Army of Evil: A History of the SS (26 page)

Leading National Socialists, including Hitler, always marked 9 November with a meeting in Munich. This year, the Propaganda Minister, Josef Goebbels, was intending to make an incendiary speech that he hoped would incite a pogrom against the Jews. Of course, Goebbels was a rabid anti-Semite, but he was planning to launch this particular attack for peculiarly personal reasons. The previous year, he had started an affair with a Czech actress, Lida Baarova, whom he had met through the Propaganda Ministry’s UFA film studios. However, his wife, Magda—a favourite of Hitler—learned of Goebbels’ philandering and complained to the Führer, who duly ordered his minister to end the affair. Goebbels responded by offering his resignation (which Hitler refused) and then, on 15 October 1938, allegedly made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. An infuriated Hitler decided that the only solution was to order Himmler to remove Baarova from the country. Although this ended the affair, Goebbels’ reputation had been seriously tarnished, and it seems that his speech was designed to curry favour with Hitler by raising the party’s anti-Semitic hackles.

Then, just as the meeting was beginning, news of vom Rath’s death reached Munich. This gave Goebbels the ammunition he needed to make his address to the meeting even more explosive. He was seen in earnest conversation with Hitler, who then left suddenly, without making his customary speech. Of course, the precise details of their conversation are not known, but Höhne believes that Goebbels “informed the Führer that in certain areas anti-Jewish demonstrations had already taken place. The Führer had thereupon decided that such demonstrations were neither to be prepared nor organised by the Party: they should occur spontaneously; however, no action was to be taken to stop them.”
²²
Goebbels then rose to relate what had just been discussed to the “old fighters” who were gathered in the Old Town Hall.
They had all been in the party long enough to understand exactly what was now expected of them. Soon they were hurrying to issue orders to SA units and party groups throughout Germany.

Goebbels’ speech unleashed a wave of violence across Germany and Austria. In total, 1,574 synagogues and more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were damaged or destroyed; around 26,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and at least 91 Jews were killed, often beaten to death in front of their families. This turn of events came as a complete surprise to the leaders of the SS. Of course, both Himmler and Heydrich had been in Munich, but the first Heydrich knew of the violence was when a synagogue close to his hotel went up in flames. He hurried to issue orders to Gestapo, regular police and SS units, telling them to protect Jewish businesses and houses to the best of their ability, and to arrest looters. Nevertheless, many individual SS men, as well as local units, were certainly enthusiastic participants in the violence.

The riots became known as
Kristallnacht
*
(Night of the Broken Glass), reflecting the shattered windows of Jewish shops and businesses, and they marked a significant turning point in anti-Semitic policy in the Third Reich. Hitherto, most of the pressure against the Jews had been applied legally, economically and socially. From now on, it was increasingly physical, applied brutally in the “protective custody” of the concentration camps.

In the immediate aftermath of
Kristallnacht
, Hitler turned to Goering, rather than Himmler or Heydrich, to find a solution to the “Jewish question.” Goering convened a meeting of interested parties and announced:

It was decided to increase the pressure on Jewry, completely exclude them from the economy and, above all, step up the SD’s emigration programme. Heydrich set about creating a nationwide replica of the Viennese Central Office for Jewish Emigration, commanded by Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo. Like Eichmann, he also co-opted Jewish community leaders to ensure that it ran smoothly.

The main problem for the SD, though, was where to send the Jews. In an attempt to halt intercommunal violence in Palestine, Britain had imposed a strict limit on the number of Jews it would allow to move there over the next five years: 75,000. Germany had nearly 500,000 Jews within its borders, and it wanted to expel all of them as soon as possible. Some of them could be accommodated elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, but these countries also had limits on the number of immigrants they could, or would, accept. Despite the widespread international condemnation of Germany’s treatment of its Jews, no country was prepared to increase its quota to meet the demand. So, once again, the SD turned to the Zionists.

In 1937, Haganah had organised a special unit—
Mossad le Aliyah Bet
—to smuggle as many Jews as possible into Palestine, using a network of contacts throughout Europe. According to Höhne:

These “illegal” convoys began in March 1939. Jews were usually transported from Germany or Austria to a third country, where they were loaded onto a ship and taken to Palestine. The British attempted to counter this influx with a naval patrol off the Palestinian coast, and they intercepted a number of the transports. Nevertheless, at least ten thousand Jews managed to escape from Germany before the start of the Second World War brought this form of emigration to an abrupt end.

