Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  The party’s ‘old guard’ were meeting that evening in the Old Town Hall in Munich. Hitler, too, was present. On the way there, with Goebbels, he had been told of disturbances against Jews in Munich, but favoured the police taking a lenient line.48 He could scarcely have avoided being well aware of the anti-Jewish actions in Hessen and elsewhere, as well as the incitements of the press. It was impossible to ignore the fact that, among Party radicals, antisemitic tension was running high. But Hitler had given no indication, despite vom Rath’s perilous condition at the time and the menacing antisemitic climate, of any intended action when he had spoken to the ‘old guard’ of the Party in his traditional speech at the Bürgerbräukeller the previous evening.49 By the time the Party leaders gathered for the reception on the 9th, Hitler was aware of vom Rath’s death. With his own doctor, Karl Brandt, dispatched to the bedside, Hitler had doubtless been kept well informed of the Legation Secretary’s deteriorating condition and had heard of his demise at the latest by 7 o’clock that evening – in all probability by telephone some hours earlier.50 According to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, he had already been given the news – which he had received without overt reaction – that afternoon while he was engaged in discussions on military matters in his Munich apartment.51

  Goebbels and Hitler were seen to confer in agitated fashion during the reception, though their conversation could not be overheard. Hitler left shortly afterwards, earlier than usual and without his customary exchanges with those present, to return to his Munich apartment. Around 10p.m. Goebbels delivered a brief but highly inflammatory speech, reporting the death of vom Rath, pointing out that there had already been ‘retaliatory’ action against the Jews in Kurhessen and Magdeburg-Anhalt. He made it abundantly plain without explicitly saying so that the Party should organize and carry out ‘demonstrations’ against the Jews throughout the country, though make it appear that they were expressions of spontaneous popular anger.52

  Goebbels’s diary entry leaves no doubt of the content of his discussion with Hitler. ‘I go to the party reception in the Old Town Hall. Huge amount going on (Riesenbetrieb). I explain the matter to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Pull back the police. The Jews should for once get to feel the anger of the people. That’s right. I immediately give corresponding directives to police and party. Then I speak for a short time in that vein to the party leadership. Storms of applause. All tear straight off to the telephone. Now the people will act.’53

  Goebbels certainly did his best to make sure ‘the people’ acted. He put out detailed instructions of what had and had not to be done. He fired up the mood where there was hesitancy.54 Immediately after he had spoken, the Stoßtrupp Hitler, an ‘assault squad’ whose traditions reached back to the heady days of pre-putsch beerhouse brawls and bore the Führer’s name, was launched to wreak havoc on the streets of Munich. Almost immediately they demolished the old synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Straße, left standing after the main synagogue had been destroyed in the summer. Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria (who as Bavarian Minister of Interior was supposedly responsible for order in the province), himself no moderate in the ‘Jewish Question’, got cold feet. But Goebbels pushed him into line. The ‘capital city of the Movement’ of all places was not going to be spared what was happening already all over Germany. Goebbels then gave direct telephone instructions to Berlin to demolish the synagogue in Fasanenstraße, off the Kurfürstendamm.55

  The top leadership of the police and SS, also gathered in Munich but not present when Goebbels had given his speech, learnt of the ‘action’ only once it had started. Heydrich, at the time in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, was informed by the Munich Gestapo Office around 11.20p.m., after the first orders had already gone out to the Party and SA. He immediately sought Himmler’s directives on how the police should respond. The Reichsführer-SS was contacted in Hitler’s Munich apartment.56 He asked what orders Hitler had for him. Hitler replied – most likely at Himmler’s prompting – that he wanted the SS to keep out of the ‘action’.57 Disorder and uncontrolled violence and destruction were not the SS’s style. Himmler and Heydrich preferred the ‘rational’, systematic approach to the ‘Jewish Question’. Soon after midnight orders went out that any SS men participating in the ‘demonstrations’ were to do so only in civilian clothing.58 At 1.20a.m. Heydrich telexed all police chiefs instructing the police not to obstruct the destruction of the synagogues and to arrest as many male Jews, especially wealthy ones, as available prison accommodation could take.59 The figure of 20–30,000 Jews had already been mentioned in a Gestapo directive sent out before midnight.60

