That same month, September 1938, Hitler met with Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Berlin. In a revealing conversation – on both sides – they talked about the ‘Jewish question’ in the aftermath of the Evian conference and the failure of the Polish attempt to pursue a Madagascar ‘solution’. Lipski recorded in his notes that Hitler ‘has in mind an idea of settling the Jewish problem by way of emigration to the colonies in accordance with an understanding with Poland, Hungary, and possibly Romania’. After hearing these words, Lipski said to Hitler that ‘if he finds such a solution we will erect to him a beautiful monument in Warsaw.’68
Around the same time Hitler was talking with the Polish ambassador about sending the Jews to the ‘colonies’, the British were trying to reach a diplomatic agreement with him about the fate of Czechoslovakia. Part of the problem was that the British government appeared to believe Hitler’s claim that he did not want war and that his chief concern was genuinely with the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. In an attempt to solve the dispute, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, agreed at a conference in Munich at the end of September 1938 that German troops could occupy the Sudetenland, the predominantly German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, infamously, had no say in the matter. By thus appeasing Hitler, the British hoped to prevent war.
The trouble was that Chamberlain failed to understand that Hitler was not at heart a conventional statesman who, like all sensible political leaders, would be loath to risk military conflict. Ernst von Weizsäcker, a German diplomat, tried to explain the reality of the situation to the British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson: ‘I have said to Henderson once again that this is not a game of chess but a rising sea. One cannot make the same kind of assumptions as in normal times and with normal people.’69 Weizsäcker’s metaphor of the ‘rising sea’ is not just striking but accurate – at least as far as the German Jews were concerned, for they were about to be engulfed.
Any wide-ranging war in the near future threatened to upset existing Nazi plans for the Jews, since it would begin before the majority of the Jews had been pushed out of the Reich. This was, for Hitler and the staunch anti-Semites in the Nazi party, a dangerous problem, since they believed that the Jews had acted as traitors behind the lines in the First World War and that they would be liable to act in the same way in the event of another conflict. One practical method of dealing with the situation was proposed by the head of the Jewish Department of the SD, Herbert Hagen. In September 1938 he wrote a memo entitled ‘Activity of the Department in the Event of Mobilization’ which proposed arresting all foreign Jews once the German Army had been mobilized for war, as well as imprisoning all other Jews in ‘special camps’ where they would be forced to work on armaments production. Hagen also suggested that some Jews might be subjected to ‘special treatment’. It is unclear in the context of his memo exactly what he meant by this. He could have intended the phrase simply to mean that the circumstances of some Jews would need to be looked at more closely, but it is also possible that he imagined that the Security Services might perhaps find it necessary to kill some of the group, since ‘special treatment’ would subsequently become one of the accepted euphemisms for extermination.70
As for Hitler, his belief in a world Jewish conspiracy had not been damaged by the failure of the international community to offer help to the Jews at the Evian conference. In a speech in Saarbrücken on 9 October 1938 he said, ‘we know that the international Jewish fiend looms threateningly behind the scenes … and it does so today just as it did yesterday.’71 He now decided that if foreign countries would not voluntarily take Jews living in the Reich, the Nazis would dump some of them on their doorstep. On 28 October, the Nazis gathered together around 17,000 Polish Jews who lived in Germany, took them to the border with Poland and tried to push them on to Polish land.
The timing of this brutal action was influenced by the law the Poles had passed earlier that year, which from 30 October threatened to deny citizenship to Poles living abroad. By trying to shove the Polish Jews back across the border to Poland two days before the deadline, the Nazis sought to circumvent the new rule. The plight of these Jews – wanted neither by the Germans nor by the Poles – was horrific. As Josef Broniatowski, who had been taken from Plauen, west of Dresden, to the Polish border, recalled, ‘Thousands of Jews ended up on the meadow and marched soaked up to their waists across the fields [after crossing a water-filled ditch]. As we were getting close to a Polish village, some Polish soldiers came and chased us back to the German border, all the while hitting people and shooting,’ and during the night ‘many old people and little children died.’ Eventually they were driven to another border crossing where they were finally admitted into Poland. ‘The suffering was terrible, in the village to which they chased us the miners, who are Catholics, started crying when they saw all this suffering and misery.’72
Sendel and Riva Grynszpan were two more Jews among the thousands who were taken to the Polish border. Sendel had owned a small tailor’s shop in Hanover and had suffered much economic hardship as a result of Nazi anti-Semitic legislation. He recalled that at the end of October 1938 the Gestapo arrived and ‘took us in police trucks, [and] in prisoners’ lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were black with people shouting: “Juden raus! Aus nach Palästina!” (“Out with the Jews! Off to Palestine!”).’73
Their son, Herschel, had moved to France in 1936 at the age of fifteen in order to escape Nazi persecution, but he remained devoted to his mother and father. In Paris he struggled to survive as he was at constant risk of deportation. When he heard what had happened to his parents he decided take revenge on the Nazis, and on Monday 7 November 1938 he shot Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris. Vom Rath died two days later on 9 November, coincidentally one of the most sacred dates in the Nazi calendar – the anniversary of the failed Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich.
