Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  So what did the German people think about the pogrom of November 1938? Did they approve of or reject what had happened? It is difficult to arrive at a clear answer since there was no public sphere in Germany in which people could freely articulate their opinions and attitudes. “If we could only find out who was for it and who was against it!” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wrote after witnessing a silent crowd looking at the smouldering ruins of the synagogue in Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse on 10 November.88 On 14 November, the Argentinian ambassador to Germany reported: “It cannot be determined what people’s inner feelings about the events were since it is publicly known that the regime does not permit or tolerate criticism of the actions of party members and those working for them.”89 Publicly announcing one’s disgust would have been risky since there were enough people in the general populace whose loyalty to the regime made them only too happy to turn others in to the Gestapo.90 On 12 November, the Italian consul general in Innsbruck wrote that the population was “deeply outraged” at the pogrom, but was “very cautious about voicing opinions since word has it that three Aryans were taken off to the Dachau concentration camp at night for openly expressing their disapproval.”91

  Drawing on information gathered throughout the Reich, the SPD-in-exile reports concluded that the “excesses were strongly condemned by the vast majority of the German people.”92 But of course the information collected by people trusted by the SPD tended to come from former Social Democratic circles and probably only reflected the views of part of the populace. Still, foreign observers like the American consul general in Stuttgart, Samuel W. Honacker, also found that around 80 per cent of Germans disagreed with the violent operation while only 20 per cent had expressed satisfaction with it.93 Even reports made by local officials, mayors and Gestapo offices spoke of “widespread disagreement” with the “operation” of 9–10 November and of a “generally quite unpropitious” effect on the popular mood. Even party members had rejected it, although they were “extraordinarily careful with their criticism lest they be branded Jew-lovers.”94

  Given all of these indications, it is fairly safe to say that the majority of the German populace reacted negatively to the Kristallnacht pogrom, although their public rejection of the violence was largely based not on empathy with the Jews but rather on their dismay at the destruction of valuable commodities. “On the one hand, we save toothpaste tubes and tin cans,” complained an NSDAP member from the city of Duisburg, “and on the other houses are destroyed, and windows are smashed.”95 Significantly, Hitler as the main instigator again remained exempt from criticism. Various reports registered remarks such as “The Führer surely did not intend this.”96 The dictator’s strategy of passing himself off as the disengaged statesman far above any such unpleasantness, while delegating responsibility to his underlings, was a complete success. On 26 November the temporary British consul general reported from Munich: “A childlike faith in the Führer and the conviction that he had nothing to do with the ‘Pogrom’ subsists, but criticism can be heard of other Party leaders, especially Goebbels, Himmler, Göring and von Schirach.”97

  There were isolated cases of neighbours and friends showing solidarity with those being persecuted and trying to help them, but they were the exceptions. As a rule, people expressed sympathy with the victims and outrage at the perpetrators only in private. On 24 November, the Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter wrote in a letter to his mother that what he had seen in the previous few weeks was “the most shameful and terrible spectacle that has happened in very many years.” Nonetheless, Ritter, a conservative patriot, hoped that those responsible would have “an internal change of heart and a return to being calm.”98 Ulrich von Hassell, whom Hitler had removed from his post as German ambassador to Italy at the beginning of the year, noted on 25 November that he was “still under the burdensome impression of the vile persecution of Jews.” There was no doubt, he added, that “this was an officially organised tempest against the Jews unleashed at one and the same hour of the night throughout Germany—a true scandal!”99 Like Ritter and Hassell, many Germans seem to have felt ashamed that the barbaric excesses of 9–10 November could have happened in their ostensibly civilised nation. The Swiss consul general in Cologne reported being asked by people from all walks of life in the days following the pogrom: “What do you say to these terrible events?” Every one of them, the consul continued, had added: “It makes you ashamed to be German.”100