  Meanwhile, across the Reich, Party activists – especially SA men – were suddenly summoned by their local leaders and told to burn down synagogues or were turned loose on other Jewish property.61 Many of those involved had been celebrating at their own commemoration of the Beerhall Putsch, and some were the worse for wear from drink. The ‘action’ was usually improvised on the spot. The dozen or so men from the SA-Reserve in Marburg, still drinking solidly when they were told, to their surprise, by their Standartenführer that they were to burn down the synagogue that night, could not find anything with which to set the building alight until someone had the idea that there were four large canisters of oil in the nearby theatre.62 In Tübingen, three Party members making their unsteady way home in the early hours were picked up en route by a car containing the District Leader. He told them that he had received a telegram from the Gauleiter in Stuttgart that all the synagogues in the Reich were to be set on fire. They returned with him to their Party headquarters to look for incendiary material. When they arrived at the synagogue, they found it already vandalized. A group of eight SA and SS men had broken in around midnight, smashing the windows and door, and had carried off some of the contents and hurled them in the river Neckar. Only with difficulty, and with the help of a rotting wreath of oak-leaves and some floor-polish, could the Party members get the synagogue to catch fire. Eventually they managed it. The fire-brigade saw to it that the nearby houses were protected. By morning, the synagogue was a burnt-out shell.63 The pattern, more or less, repeated itself all over Germany.

  At midnight, at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich where the attempted putsch in 1923 had met its end, Goebbels had witnessed the swearing-in of the SS to Hitler. The Propaganda Minister was ready to return to his hotel when he saw the sky red from the fire of the burning synagogue in Herzog-Rudolf-Straße.64 Back he went to Gau headquarters. Instructions were given out that the fire brigade should extinguish only what was necessary to protect nearby buildings. Otherwise they were to let the synagogue burn down. ‘The Stoßtrupp is doing dreadful damage,’ he commented. Reports came in to him of seventy-five synagogues on fire throughout the Reich, fifteen of them in Berlin. He had evidently by this time heard of the Gestapo directive. ‘The Führer has ordered,’ he noted, ‘that 20–30,000 Jews are immediately to be arrested.’ In fact, it had been a Gestapo order with no reference in it to a directive of the Führer. Clearly, however, though he had instigated the pogrom, Goebbels took it that the key decisions came from Hitler.65 Goebbels went on: ‘That will go down (Das wird ziehen). They should see that our patience is exhausted.’ He went with Julius Schaub, Hitler’s general factotum, into the Artists’ Club to wait for further news. Schaub was in fine form. ‘His old Stoßtrupp past has been revived,’ commented Goebbels. He went back to his hotel. He could hear the noise of shattering glass from smashed shop windows. ‘Bravo, bravo,’ he wrote. After a few hours snatched sleep, he added: ‘The dear Jews will think about it in future before they shoot down German diplomats like that. And that was the meaning of the exercise.’66

  All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. ‘I weigh up our current measures with the Führer. Allow to strike further or stop. That’s now the question.’67 In the light of the mounting criticism of the ‘action’, also – though naturally not for humanita
rian reasons – from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership, the decision was taken to halt it.68 Goebbels prepared a decree to end the destruction, cynically commenting that if it were allowed to continue there was the danger ‘that the mob would start to appear’.69 He reported to Hitler, who was, Goebbels claimed, ‘in agreement with everything. His opinions are very radical and aggressive.’ ‘With minor alterations, the Führer approves my edict on the end of the actions… The Führer wants to move to very severe measures against the Jews. They must get their businesses in order themselves. Insurance will pay them nothing. Then the Führer wants gradually to expropriate the Jewish businesses.’70

  By that time, the night of horror for Germany’s Jews had brought the demolition of around 100 synagogues, the burning of several hundred others, the destruction of at least 8,000 Jews’ shops and vandalizing of countless apartments. The pavements of the big cities were strewn with shards of glass from the display windows of Jewish-owned stores; merchandise, if not looted, had been hurled on to the streets. Private apartments were wrecked, furniture demolished, mirrors and pictures smashed, clothing shredded, treasured possessions wantonly trashed. 71 The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million Marks.72

