Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  But ‘Crystal Night’ had nevertheless spawned completely new openings for radical measures. This was most evident in the economic sphere, to which the meeting returned. Insurance companies were told that they would have to cover the losses, if their foreign business was not to suffer. But the payments would be made to the Reich, not, of course, to the Jews. Towards the end of the lengthy meeting, Göring announced, to the approval of the assembled company, the ‘atonement fine’ that was to be imposed on the Jews.91 Later that day, he issued decrees, imposing the billion-Mark fine, excluding Jews from the economy by 1 January 1939, and stipulating that Jews were responsible for paying for the damage to their own property.92 ‘At any rate now a tabula rasa is being made,’ commented Goebbels with satisfaction. ‘The radical view has triumphed.’93

  Indeed, the November Pogrom had in the most barbaric way imaginable cleared a pathway through the impasse into which Nazi anti-Jewish policy had manoeuvred itself by 1938. Emigration had been reduced to little more than a trickle, especially since the Evian Conference, where, on the initiative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delegates from thirty-two countries had assembled in the French resort, deliberated from 6 to 14 July, then confirmed the unwillingness of the international community to increase immigration quotas for Jews. Moves to remove the Jews from the economy were still proceeding far too slowly to satisfy Party fanatics. And anti-Jewish policy had suffered from complete lack of coordination. Hitler himself had been little involved. Goebbels, a driving-force, as we have noted, in pressing for tougher measures against the Jews since the spring, had recognized the opportunity that vom Rath’s assassination gave him. He sniffed the climate, and knew conditions were ripe. In a personal sense, too, the shooting of vom Rath was timely. Goebbels’s marital difficulties and relationship with the Czech film actress Lida Baarova had threatened to lower his standing with Hitler.94 Now was a chance, by ‘working towards the Führer’ in such a key area, to win back favour.

  One consequence of the night of violence was that the Jews were now desperate to leave Germany. Some 80,000 fled, in the most traumatic circumstances, between the end of 1938 and the beginning of the war.95 Some, like the Fröhlichs, the family of the eminent American historian Peter Gay, were able through daring ingenuity, involving minor but dangerous forms of illegalities in forging documents and smuggling out possessions, to outwit intimidating and obstructive bureaucrats, and to subvert their chicanery in managing, amid constant anxiety and with many travails, to buy exit visas for Cuba, after being denied entry to Great Britain.96 Countless others were less fortunate – sick with worry at the unknown fate of husbands and fathers marched off by the Gestapo, or taking flight with no more than they could carry with them. Many, with little hope of an official exit route, fled across the borders illegally – 1,500 into the Netherlands alone.97 Many other Jews pleading for asylum were turned back at the Dutch frontier as border guards were doubled in number to deny entry to the Nazis’ victims.98 By the time the Dutch closed their borders on 17 December, nevertheless, some 7,000 German Jews had, legally or illegally, found refuge there.99 In the same days, the British government opened the country’s doors to 10,000 Jewish children – though it rejected an appeal to allow a further 21,000 Jews to enter Palestine.100 By whatever desperate means, tens of thousands of Jews were able to escape the clutches of the Nazis and flee across neighbouring borders, to Britain, the USA, Latin America, Palestine (despite British prohibitions), and to the distant refuge with the most lenient policy of all: Japanese-occupied Shanghai.101

  The Nazis’ aim of forcing the Jews out had been massively boosted. Beyond that, the problem of their slow-moving elimination from the economy had been tackled. Whatever his criticism of Goebbels, Göring had wasted no time in ensuring that the chance was now taken fully to ‘aryanize’ the economy, and to profit from ‘Reichskristallnacht’. When he spoke, a week later, of the ‘very critical state of the Reich finances’, he was able to add: ‘Aid first of all through the billion imposed on the Jews and through the profits to the Reich from the aryanization of Jewish concerns’.102 Others, too, in the Nazi leadership, critical or not of Goebbels, also seized the chance to push through a flood of new discriminatory measures, intensifying the hopelessness of Jewish existence in Germany.103 Radicalization fed on radicalization.

