1938 (40 page)

You mark my words, in the decisive battle to come, if we are defeated we will be given no quarter, they will be allowed to starve to death or butchered. That will be the fate of every man, whether he be an enthusiastic supporter or not, it will be enough that German is his mother tongue.

Himmler fairly accurately predicted the first weeks of the Allied occupation in 1945.

Himmler’s ideology was inspired by the need to preserve his
Volk
. It was a dispassionate view. People needed to be kind and decent, but when it came to preserving a race, there was to be no pity. Himmler would kill a hundred people in a town, and he would expect his men to do so without qualms.

REICHSKRISTALLNACHT or the Night of the Broken Glass, the pogrom that occurred on the night of November 9–10, was almost entirely the brainchild of Joseph Goebbels. Having been out of favor for the past four months, this magnificent opportunity to worm his way back into his master’s affections dawned slowly on the gauleiter of Berlin. His diary does not allude to the expulsion of the Polish Jews, and it was only in his entry for the 8th that he finally records the wounding of vom Rath together with sporadic outbreaks of violence against the Jews. It was then that the penny dropped: This was the chance to expand the largely unsuccessful program he had conceived for Berlin to cover the whole Reich. “Now we want to be blunt. In Hessen big antisemitic projects. The synagogues are going to be burned down. If we could only let rip with the fury of the people once and for all!”

Goebbels needed to bend Hitler’s ear first. That evening was the annual reenactment of the 1923 putsch that began on November 8 in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Hitler returned to the theme of attacking his British enemies, Churchill, Eden, and Duff Cooper. After the speech, the leading Nazis went to the Führerbau, where Bormann addressed them on the plans for celebrating Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939. They proceeded to the Café Heck, where Goebbels and Hitler sat until 3 AM. He may have had a chance to talk over his plans, but nothing is recorded in the diary.

The main action 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’s 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 vom 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 apartment when vom 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.” And later: “The Führer has ordered that 25–30,000 Jews should be arrested at once.”

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 because his assassination occurred shortly before the Olympic Games. At 10 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 colors. 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, Hitler 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. 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 he was anxious to accelerate the persecution of the Jews with the usual objective: to encourage them to go more speedily.

GOEBBELS’S POGROM caught everyone off guard. Neither Wolff nor Heydrich, SS leaders, had been informed. At midnight Heydrich was drinking in the Nobel Hotel in the Maximilianstrasse when Heinrich “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 apartment 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.

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.”

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 PM; the SA (Lutze) at 11; the police (Himmler) at midnight, and the SS at 1:30 AM. The SS were told they were to wear mufti. Himmler made no bones of his disapproval: “The order comes from the Reichs 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—when it comes to foreign relations—a most difficult time.”

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 onto 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. The city’s gauleiter, Adolf Wagner, had to be egged on, as his heart was not in it. Goebbels was obliged to transmit the order personally to destroy the synagogue in the Fasanenstrasse in Berlin. In Munich, he smugly noted the “blood red sky.” “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.”

The 9th was the most important feast day in the Nazi calendar; many of the men were drunk. The SA men had a difficult time starting fires, as no one had laid down stocks of incendiary material. In Rüdesheim the SA men managed to set fire to themselves rather than the synagogue. Some were mere boys—big on destruction but often small in courage. In Feldafing on the Starnberg Lake, the youths were armed with bricks. Nor did everything happen as Heydrich had foreseen, for some of the gangs had accounts to settle too. In Erfurt, the baptized lawyer Flesch was tortured because he had appeared against an SA man in a divorce case. In Aschaffenburg the killing of Jewish businessmen had all the hallmarks of settling scores.

Heydrich’s commands about sacred documents were not heeded in Frankfurt, where rioters tore up the old books in a Jewish library. In Vienna they arrested all the Jews lining up for visas outside the British consulate. 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”).

In Munich the “demonstrators” made straight for Schloss Planegg, the home of the Jewish Baron von Hirsch, and destroyed it. 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 apartment, although he had been unable to walk for two years. The archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber, lent the Rabbi Leo Baerwald a truck so that he might rescue the contents of his synagogue.

The destruction was generally the work of the SA, occasionally encouraged by regional party officials and carried out by local boys who knew the Jews they were attacking. In some rural parts of Germany the purge was halfhearted. 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 as old as Adam in the German countryside, the disparities between religious and racial antisemitism were shown in stark relief. You were supposed to love your neighbor. There was also a fear that the Catholics would be the next victims, and in some instances thugs destroyed church property when nothing Jewish was to hand.

In Buttenhausen in Württemberg, for example, 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 from 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 had 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, even if they could not prevent the SA from wrecking the interior. 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. A uniform also came in handy in Schirwindt in East Prussia. The Landrat, Wichard von Bredow, was informed that he had to issue the orders 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.

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 chased away Nazi thugs who were 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 labor service and was due to join the Luftwaffe. On the night of November 9–10 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” 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 neighbor to call the police, but she informed him the police were right outside. His mother finally goaded 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.

In Berlin children looted a Jewish toy shop. When Gentile women remonstrated with them, they were spat upon and manhandled by the mob. 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!”