to run to the point of exhaustion around camp grounds or to stand at attention for hours in the November cold, without being allowed to move. “It was a chain of endless physical and emotional suffering,” one of the misfortunates wrote about the reality of Buchenwald.
The first days were the worst. They deprived us of water. Water was scarce to begin with, and they did not give us any at all. Your mouth completely dried out, your throat burned and your tongue literally stuck to your gums. When they handed out bread on the third day, I could not choke it down because I did not have any saliva in my mouth. Nights were terrible. People became hysterical and broke down. One man screamed that people were trying to kill him. Another gave a kind of sermon. A third babbled something about waves of electricity. There was screaming, crying, praying, cursing, coughing, dust, filth and a horrible stench. It was as if all hell had broken loose.80
Most of the detainees were released after a few weeks if they promised to immediately begin making plans to leave Germany. They also had to promise not to tell anyone about what they had experienced in the camps. But much of the truth seeped out. “The terrified hints and fragments of stories from Buchenwald are horrific,” Victor Klemperer noted in early December 1938. “Despite the gagging order, people say that you won’t return from that place a second time—ten to twenty people die there every day anyway.”81
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The night of 9–10 November 1938 was a complete shock for Jews still living in Germany. “In terms of suffering, privation, humiliation and terror, nothing that had happened previously could compare with this night,” recalled Hugo Moses, a former Oppenheim Bank employee.82 All of a sudden the pogrom had made Jews realise that they were without legal protection of any kind. They could be beaten, robbed and killed without the custodians of law and order lifting a finger or the perpetrators being threatened with any form of punishment. A line had been crossed: Germany had left the community of civilised nations. “We’ll never again return to this country if we get out alive,” the Berlin doctor Hertha Nathorff wrote in her diary one week after Kristallnacht.83
Although the Nazi Party press never ceased depicting the pogrom as a spontaneous expression of popular outrage, it
was clear to everybody that this was a fictional narrative. Given the fact that the violence had obviously been organised, a state police office in Bielefeld concluded in late November 1938, the constant repetition of the propaganda version of events was “almost laughable.”84 In its report in November, the Reich Security Main Office also stated: “The people who carried out the operation generally were the party’s political organisers, members of the SA and the SS, and individual members of the Hitler Youth.”85 Foreign observers saw the participation of young people as a particularly bad sign. It revealed “the moral demise of the young generation of Germans who are capable of all sorts of attacks and violence if ordered to carry them out by the party,” the Polish consul general in Leipzig reported.86 In some places, ordinary citizens had joined in with the SA troups, encouraging the perpetrators of violence and sometimes getting directly involved. But in general, the Security Service observed that “the civilian population was only very slightly involved in the operation.”87
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