  The radicalization now encountered no opposition of any weight. Any opposition would have had to come from those with access to the levers of power. The ordinary people who expressed their anger, sorrow, distaste, or shame at what had happened were powerless. Those who might have articulated such feelings, such as the leaders of the Christian Churches, among whose precepts was ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, kept quiet. Neither major denomination, Protestant or Catholic, raised an official protest or even backing for those courageous individual pastors and priests who did speak out. Within the regime’s leadership, those, like Schacht, who had used economic or otherwise tactical objections to try to combat what they saw as counter-productive, wild ‘excesses’ of the radical antisemites in the party, were now politically impotent. In any case, such economic arguments lost all force with ‘Crystal Night’. The leaders of the armed forces, scandalized though some of them were at the ‘cultural disgrace’ of what had happened, made no public protest. Brauchitsch shrugged his shoulders when outraged comments from generals came to his ears. His gutless response mirrored the broader feeling of powerlessness among an officer corps whose collective strength and moral authority vis à vis Hitler had been greatly diminished across the months spanning the Blomberg – Fritsch crisis, the Anschluß, the Sudeten crisis, and now ‘Reichskris-tallnacht’. And despite all that had happened, there was evidently a readiness to believe that Hitler was not responsible, and blame could be attached to Goebbels.104

  Beyond that, the deep antisemitism running through the armed forces meant that no opposition worth mentioning to Nazi radicalism could be expected from that quarter. Characteristic of the mentality was a letter which the revered Colonel General von Fritsch wrote, almost a year after his dismissal and only a month after the November Pogrom. Fritsch was reportedly outraged by ‘Crystal Night’. But, as with so many, it was the method not the aim that appalled him. He mentioned in his letter that after the previous war he had concluded that Germany had to succeed in three battles in order to become great again. Hitler had won the battle against the working class (Arbeiterschaft). The other two battles, against Catholic Ultramontanism, and against the Jews, still continued. ‘And the struggle against the Jews is the hardest,’ he noted. ‘It is to be hoped that the difficulty of this struggle is apparent everywhere.’105

  ‘Crystal Night’ marked the final fling within Germany of ‘pogrom antisemitism’. Willing though he was to make use of the method, Hitler had emphasized as early as 1919 that it could provide no solution to the ‘Jewish Question’.106 The massive material damage caused, the public relations disaster reflected in the almost universal condemnation in the international press, and to a lesser extent the criticism levelled at the ‘excesses’ (though not at the draconian anti-Jewish legislation that followed them) by broad sections of the German population ensured that the ploy of open violence had had its day. Its place was taken by something which turned out to be even more sinister: the handing-over of practical responsibility for a coordinated anti-Jewish policy to the ‘rational’ antisemites in the SS. On 24 January 1939, Göring established – based on the model which had functioned effectively in Vienna – a Central Office for Jewish Emigration under the aegis of the Chief of the Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich.107 The policy was still forced emigration, now transformed into an all-out, accelerated drive to expel the Jews from Germany. But the transfer of overall responsibility to the SS nevertheless began a new phase of anti-Jewish policy. For the victims, it marked a decisive step on the way that was to end in the gas-chambers of the extermination camps. Heydrich was to refer back to this commission from Göing when opening the Wannsee Conference, to coordinate extermination
measures, in January 1942.108

  Hitler was directly involved in the shaping of anti-Jewish policy in the weeks following ‘Crystal Night’. On 5 December, Göring transmitted to the Gauleiter on his behalf directives on a variety of discriminatory measures relating, for instance, to the banning of Jewish access to hotels and restaurants, but allowing them to shop in ‘German’ stores. At the end of December, Göring again sought Hitler’s views on the restrictions to be placed on Jews, which he passed on to all Party and state offices. These were left as open to interpretation as possible, and were characteristically ill-defined. The radical suggestions put forward by Goebbels and Heydrich at the meeting on 12 November were neither taken up in full, nor completely rejected. Jews were to be banned from railway sleeping – and restaurant-cars, for example, but no special compartments for them were to be erected; they were still to be allowed to use public transport. Or, another example, rent protection for Jews was not to be abolished; but it was nonetheless desirable that they be concentrated in specific apartment blocks. Pensions were not to be taken away from dismissed Jewish civil servants. And a number of exceptions were also made for Mischlinge – those deemed to be of mixed Jewish and ‘Aryan’ descent. These were not signs of any ‘moderation’ or lack of radicalism on Hitler’s part. An indication of his own hard line was his communication to Reich Minister of the Interior Frick in December 1938 that he would no longer make use of the rights he had to exempt individuals from the provisions of the Nuremberg Laws. For the rest, he was prepared, as he had been following previous antisemitic waves in 1933 and 1935, to let the radicalization of anti-Jewish policy develop organically.109

  IV

  The open brutality of the November Pogrom, the round-up and incarceration of some 30,000 Jews that followed it, and the draconian measures to force Jews out of the economy had, Goebbels’s diary entries make plain, all been explicitly approved by Hitler even if the initiatives had come from others, above all from the Propaganda Minister himself.

  To those who saw him late on the evening of 9 November, Hitler had appeared to be shocked and angry at the reports reaching him of what was happening.110 Himmler, highly critical of Goebbels, was given the impression that Hitler was surprised by what he was hearing when Himmler’s chief adjutant Karl Wolff informed them of the burning of the Munich synagogue just before 11.30 that evening.111 Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who saw him immediately on his return to his apartment from the ‘Old Town Hall’, was convinced that there was no dissembling in his apparent anger and condemnation of the destruction.112 Speer was told by a seemingly regretful and somewhat embarrassed Hitler that he had not wanted the ‘excesses’. Speer thought Goebbels had probably pushed him into it.113 Rosenberg, a few weeks after the events, was convinced that Goebbels, whom he utterly detested, had ‘on the basis of a general decree (Anordnung) of the Führer ordered the action as it were in his name’.114 Military leaders, equally ready to pin the blame on ‘that swine Goebbels’, heard from Hitler that the ‘action’ had taken place without his knowledge and that one of his Gauleiter had run out of control.115

  Was Hitler genuinely taken aback by the scale of the ‘action’, for which he had himself given the green light that very evening? The agitated discussion with Goebbels in the Old Town Hall, like many other instances of blanket verbal authorization given in the unstructured and non-formalized style of reaching decisions in the Third Reich, probably left precise intentions open to interpretation. And certainly, in the course of the night, the welter of criticism from Göring, Himmler, and other leading Nazis made it evident that the ‘action’ had got out of hand, become counter-productive, and had to be stopped – mainly on account of the material damage it had caused.

  But when he consented to Goebbels’s suggestion to ‘let the demonstrations continue’, Hitler knew full well from the accounts from Hessen what the ‘demonstrations’ amounted to.116 It took no imagination at all to foresee what would happen if active encouragement were given for a free-for-all against the Jews throughout the Reich. If Hitler had not intended the ‘demonstrations’ he had approved to take such a course, what, exactly, had he intended? Even on the way to the Old Town Hall, it seems, he had spoken against tough police action against anti-Jewish vandals in Munich.117 The traditional Stoßtrupp Hitler, bearing his own name, had been unleashed on Jewish property in Munich as soon as Goebbels had finished speaking. One of his closest underlings, Julius Schaub, had been in the thick of things with Goebbels, behaving like the Stoßtrupp fighter of old. During the days that followed, Hitler took care to remain equivocal. He did not praise Goebbels, or what had happened. But nor did he openly, even to his close circle, let alone in public, condemn him outright or categorically dissociate himself from the unpopular Propaganda Minister. Indeed, within a week Hitler was seen again in Goebbels’s presence at a performance of Kabale und Liebe (‘Intrigue and Love’) at the opening of the Schiller Theatre, and stayed that night at the Goebbels’ villa at Schwanenwerder. On that occasion, too, he ‘spoke harshly about the Jews’. Goebbels had the feeling that his own policy against the Jews met with Hitler’s full approval.118

