Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  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. 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.

  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. 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. Goebbels 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.’

  All morning new reports of the destruction poured in. Goebbels assessed the situation with Hitler. In the light of the mounting criticism of the ‘action’, also – though naturally not for humanitarian reasons – from within the top ranks of the Nazi leadership, the decision was taken to halt it. 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’. 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.’

  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. The material damage was estimated soon afterwards by Heydrich at several hundred million Marks.

  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. It was little wonder that suicide was commonplace that terrible night. 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.

  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.

  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.’

  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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

  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. 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.

  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 suggestion 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’.

  This was effectively achieved in the meeting, attended by over 100 persons, which Göring called for 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). They would not be introduced in the Reich itself until September 1941.

  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. 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. ‘At any rate now a tabula rasa is being made,’ commented Goebbels with satisfaction. ‘The radical view has triumphed.’

  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 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. 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. 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.

  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’. Others, too, in the Nazi leadership seized the chance to push through a flood of new discriminatory measures, intensifying the hopelessness of Jewish existence in Germany. Radicalization fed on radicalization.

  The radicalization encountered no opposition of any weight. 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. 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. 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.’

  ‘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’. 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. 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.

  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. 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. Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjut
ant, 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. 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. Rosenberg, a few weeks after the events, was convinced that Goebbels, whom he utterly detested, had ‘on the basis of a general decree of the Führer ordered the action as it were in his name’. 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.

  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. 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 rejected tough police action against anti-Jewish vandals in Munich. 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. Goebbels had the feeling that his own policy against the Jews met with Hitler’s full approval.