Goebbels, like all the leading Nazis, was in Munich for the commemoration. He relished the pretext that the assassination of vom Rath gave for a new attack on the German Jews. ‘In the afternoon [of 9 November] the death of the German diplomat vom Rath is reported,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Well, now it’s done.’ Goebbels met Hitler a few hours later at the party reception in the old Town Hall in Munich. ‘I present the matter to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations [against the Jews] continue. Withdraw the police. The Jews are to experience the rage of the people. That’s right. I immediately issue appropriate instructions to police and party. Then I briefly speak to the party leadership to that effect. Rapturous applause. Everyone dashed to the telephones. Now the people will act.’74
Goebbels’ diary entry was disingenuous. It wasn’t so much that the Jews would ‘experience the rage of the people’ as that they would experience the rage of Nazi Stormtroopers. Throughout the night of 9 November, and the early hours of 10 November, Jewish shops and homes were smashed, synagogues were burnt, and Jews beaten up, arrested or even murdered. There are no accurate figures for how many Jews died that night – it was certainly more than ninety. Around 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps.
Eighteen-year-old Rudi Bamber in Nuremberg learnt of the attacks only when the front door of his house was smashed open. It was the first of two visits from Stormtroopers that night. The first group confined themselves to wrecking the house, the second attacked the residents. One of the elderly women who lived with them in the house was dragged out and beaten up. The Stormtroopers then turned their attentions on Rudi and started hitting him. Eventually he was taken outside and put under guard. Then – for reasons he never understood – the Stormtroopers left him and moved on. He went back into the house and found that ‘it was all so chaotic … the second lot [of Stormtroopers] had smashed pipes and the water was running through the floors and I was concerned in trying to find the main stop valve to stop the water from running further, and fighting one’s way thr
ough – it was a bit like sort of after an air raid I suppose in a way, you know, stuff lying everywhere and furniture broken, glass, china, everywhere.’75
Upstairs he found his father – dying. The Stormtroopers had murdered him. ‘I was absolutely in shock. I couldn’t understand how this situation had arisen, from what we had before, the sort of usual average, normal life – “normal” in inverted commas. For this to happen seemed to be absolutely unacceptable and unbelievable … I really couldn’t envisage that such a thing should have or could have happened. I’d heard of concentration camps before, of course; they were going already in Dachau and Buchenwald, but that was something different. [This was] violence of a totally unnecessary and uncalled for [kind]. I didn’t know the people, they didn’t know me. They had no grudge against me [personally] – they were just people who had come to do whatever they thought they should do … The whole thing is senseless and pointless.’
What particularly struck Rudi Bamber, as he tried to come to terms with the murder of his father, were the contradictions that lay within the Germany he now inhabited. The assault in the early hours of 10 November had been arbitrary and unpredictable – yet it had been carried out by Stormtroopers under the protection of the state. The next morning the police sealed off the building as if it was an official crime scene. They also wanted to prevent looting, which was still held to be against the law. After a few days Rudi went to the office of the Gestapo and asked if his family could now remove the seals and move back into the house. ‘It seems strange to me,’ he says. ‘I had no fear in going to the Gestapo. Somehow there seemed to be some legitimacy somewhere in this system … it was a period which is incomprehensible to me now.’
One of the reasons Rudi Bamber found it hard to deal with what had happened was that ‘I couldn’t give expression to my anger,’ because ‘if one could really give vent to one’s feelings it might be worse for us … I had no way of coping with this in a sort of sensible or rational way. The background of the Nazi propaganda, Nazi domination, had I think subdued me and other Jews as well, to accept many things, and I think this came out when people were deported and taken to the camps. Looking back at it now I find it almost unbelievable how I dealt – or rather didn’t deal – with anything which had happened and had no particular reaction to it, which obviously any right-thinking person would have had. But I think it was the power of the system which held me down in a way and stopped me from dealing with it in an appropriate way.’