In total, some 40,000 Jews got out of Germany in 1938, while some 78,000 escaped in 1939. The SD could therefore claim that its emigration policy was something of a success. Should Hitler not have been determined to fight a war of conquest, it even seems likely that the “Jewish question” in Germany would have been solved in this way, without recourse to the grisly horrors that were to come. Of course, part of the tragedy was that many of the Jews who emigrated to Germany’s European neighbours—and for a time must have believed they were reasonably safe—subsequently fell back into National Socialist hands as their new homes were occupied.

The rigorous pursuit of the emigration policy illustrates that, prior to the war at least, extermination of the Jews was not seriously considered as an option by the men who were dealing with the “Jewish question” at the coal face. In fact, many of the SD’s “experts” were sharply critical of the crude anti-Semitism of their counterparts in the party. They recognised that the logical conclusion of National Socialist hate propaganda was to kill the Jews, but they simply did not believe that this was feasible, for numerous political and legal reasons. Tragically, though, they had no moral objections to it, which meant that most of them shifted effortlessly from forced emigration to mass murder and extermination as soon as the “final solution” was devised.

*
The
Mischlinge
could be exempted from the provisions of the racial laws under various circumstances; and they could petition the state for “liberation.” Over the years, several attempts were made to recategorise them as Jews, but none of these succeeded.

*
Most of the 175 investigations were launched after accusations were made by members of the public. Seventy-one of them ultimately proved to have no foundation in fact, which would seem to indicate that making accusations to the Gestapo was often used to settle private scores.

*
Other accounts suggest he joined the Foreign Ministry or the Propaganda Ministry.

*
Ultimately, the Polish government relented and allowed the expellees to move into refugee camps within the Polish frontier. After Poland began expelling German citizens from its territory in retaliation, the German government relented and allowed the Polish-German Jews to return to their homes to collect property, before leaving for good.

*
In Germany, it is now generally known, less euphemistically, as
Pogromnacht.

I
n parallel with the regime’s measures against the Jews, from an early stage the National Socialists targeted individuals suffering from supposedly hereditary diseases as well as the mentally and physically handicapped. It was through the implementation of these policies that many of the individuals who later participated in the Holocaust became desensitised to and trained in mass murder. It could even be said that the measures introduced against the sick and disabled in the 1930s set the Third Reich on the route to the “final solution of the Jewish question” in the 1940s. SS personnel were involved from the start, although the euthanasia programme was officially the responsibility of Hitler’s private office, the
Kanzlei des Führers
(Führer Chancellery).

There is a sense in which National Socialism was “politics as applied biology.” The movement’s theorists genuinely believed that it might be possible to resolve social and political problems by biological means. The first manifestation of this ideology—and the model for German eugenic legislation thereafter—was the Sterilisation Law of July 1933. Eugenicists had been advocating the sterilisation of “inferior
and degenerate types” for decades, and proposals for voluntary sterilisation had already reached state legislatures in Germany. But the new law introduced a new element: compulsion. Its preamble read: “Any person suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilised if medical knowledge indicates that his offspring will suffer from severe hereditary physical or mental damage.” The following conditions were classified as “hereditary” under the law:

The structure for enforcement was straightforward. If a person with one of these conditions did not voluntarily apply for sterilisation, it could be sought by health service doctors and directors of hospitals, care homes and prisons. A system of hereditary health courts was instituted, consisting of three members: a judge and two doctors. A more senior appeal court was structured in the same way.

In the first year in which sterilisation was in operation, some 388,400 people were reported to the hereditary health courts, 75 per cent of them by their own doctors. This was too much work for the courts to handle: just over 80,000 of these cases were reviewed, with 62,000 resulting in a sterilisation order. Of these people, just under half were actually sterilised (usually by vasectomy for men and Fallopian ligation for women) because of a lack of capacity in hospitals. It seems the system did not manage to clear the backlog even by 1939.
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But this was not due to a lack of enthusiasm in the medical community:
on the whole, German doctors welcomed the sterilisation scheme. It gave them enhanced prestige as implementers of government policy as well as a much greater range of paid tasks to perform—such as filling out forms and giving evidence to hereditary health courts.

However, the “science” underpinning the Sterilisation Law was flimsy, at best: