The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Map 15. Synagogues Destroyed on 9-10 November 1938

  In Munich, meanwhile, Goebbels had been thoroughly enjoying the looting and destruction vented upon the city’s Jewish community. ‘The Hitler shock-troop gets going immediately to clear things out in Munich,’ he noted in his diary recording the events of the night of 9-10 November 1938. ‘That then happens straight away. A synagogue is battered into a lump . . . The shock-troop carries out frightful work.’ Led by Julius Schaub, a long-time Nazi who had taken part in the failed beer-hall putsch of 1923 and had served as Hitler’s personal adjutant ever since 1925, the violence clearly reflected the atmosphere present in Hitler’s immediate entourage during the night. ‘Schaub is completely worked up,’ Goebbels noted: ‘His old shock-troop past is waking up.’175 On receiving a phone call at about 2 a.m. with the news of the first Jewish death, Goebbels replied ‘that the man reporting it should not get upset because of one dead Jew; thousands of Jews were going to cop it in the coming days.’176 He could scarcely conceal his glee: In Berlin 5, then 15, synagogues burn down. Now the people’s anger is raging. Nothing more can be done against it for the night. And I don’t want to do anything either. Should be given free rein . . . As I drive to the hotel, windows shatter. Bravo! Bravo! The synagogues are burning in all big cities. German property is not endangered.177

  As dawn broke, however, he began to consult with Hitler, probably over the phone, on how and when the action should be brought to an end. ‘New reports rain down all morning,’ he wrote in his diary entry for 10 November 1938. ‘I consider with the Leader what measures should be taken now. Let the beatings continue or stop them? That is now the question.’ Following this conversation, he drafted an order to halt the pogrom and took it to Hitler, who was lunching at the Osteria, his favourite Munich restaurant. ‘I report to the Leader at the Osteria,’ he wrote. ‘He agrees with everything. His views are totally radical and aggressive. The action itself has taken place without any problems.’ Hitler approved the draft decree; it was read out over the radio the same afternoon and printed on the front pages of the newspapers the following morning. The pogrom was finally over.178

  Many Jews had been seriously injured in the course of the violence. Even the official report on the pogrom by the Nazis estimated ninety-one Jewish deaths. The true number will probably never be known, but it was certainly many times greater, above all when the maltreatment of the Jewish men after they were arrested is taken into consideration, along with at least 300 suicides caused by the despair it engendered; deaths undoubtedly ran into the hundreds and probably numbered between one and two thousand.179 Moreover, for many Jewish men, the violence continued well after the pogrom itself was over. As the police, stormtroopers and SS units, following Hitler’s orders, arrested all the Jewish men they could find, terrible scenes took place on the streets and squares of every German town. In Saarbrucken the Jews were made to dance and kneel outside the synagogue and sing religious songs; then most of them, wearing only pyjamas or nightshirts, were hosed down with water until they were drenched. In Essen stormtroopers manhandled Jewish men and set their beards alight. In Meppen, Jewish men had to kiss the ground in front of SA headquarters while brownshirts kicked them and walked over them. In many places they were forced to wear placards round their necks with slogans such as ‘We are the murderers of vom Rath’. In Frankfurt am Main, the arrested men were greeted at the train station by a crowd which shouted and jeered at them and attacked them with clubs and sticks. In some places, whole classes were taken out of school to spit on the Jews as they were being led away.180

  Altogether about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested between 9 and 16 November and transported to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. The camp population of Buchenwald doubled from around 10,000 in mid-September 1938 to 20,000 two months later. Moritz Mayer was picked up in Munich along with most of the other Jewish men from Treuchtlingen and taken to Dachau, where he had to stand to attention for hours in the November cold along with the others, dressed only in a shirt, socks, trousers and jacket. Anyone who moved was beaten by the SS guards. The beds had been removed from the camp barracks in preparation and the men were packed in, sleeping on straw on the hut floors. Washing was out of the question, and there were only two makeshift latrines. With the new, mass arrival of Jews in the camps, arrested for no other reason, or even pretext, than that they were Jews, the atmosphere changed, and the SS guards forgot the rules that had been established by Theodor Eicke a few years before. Mayer saw SS guards at Dachau beat an old man to the ground when he forgot to add the title ‘prisoner in protective custody’ to his name at roll-call; his injuries were so severe that he died. Another old man with a weak bladder was beaten to death on the spot when he asked the SS at roll-call for leave to use the latrines. The death-toll at Dachau had been running at between twenty-one and forty-one a year from 1933 to 1936; in September 1938, twelve prisoners died, in October, ten. After the arrival of the Jewish prisoners, the death-toll rose to 115 in November and 173 in December, making 276 for the year overall.181

  Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry lost no time in presenting these events to the world as a spontaneous outburst of righteous anger on the part of the German people. ‘The blow struck at us by international Jewry’, the Göttingen Daily News-Sheet (Göttinger Tageblatt) told its readers on 11 November 1938, ‘was too powerful for our reaction to be only verbal. A fury against Judaism pent up for generations was unleashed. For that the Jews can thank their racial fellow member Grünspan [i.e. Grynszpan], his spiritual or actual mentors and themselves.’ Yet, the paper assured readers, ‘the Jews themselves were treated quite well in the course of what happened’.182 In similar vein, the flagship Nazi daily, the Racial Observer, reported, with a disregard for the truth that went beyond even what was normally to be found in its pages:All over the west side of Berlin, as in other parts of the capital where Jews still swagger and strut, not a single storefront window of a Jewish business has remained intact. The anger and fury of the citizens of Berlin, who maintained the greatest discipline despite everything, was kept within definite limits, so that excesses were avoided and not a single hair was touched on a Jewish head. The goods on display in the store windows, some of which were decorated in a quite magnificent manner, remained untouched.183

  Even more brazenly, the Propaganda Ministry instructed the papers on 10 November to claim that ‘here and there window-panes had been smashed; synagogues had set themselves alight or burst into flames in some other way’. The stories, Goebbels insisted, should not be given too much prominence in the press, which of course was read outside Germany as well as within, and there were to be no pictures of the damage.184

  On 11 November 1936, in the Racial Observer, Goebbels attacked the ‘hostility to Germany of the mostly Jewish foreign press’ for overreacting to the pogrom. In a widely syndicated article, replete with headlines such as ‘Last Warning to the Jewry of the World’, he dismissed such reports as lies. The spontaneous reaction of the German people to the cowardly murder of vom Rath came from a ‘healthy instinct’. ‘The German people’, he declared proudly, ‘are an antisemitic people. They take no pleasure or delight in allowing themselves to be restricted in their rights or allowing themselves to be provoked as a nation by the parasitic Jewish race.’ The government, he concluded, had done all in its power to stop the demonstrations, and the people had obeyed. Germany and the Germans had nothing to be ashamed of.185 This was not the view taken by the international press, however, who reacted with a mixture of shock and disbelief. For many foreign observers, indeed, the events of 9-10 November 1938 came as a turning-point in their estimation of the Nazi regime.186

  III

  At their lunchtime meeting in the Osteria restaurant in Munich on 10 November 1938, Hitler and Goebbels, besides finalizing the draft of the decree bringing the pogrom to an end, also discussed what was to be done next. Hitler now took up once more the idea he had mooted in his memorandum on the creation of the Four-Year Plan back in
1936: a law making Germany’s Jews collectively liable for any damage caused to the German people ‘by individuals from this criminal element’.187 ‘The Leader’, confided Goebbels to his diary, ‘wants to take very tough measures against the Jews. They must themselves put their businesses in order again. The insurance companies will not pay them a thing. Then the Leader wants a gradual expropriation of Jewish businesses.’188 Such measures indeed were already in train; on 14 October 1938, Goebbels had announced to a confidential meeting that the time had come to drive the Jews out of the economy altogether. Two weeks later, on 28 October, the banks had noted that Heydrich’s Foreign Currency Control Office was preparing measures to restrict the Jews’ power of disposal over their own assets. Since these assets had recently been registered, Hitler’s ‘compensation’ order of 10 November 1938 could be implemented immediately. The responsibility for taking these steps lay with Hermann

  Goring, as head of the Four-Year Plan, and Hitler telephoned him on 11 November 1938 ordering him to call a conference to this effect. It met on 12 November 1938. Goring took the chair, and the hundred or so participants included Goebbels, Heydrich, Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, Economics Minister Walther Funk and representatives of the police, the Foreign Ministry and the insurance companies. Elaborate minutes were taken. They were very revealing of the attitude of the Nazi leadership towards the Jews in the aftermath of the pogrom.189

  Göring began by reporting to the assembled participants that Hitler had ordered him in writing and on the phone to co-ordinate the final expropriation of the Jews. He complained, with a touch of irony, that the ‘demonstrations’ of 9-10 November had harmed the economy; consumer goods made by, and belonging to, the people had been destroyed. ‘I would have preferred it’, he said, ‘if you had beaten 200 Jews to death and hadn’t destroyed such valuable property.’ Goebbels added that the economy was not the only area from which the Jews now had to be removed. It was still possible, for example, he said, for them to share a compartment with Germans on a train. The minutes continued:Goebbels: . . . They will be given a separate compartment only after all Germans have secured seats. They are not to mix with Germans, and if there is no more room, they will have to stand in the corridor.

  Göring: In that case I think it would be more sensible to give them separate compartments.

  Goebbels: Not if the train is overcrowded!

  Göring: Just a moment. There will be only one Jewish coach. If that is full up, the other Jews will have to stay at home.

  Goebbels: Suppose, though, there aren’t many Jews going to the express train to Munich, suppose there are two Jews in the train and the other compartments are overcrowded. These two Jews would then have a compartment all to themselves. Therefore, Jews may claim a seat only after all Germans have secured one.

  Göring: I’d give the Jews one coach or one compartment. And should such a case as you mention arise and the train be overcrowded, believe me, we won’t need a law. We’ll kick him out and he’ll have to sit alone in the lavatory all the way!190

  Goebbels also wanted Jews banned from all remaining public facilities such as parks and gardens, beaches and resorts, insofar as they were not already. The separation of the Jews from the rest of German society was to be complete: and indeed an order was duly issued the same day by the Reich Chamber of Culture banning Jews from going to the cinema, the theatre, concerts and exhibitions. The Interior Ministry ordered them to surrender all firearms and forbade them to carry offensive weapons. Municipalities were given the right to ban them from certain streets or districts at specified times. Himmler withdrew their driving licences and vehicle registration documents. Another order, effective from 6 December 1938, prohibited Jews from using sports or playing fields, public baths and outdoor swimming pools.191

  However much they may have disagreed on minor details, Goring, Goebbels and the others present at the meeting held on 12 November 1938 agreed unanimously to issue a string of decrees giving concrete form to the various plans for the expropriation of the Jews that had been discussed over the previous weeks and months. The murder of vom Rath, which Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus had already blamed on a Jewish conspiracy, provided an ideal opportunity, but if it had not occurred, then something else would doubtless have served as a pretext instead. The issue of railway compartments was solved by Hitler, with whom Göring discussed the matter in December. The Leader decreed that no special compartments for Jews should be allowed, but they should be barred from using sleeping compartments or dining cars on long-distance expresses. He confirmed that Jews could be banned from well-known restaurants, luxury hotels, public squares, much-frequented streets and smart residential districts. Meanwhile, Jews were also barred from attending university. On 30 April 1939 they were stripped of their rights as tenants, thus paving the way for their forcible ghettoization. They could now be evicted without appeal if a landlord offered them alternative accommodation, no matter how poor. Municipal authorities could order Jews to sublet parts of their houses to other Jews. From the end of January 1939, all tax concessions were also removed from the Jews, including child benefits; they were now taxed at a single rate, the highest one. 192

  As an immediate result of the meeting on 12 November, the Jews were ordered the same day to pay a collective fine of 1 billion Reichsmarks as atonement for the murder of vom Rath. All Jewish taxpayers were ordered on 21 November to pay a fifth of all their assets, as declared the previous April, in four tax instalments by 15 August 1939. In October 1939 the proportion was raised to a quarter on the grounds that the total sum of a billion Reichsmarks had not been reached, although in fact the total collected was no less than 1.127 billion. In addition, they were commanded to clear up the mess left by the pogrom at their own expense, and to pay for the repair of their own properties even though it had everywhere been damaged by the stormtroopers and they themselves were entirely blameless. All insurance payments to Jewish property-owners for the damage caused by the stormtroopers and their helpers were confiscated by the state. This last sum amounted to 225 million Reichsmarks, so that if it is added to the fine and to capital flight taxes, the total sum plundered from the Jewish community in Germany in 1938-9 reached well over 2 billion Reichsmarks, even before profits gained from Aryanization are taken into account.193

  Another measure promulgated on 12 November, the First Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life, banned Jews from almost all remaining gainful occupations in Germany and ordered any still engaged in them to be dismissed without compensation or pensions. A few weeks later, on 3 December 1938, a Decree on the Utilization of Jewish Assets ordered the Aryanization of all remaining Jewish businesses, allowing the state to appoint trustees to complete the process if necessary. Already on 1 April 1939, nearly 15,000 of the 39,000 Jewish businesses still in existence in April 1938 had been wound up, some 6,000 had been Aryanized, just over 4,000 were undergoing Aryanization, and just over 7,000 were under investigation for the same purpose.194 All these, the press trumpeted in anticipation on 12 November, were ‘justified retributive measures for the cowardly murder of Ambassadorial Counsellor vom Rath’.195

  On 21 February 1939, all Jewish cash, securities and valuables, including jewellery (except for wedding rings), were ordered to be deposited in special blocked accounts; official permits were required for any withdrawals from them. Permits were rarely if ever issued, and the Reich government eventually seized these accounts without compensation. In practice, therefore, almost all Jews who stayed in Germany were virtually penniless and had increasingly to depend for support on the charitable activities of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which had been created on 7 July 1938 as a more pliant and subordinate successor of the Reich Representation. Hitler explicitly ordered it to be kept in existence so that the Reich was not faced with the obligation to give support to Jews who had become utterly destitute. Other leading Nazis, however, argued that the now destitute and frequently unemployed Jews who had not yet reached retiremen
t age - about half the remaining population - should be put to work for the Reich rather than being allowed to remain idle. Plans had already begun in October 1938, well before the pogrom, and were firmed up at a meeting called by Goring on 6 December 1938. On 20 December 1938, the Reich Unemployment Agency instructed regional labour exchanges to ensure that, since the number of unemployed Jews had increased substantially, such people should be put to work, freeing up Germans for armaments production.

  On 4 February 1939, Martin Bormann repeated this instruction. Jewish workers were to be kept separate from the others. Firms that employed them would not suffer any disadvantage. Some were drafted into farm work, others in menial tasks of one kind or another. Labour service became the favoured means of keeping destitute Jews off the streets after they had been removed from the public welfare system. By May 1939, around 15,000 unemployed Jews were already employed on forced labour schemes, carrying out tasks such as rubbish collection, street-sweeping, or road construction; the ease of separating them from other workers meant that the last-named quickly became the main area into which they were drafted, and by the summer of 1939 some 20,000 were employed on heavy construction work for the motorways, work for which many of them were physically totally unprepared. Jewish forced labour remained on a relatively small scale in 1939, but already it was clear that it would reach much greater dimensions once war came, and plans were drawn up early in the year for the creation of special labour camps in which Jewish work draftees would be housed.196