  None of this has the ring of actions being taken against Hitler’s will, or in opposition to his intentions.119 Rather, it seems to point, as Speer presumed, to Hitler’s embarrassment when it became clear to him that the action he had approved was meeting with little but condemnation even in the highest circles of the regime. If Goebbels himself could feign anger at the burning of synagogues whose destruction he had himself directly incited, and even ordered, Hitler was certainly capable of such cynicism.120 What anger Hitler harboured was purely at an ‘action’ that threatened to engulf him in the unpopularity he had failed to predict. Disbelieving that the Führer could have been responsible, his subordinate leaders were all happy to be deceived. They preferred the easier target of Goebbels, who had played the more visible role. From that night on, it was as if Hitler wanted to draw a veil over the whole business. At his speech in Munich to press representatives on the following evening, 10 November, he made not the slightest mention of the onslaught against the Jews.121 Even in his ‘inner circle’, he never referred to ‘Reichskristallnacht’ during the rest of his days.122 But although he had publicly distanced himself from what had taken place, Hitler had in fact favoured the most extreme steps at every juncture.

  The signs are that ‘Crystal Night’ had a profound impact upon Hitler. For at least two decades, probably longer, he had harboured feelings which fused fear and loathing into a pathological view of Jews as the incarnation of evil threatening German survival. Alongside the pragmatic reasons why Hitler agreed with Goebbels that the time was opportune to unleash the fury of the Nazi Movement against Jews ran the deeply embedded ideological urge to destroy what he saw as Germany’s most implacable enemy, responsible in his mind for the war and its most tragic and damaging consequence for the Reich, the November Revolution. This demonization of the Jew and fear of the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ was part of a world-view that saw the random and despairing act of Herschel Grynszpan as part of a plot to destroy the mighty German Reich. Hitler had by that time spent months at the epicentre of an international crisis that had brought Europe to the very brink of a new war. In the context of continuing crisis in foreign policy, with the prospect of international conflict never far away, ‘Crystal Night’ seems to have reinvoked – certainly to have re-emphasized – the presumed links, present in his warped outlook since 1918–19 and fully expounded in Mein Kampf, between the power of the Jews and war.

  He had commented in the last chapter of Mein Kampf that ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front’ would not have been necessary if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’.123 Such rhetoric, appalling though the sentiments were, was not an indication that Hitler already had the ‘Final Solution’ in mind. But the implicit genocidal link between war and the killing of Jews was there. Göring’s remarks at the en
d of the meeting on 12 November had been an ominous pointer in the same direction: ‘If the German Reich comes into foreign-political conflict in the foreseeable future, it can be taken for granted that we in Germany will think in the first instance of bringing about a great showdown with the Jews.’124

  With war approaching again, the question of the threat of the Jews in a future conflict was evidently present in Hitler’s mind. The idea of using the Jews as hostages, part of Hitler’s mentality, but also advanced in the SS’s organ Das Schwarze Korps in October and November 1938, is testimony to the linkage between war and idea of a ‘world conspiracy’. ‘The Jews living in Germany and Italy are the hostages which fate has placed in our hand so that we can defend ourselves effectively against the attacks of world Jewry,’ commented Das Schwarze Korps on 27 October 1938, under the headline ‘Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth’.125 ‘Those Jews in Germany are a part of world Jewry,’ the same newspaper threatened on 3 November, still days before the nationwide pogrom was unleashed. ‘They are also responsible for whatever world Jewry undertakes against Germany, and – they are liable for the damages which world Jewry inflicts and will inflict on us.’ The Jews were to be treated as members of a warring power and interned to prevent their engagement for the interests of world Jewry.126 Hitler had up to this date never attempted to deploy the ‘hostage’ tactic as a weapon of his foreign policy.127 Perhaps promptings from the SS leadership now reawakened ‘hostage’ notions in his mind. Whether or not this was the case, the potential deployment of German Jews as pawns to blackmail the western powers into accepting further German expansion was possibly the reason why, when stating that it was his ‘unshakeable will’ to solve ‘the Jewish problem’ in the near future, and at a time when official policy was to press for emigration with all means possible, he showed no interest in the plans advanced by South African Defence and Economics Minister Oswald Pirow, whom he met at the Berghof on 24 November, for international cooperation in the emigration of German Jews.128 The same motive was probably also behind the horrific threat he made to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Franzisek Chvalkovsky on 21 January 1939. ‘The Jews here (bei uns) will be annihilated (vernichtet),’ he declared. ‘The Jews had not brought about the 9 November 1918 for nothing. This day will be avenged.’129