  The human misery of the victims was incalculable. Beatings and bestial maltreatment, even of women, children, and the elderly, were commonplace. A hundred or so Jews were murdered. One woman in Innsbruck told despairingly on 10 November of how a troop of young men had broken into the apartment she shared with her husband and four-year-old daughter. They knew none of their assailants. ‘What do you want of me?’ her husband had asked. He received no answer. Ten minutes later she found him stabbed to death. The Jewish Community was allowed only to enter, as cause of death, ‘wound in the chest’ (Brustverletzung).73 It was little wonder that suicide was commonplace that terrible night. Some tried, but did not manage, to kill themselves. One Jewish doctor in Vienna, held back from throwing himself from a third-storey window, slit his wrists and throat, but could still not end his own life, and was hauled off to a psychiatric clinic.74 Many more succumbed to brutalities in the weeks following the pogrom in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, where the 30,000 male Jews rounded up by the police had been sent as a means of forcing their emigration.75 Hans Berger, a forty-year-old from Wiesbaden, was one of those taken into custody by the Gestapo on 10 November. Like those arrested with him, he was subjected to indescribable sadism and torture by the camp-guards in Buchenwald, where he was interned. To maximize the humiliation, the prisoners – many suffering from chronic diarrhoea – were left to stand in their own excrement. It was as if the dirt and stench were to emphasize the separation of the Jews from the ‘healthy’, ‘clean’, and ‘wholesome’ German ‘national community’.76 Three weeks of hell on earth were finally over for Herr Berger when he was eventually released to emigrate to Brussels, and from there to southern France. He, his wife, and two sons, were presumed to be among those later deported to the death camps.77

  The scale and nature of the savagery, and the apparent aim of maximizing degradation and humiliation, reflected the success of propaganda in demonizing the figure of the Jew – certainly within the organizations of the Party itself – and massively enhanced the process, under way since Hitler’s takeover of power, of dehumanizing Jews and excluding them from German society – a vital step on the way to genocide.78

  The propaganda line of a spontaneous expression of anger by the people was, however, believed by no one. ‘The public knows to the last man,’ the Party’s own court later admitted, ‘that political actions like that of 9 November are organized and carried out by the party, whether this is admitted or not. If all the synagogues burn down in a single night, that has somehow to be organized, and can only be organized by the party.’79

  Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the Party’s lead in many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their communities were involved. In Düsseldorf, for example, doctors from a local hospital were said to have taken part in the violence; in the Lower Franconian village of Gaukönigshofen, well-respected farmers smashed the Torah shrine, hurled the Torah Rolls and other sacred objects into the flames enveloping the synagogue, and came with wash-baskets to carry away wine and foodstuffs from Jewish homes.80 Schoolchildren and adolescents were frequently ready next day to add their taunts, jibes, and insults to Jews being rounded up by the police, who were often subjected to baying, howling mobs hurling stones at them as they were taken into custody.81 Many young Germans had been fanaticized and inured to the brutality by their years of indoctrination in the Hitler Youth. The BDM functionary Melita Maschmann, for instance, told herself that the Jews were the enemies of the new Germany and had now learnt what that meant. World Jewry had to see what had happened as a warning. If they sowed hatred against Germany, they had to realize ‘that hostages of their people found themselves in our hands’.82