Across Germany the attacks on synagogues and the desecration of Jewish Holy Scriptures marked a new low even for the Nazis. In Berlin, Günther Ruschin witnessed the aftermath of the destruction of the synagogue in which his father was cantor: ‘I went there and I saw the holiest things we have. They were dirty with excrement and it was awful. It was the first time I saw my father cry.’76
For Rudi Bamber, the lack of support from other Germans compounded the suffering. He remembers that his family received no comfort from the non-Jewish population. Most just walked past their wrecked family home, but ‘one or two’ even threw stones at the building. Similarly, Heinz Nassau reported from Essen that as the Jewish youth centre was burning in the city, a nurse asked a fireman whether the Jewish administrator and his family were still inside. She was told: ‘They can perish quietly! After all they did away with vom Rath. Make sure you leave this area or we’ll smash you up too.’77
The reaction across the rest of Germany was more varied. One police report recorded that ‘the populace has divided views’ with the majority of people believing that ‘all this destruction was uncalled for.’78 Another Jewish eyewitness report from Bavaria said that ‘The mood amongst the Christian population of Munich is thoroughly against the operation. I was shown the liveliest sympathy and compassion from all sides … A completely unknown Aryan lady from the best social class came to my wife with the comment, “Madam, I am ashamed to be a German.” Another unknown lady sent a bottle of wine.’79
This differing response to the atrocity that became known as ‘Kristallnacht’ – Night of Broken Glass – was also illustrated by the contrasting reactions of Uwe Storjohann’s parents in Hamburg. Even though Uwe’s father was an ‘anti-Semite’ he was ‘really angry’ about Kristallnacht because the ‘holy temples’ of the Jews had been ‘desecrated’. But his mother was not so concerned. She was pleased when, in the aftermath of the attack, their Jewish neighbours left and two days later ‘a transport van came and one of Hamburg’s high-up SA leaders’ moved into their flat. Uwe remembers that his mother ‘thought it was great that the SA leader, who was very jovial and pretended to be close to the people, was now there’.80
For the thousands of Jews sent to concentration camps after Kristallnacht the experience was predictably traumatic. One Jewish man recorded how he witnessed the commandant of Sachsenhausen take off his gloves and repeatedly punch a prisoner, calling him a ‘dirty Jewish pig’. He was also forced to watch as a prisoner who had tried to escape was punished: ‘The man in question was strapped to a Bock [whipping block] and beaten with a heavy bull whip by two SA men, who had volunteered specially for this … The victim had to loudly count every blow up to 25 himself until he fell silent because he lost consciousness, but even then the animals did not stop their mistreatment. The Stubenälteste [room elder] reported that if the victim recovered even slightly, the second twenty five would be administered.’81
The newspaper of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps), had been agitating in increasingly radical terms against the Jews for months prior to Kristallnacht. But in the wake of the attacks even more hatred burst through. ‘Because it is necessary,’ declared an article that appeared on 24 November, ‘because we no longer hear the world’s clamour, and because no power on earth can stop us, we will bring the Jewish question to its total solution. The programme is clear. It is: Total expulsion, complete separation!’82
Another article, published on 17 November, stated: ‘Woe betide the Jews, if even one of them or one of their accomplices, hired and filled with hatred by them, ever lifts up their murderous hand against one German! Not one will be held responsible for a dead or wounded German, but they all will. This is what those should know, who haven’t known after our first moderate warning … There is only one right, our right, our self-defence, and we alone are to decide the time and mode of its application.’83 A subsequent edition of Das Schwarze Korps made the threat explicit: ‘The day a murder weapon that is Jewish or bought by Jews rises against one of the leading men of Germany, there will be no more Jews in Germany! We hope we have made ourselves clear!’84
The SS newspaper made two more statements around this time that are important to our understanding of the mentality of these hard-line believers. The first was that though the SS accepted that anti-Semitism was not new – indeed, it had ‘been vital within all healthy peoples and races for many thousand years’ – they believed the Nazis were the only ones to have drawn from it the necessary ‘effective and practical, albeit unsentimental conclusions’.85 Second, the SS asserted that the Nazis had been forced to take action against the Jews because of the failure of the international community to help out, and so they saw their critics in the democratic nations as hypocrites: ‘Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor an English archbishop, nor any other prominent Democrat would put his daughter into the bed of a sleazy east European Jew; but when it comes to Germany, they know at once no Jewish question, but only the “persecution of the innocent for the sake of their faith”, as if we had ever been interested in what a Jew believes or does not believe.’86 Thus, even before the war began, the SS claimed they could take violent action against the Jews for two reasons: first, all ‘healthy’ people in the world accepted that it was right to be anti-Semitic, but only the Nazis were tough enough to take the necessary action against the Jews, and, second, it wasn’t the SS’s fault if they had to attack the Jews, because other countries had decided not to offer the Jews safe refuge.
At the same time as these views were being
voiced in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS in concentration camps were beating, whipping and otherwise tormenting thousands of Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht. What all this tells us, of course, is that the SS were prepared for radical action against the Jews nearly a year before the Second World War started.
The overall international response to Kristallnacht was, understandably, one of condemnation. But in most countries, just as at Evian, compassionate words did not lead to compassionate action. Roosevelt did allow 12,000 Austrian and German Jews already in the United States on short-term visas to extend their stay, but a proposal in Congress to allow 20,000 additional Jewish children into America was rejected. Roosevelt did not speak up in support of the bill and the proposal died.
Only in Britain was there a substantial increase in the number of refugees admitted. In a gradual process that had begun in the wake of the Anschluss and continued after Kristallnacht, restrictions were eased so that 50,000 Jews from Germany and German-controlled territory could enter Britain before the outbreak of war.87 Around 9,000 children travelled to the country on what became known as ‘Kindertransports’. Rudi Bamber and his younger sister were two of those who managed to get visas to come to Britain just before the war began. Rudi remembers that there had to be ‘a lot of planning’ put into his emigration. ‘Every bit of clothing – everything which I took – had to be listed and approved by the authorities.’ Before his exit was finally authorized, Rudi also had to appear before a tribunal: ‘There were Nazi officials and army officers, Gestapo and police sitting round … It was absurd because the general who was in charge of this sort of said “Oh yes, you’re in agriculture. You’re going to go to the colonies presumably to farm there.” I said “Oh yes.” I would have said yes to anything … Nobody mentioned the word “Jew” at the time.’88
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