  Nonetheless, people’s rejection of the pogrom did not worry the regime because it remained in the private sphere. Nowhere was there vocal public protest, not even within the Churches, as might have been expected.101 That being the case, Hitler and his henchmen could consider Kristallnacht a success. They had unleashed anti-Semitic violence against the Reich’s Jewish minority on a previously unprecedented scale without encountering any resistance. That was a clear sign that the majority of Germans had accepted the exclusion of Jews from the “ethnic-popular community,” even if they had reservations about open brutality. As Richard Evans has rightly concluded, the National Socialists now knew that they could do whatever they wanted to Jews, and no one would stop them.102

  As far as further action on the “Jewish question” was concerned, Hitler set the agenda at a noon meeting with Goebbels in the Osteria Bavaria on 10 November. “His views are radical and aggressive,” Goebbels noted afterwards. “The Führer wants to move on to extremely strict measures against the Jews. They will have to repair their businesses themselves. Insurance companies will pay them nothing. The Führer then wants to gradually confiscate the businesses and give their former owners certificates, which we can devalue at any time.”103 On 11 November, Hitler instructed Göring, as the head of the Four Year Plan, to convene a conference in order to “centrally summarise the decisive steps.”104

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  The conference took place the following day between 11 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. in the Aviation Ministry. Hundreds of civil servants, ministers and state secretaries took part, including Wilhelm Frick, his deputy Wilhelm Stuckart, Interior Ministry “race expert” Bernhard Lösener, Foreign Ministry Political Division Director Ernst Woermann, and his “Jewish expert” Emil Schumburg; Goebbels, Finance Minister von Krosigk, Justice Minister Gürtner, Economics Minister Funk and his ministerial director and the director of the division for economic organisation and Jewish affairs, Rudolf Schmeer; as well as Reinhard Heydrich, Kurt Daluege and Adolf Eichmann as representatives of the Security Service and the police. Minister for Economics, Labour and Finances Hans Fischböck and Reich Commissioner Josef Bürckel attended from Austria.

  The detailed protocol of the conference has been preserved almost in its entirety. It is a horrific document—not only for the pitilessness with which the participants pursued their ideas to their logical conclusions, but also for the completely unrestrained language, free from any sort of moral scruple, that they used. “I would have preferred it if you had killed 200 Jews and not destroyed so many things of value,” Göring declared after a representative of the German insurance industry, Eduard Hilgard, had broken down the damage done during Kristallnacht into individual categories. Citing the list drawn up by Berlin’s police president the previous June, Goebbels suggested a whole series of harassment initiatives aimed at forcing Jews “from every corner of the public sphere,” where they were behaving “provocatively.” For example, Jews could be banned from attending cultural events. They would only be allowed to travel in segregated train carriages. They could be prohibited from public swimming pools and other leisure facilities and be banned from setting foot in a “German forest.” “Today, there are packs of them running around in [Berlin’s] Grunewald [forest],” Goebbels added. Göring suggested that one could perhaps set aside a “certain section” of forest for Jews and proposed that his forestry expert Friedrich Alpers “could see to it that animals that resembled Jews—elk have such hooked noses—were brought and settled there.” Heydrich suggested that for the rest of the time they spent in Germany, Jews
be required to wear a “distinguishing badge”—an idea that would be first realised with the introduction of the notorious yellow star in September 1941. Göring supported the creation of ghettos within cities so as to completely isolate Jews. Heydrich rejected this idea, arguing that ghettos were “perennial hiding places for criminals…impossible to keep under police surveillance.” At the end of the conference, during which conservative ministers and ministerial civil servants uttered not a single word of disapproval or moderation, Göring summed up the results: “This will work. These swine won’t be so quick to commit a second murder. And I have to say it again. I would not want to be a Jew in Germany.”105

  The most immediate result of the conference was that that very day Jews were required to pay an “atonement contribution” of one billion reichsmarks for the Paris assassination. In addition, as of 1 January 1939, they were prohibited from running businesses or working as tradesmen and required to pay for all the damage to their businesses and residences during the pogrom themselves. The sums due to them from insurance policies were confiscated by the Reich. “In any case, it’s now tabula rasa,” wrote a happy Goebbels. “The radical opinion has emerged victorious.”106 A Finance Ministry decree of 21 November 1938 required Jews to pay out to the state 20 per cent of their assets in four instalments by August 1939. A further Finance Ministry edict of 3 December established the regulations for the Aryanisation by administrators of those Jewish businesses that still existed and required Jews to turn over stocks and bonds, jewellery and art to state depots.107 With that, the Nazis had got their hands on nearly all of the Jewish people’s wealth. The “atonement contribution” alone increased Reich revenue by 6 per cent in one fell swoop, offering noticeable relief to Germany’s state finances, which accelerated rearmament had left extraordinarily tight.108 “The benefits from all Aryanisation must exclusively go to the finance minister and not any other individual in the Reich,” Göring stressed at a speech to Gauleiter, senior municipal officials and Reich governors on 6 December. Otherwise it would be impossible to carry out the Führer’s armaments programme.109

  There were waves upon waves of discriminatory laws and edicts. On 15 November, the Education Ministry ordered all Jewish pupils to be thrown out of German schools since it was “intolerable” for German pupils to sit in the same classroom with Jews after “the ruthless assassination in Paris.”110 On 28 November, the Interior Ministry gave senior municipal officials the right to declare certain districts off-limits to Jews and to restrict their access to public spaces—a first step towards ghettoisation.111 On 3 December, Jews had their driving licences revoked on the orders of Himmler as Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police. Five days later, Jews were banned from university libraries. These two prohibitions hit Victor Klemperer particularly hard. Previously he had enjoyed driving around the environs of Dresden with his wife—“it was a bit of freedom and life”—and even after his dismissal as a professor, he had been allowed to do research in Dresden’s university library. Now he could do neither.112

  “One step at a time,” noted Goebbels, speaking for both himself and Hitler. “We’re not going to ease up until we’ve got rid of them.”113 On 20 December, the Labour Ministry decreed that “all unemployed, able-bodied Jews” should be required to do forced labour. On 23 February 1939, the Transport Ministry prohibited Jews from using sleeper or dining cars on trains, and on 30 April, Jews were stripped of most of the rights they enjoyed under tenant-protection laws.114

  At the conference of 12 November 1938, Heydrich had already suggested using the Viennese model to force Jews to emigrate, since Austria had succeeded in “forcing out” 50,000 Jews within a short span of time.115 Göring agreed, and on 24 January 1939, he established a “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” in Berlin. Heydrich was put in charge, and with that he became one of the key figures in the Third Reich’s “Jewish policy.”116 As much as officials insisted, on the one hand, that Jews emigrate, the more they did, on the other, to make this more difficult by inventing bureaucratic formalities and harassment. “Not only were there hefty fees to pay, so that the assets you still had were practically worthless,” remembered a Jewish department store owner from Hanau, who emigrated in April 1939.

  You had to run around endlessly and go through all sorts of drudgery to collect all the necessary forms. You had to go to the passport office, the police, customs, the currency office, the city treasury, the emigrants’ advisory office, the registrar’s office and other places. And you had to return everywhere three times, even if all you wanted was the simplest of forms.117

  Despite all the obstacles, 115,000 German Jews succeeded in emigrating between 10 November 1938 and the start of the Second World War in early September 1939. That meant that in total 400,000 Jews had left the Reich, excluding Austria, since the National Socialists came to power.118

  Those who stayed behind were completely marginalised and pauperised. “There is no Jewish life any more,” wrote Fritz Goldberg, a former assistant theatre director in Berlin who would get out of Germany in the nick of time in the summer of 1939. “There is only a host of frightened, hunted people who have no houses of worship, who are banned from entering any café, public square or hospital, who can no longer attend any places of amusement and whose entire belongings have been stolen and destroyed.”119 By the end of the year, the Nazi leadership was already dropping dark hints as to what they intended to do with the “broken rest” of the Jews who stayed in Germany.120 If in the “foreseeable future” the Reich became involved in a “foreign-policy conflict,” Göring had announced at the conference of 12 November, there would have to be “a major reckoning with the Jews.”121 On 24 November 1938, Hitler received South African Defence and Economics Minister Oswald Pirow at the Berghof. On that occasion, he declared that it was his “unshakeable will” to solve the “Jewish problem” before too long. This, Hitler declared, was not just a German, but a European problem. Half cynically and half threateningly, he added: “What do you think would happen to Jews in Germany, Mr. Pirow, if I withdrew my protective hand from them? The world cannot imagine it.”122

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  On 30 January 1939, in his speech to the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of taking power, which was also broadcast on radio, Hitler publicly emphasised for the first time his determination to “deport the Jews.” Europe, he declared, would “never settle down before the Jewish question is solved.” There were enough “settlement areas” in the world, the dictator declared, most likely referring to the Madagascar idea. “The opinion that the Jews are a people destined by God to exist to a large extent off the body and the labour of other peoples must be thrown out once and for all.” Such statements remained within the framework of what Hitler had repeatedly said throughout 1938. What followed went further. In his life, Hitler claimed, he had been “a prophet often enough” and had mostly been “laughed at.” But he now offered a further prophesy: “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe once again succeeds in plunging various peoples into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the world and the triumph of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”123

  This speech has been interpreted as evidence that Hitler was already envisioning the “final solution”—the physical destruction of Jews. Yet at the time of the speech, Hitler probably intended his threat as a way of increasing pressure upon German Jews to emigrate and upon Western governments to relax their restrictive immigration policies.124 With this in mind, Foreign Ministry State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker had declared on 15 November 1938 to the Swiss ambassador in Paris that “Jews are going to have to be deported since there is no way they can remain in Germany. But Weizsäcker had added: “If, however, no country can be found to accept them, sooner or later they will face complete destruction.”125

  But there was more to Hitler’s declarations that German Jews would be annihilated than just tactics. On the contrary, they were embedded in a broader plan for the future. By
the winter of 1938/9, it was already apparent that the aggressive expansionism of the Nazi regime would lead, sooner or later, to military hostilities in Europe. In the event that this conflict developed, as it had in 1914–1918, into a “world war” involving the United States, “international finance Jewry” was to be blamed. In this sense, Hitler’s threats had an all-too-real, sinister core. If they fell into the hands of Himmler and his henchmen, Jews living in Europe had to reckon with the worst—being murdered.126 In his declaration of 30 January 1939, Hitler was testing the waters for an extreme solution to the “Jewish question.” It was no accident that he would repeatedly refer back to his earlier “prophecy” in 1941 and 1942 as the genocide of Jews got under way.

  21

  The Way to War

  “The time for surprises is over,” Hitler declared in his Reichstag speech on 30 January 1937, four years after taking power. “As a nation of equal status Germany is conscious of its European responsibility, and will work loyally towards solving the problems that beset us and other nations.”1 The dictator would have had good reason to manoeuvre Germany into quieter water when it came to foreign policy. The triumphs his regime had achieved during its first years were impressive enough. Step by step, Hitler had freed Germany from the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles and re-established its ability to pursue its own foreign-policy aims. By simultaneously posing as a man of peace and presenting them with faits accomplis, he had repeatedly duped and outmanoeuvred the Western powers. Exploiting an international constellation of circumstances that was extraordinarily favourable to the Third Reich, he had pushed through an accelerated rearmament programme without provoking a feared military intervention by the Versailles signatories. After that he was out of the danger zone. Germany once again had the most modern and powerful military on the European continent. “Today we have once again become a global power,” Hitler announced on 20 February 1937 at the annual celebration of the Nazi Party’s founding in the Hofbräuhaus.2