  At the same time, there is no doubt that many ordinary people were appalled at what met them when they emerged on the morning of 10 November. ‘All reports agree,’ summarized the Sopade – the exiled Social Democratic Party’s leadership – in its verdict on the events of ‘Crystal Night’, ‘that the outrages are strongly condemned by the great majority of the German people.’83 A mixture of motives operated. Some, certainly, felt human revulsion at the behaviour of the Nazi hordes and sympathy for the Jews, even to the extent of offering them material help and comfort. Jews who managed to flee to safety told in later months of how ‘Christian neighbours’ in Schweinfurt had brought them milk and bedding. In Burgsinn, also in Lower Franconia, Jews were given money, fresh clothing, bread, and other foodstuffs by local inhabitants. Jews from other neighbourhoods had similar stories to tell.84 Not all motives for the condemnation were as noble. Often, it was the shame inflicted by ‘hooligans’ on Germany’s standing as a ‘nation of culture’ which rankled. ‘One could weep, one must be ashamed to be a German, part of an aryan noble people (Edelvolk), a civilized nation guilty of such a cultural disgrace,’ wrote one Nazi sympathizer in an anonymous letter to Goebbels.85 Most commonly of all, there was enormous resentment at the unrestrained destruction of material goods at a time when people were told that every little that was saved contributed to the efforts of the Four-Year Plan. ‘On the one hand we have to collect silver paper and empty toothpaste tubes, and on the other hand millions of Marks’ worth of damage is caused deliberately,’ ran one such bitter complaint.86

  III

  By the morning of 10 November, anger was also rising among leading Nazis responsible for the economy about the material damage which had taken place. Walther Funk, who had replaced Schacht as Economics Minister early in the year, complained directly to Goebbels, but was told, to placate him, that Hitler would soon give Göring an order to exclude the Jews from the economy.87 Göring himself, who had been in a sleeping-compartment of a train heading from Munich to Berlin as the night of violence had unfolded, was furious when he found out what had happened. His own credibility as economics supremo was at stake. He had exhorted the people, so he told Hitler, to collect discarded toothpaste tubes, rusty nails, and every bit of cast-out material. And now, valuable property had been recklessly destroyed.88

  When they met at lunchtime on 10 November in his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, Hitler made plain to Goebbels his intention to introduce draconian economic measures against the Jews. They were dictated by the perverted notion that the Jews themselves would have to foot the bill for the destruction of their own property by the Nazis. The victims, in other words, were guilty of their own persecution. They would have to repair the damage without any contributions from German insurance firms and would be expropriated. Whether, as Göring later claimed, Goebbels was the initiator of the sug
gestion to impose a fine of 1,000 million Marks on the Jews is uncertain. More probably Göring, with his direct interest as head of the Four-Year Plan in maximizing the economic exploitation of the Jews, had himself come up with the idea in telephone conversations with Hitler, and perhaps also with Goebbels, that afternoon. Possibly, the idea was Hitler’s own, though Goebbels does not refer to it when speaking of his wish for ‘very tough measures’ at their lunchtime meeting. At any rate, the suggestion was bound to meet with Hitler’s favour. He had, after all, in his ‘Memorandum on the Four-Year Plan’ in 1936 already stated, in connection with accelerating the economic preparations for war, his intention to make the Jews responsible for any damage to the German economy. With the measures decided upon, Hitler decreed ‘that now the economic solution should also be carried out’, and ‘ordered by and large what had to happen’.89

  This was effectively achieved in the meeting, attended by over 100 persons, which Göring called for the following morning, 12 November, in the Air Ministry. Göring began by stating that the meeting was of fundamental importance. He had received a letter from Bormann, on behalf of the Führer, desiring a coordinated solution to the ‘Jewish Question’. The Führer had informed him, in addition, by telephone the previous day that the decisive steps were now to be centrally synchronized. In essence, he went on, the problem was an economic one. It was there that the issue had to be resolved. He castigated the method of ‘demonstrations’, which damaged the German economy. Then he concentrated on ways of confiscating Jewish businesses and maximizing the possible gain to the Reich from the Jewish misery. Goebbels raised the need for numerous measures of social discrimination against the Jews, which he had been pressing for in Berlin for months: exclusion from cinemas, theatres, parks, beaches and bathing resorts, ‘German’ schools, and railway compartments used by ‘aryans’. Heydrich suggested a distinctive badge to be worn by Jews, which led on to discussion of whether ghettos would be appropriate. In the event, the idea of establishing ghettos was not taken up (though Jews would be forced to leave ‘aryan’ tenement blocks and be banned from certain parts of the cities, so compelling them in effect to congregate together); and the suggestion of badges was rejected by Hitler himself soon afterwards (presumably to avoid possible recurrence of the pogrom-style violence which had provoked criticism even among the regime’s leaders).90 They would not be introduced in the Reich itself until September 1941.