functionaries, and untold numbers of small commercial enterprises grabbed what they could.15 ‘Aryan’ pillars of the establishment like doctors and lawyers were equally welcoming of the economic advantages that could come their way with the expulsion of Jews from the medical and legal professions.16 University professors turned their skills, without prompting, to defining alleged negative characteristics of the Jewish character and pyschology.17 And all the time, civil servants worked like beavers to hone the legislation that turned Jews into outcasts and pariahs, their lives into torment and misery.18 The police, particularly the Gestapo — helped as always by eager citizens anxious to denounce Jews or those seen as ‘friends of Jews’
Each group, agency, or individual involved in pushing forward the rad-icalization of anti-Jewish discrimination had vested interests and a specific agenda. Uniting them all and giving justification to them was the vision of racial purification and, in particular, of a ‘Jew-free’ Germany embodied in the person of the Fuhrer. Hitler’s role was, therefore, crucial, even if at times indirect. His broad sanction was needed. But for the most part little more was required.
There is no doubt that Hitler fully approved of and backed the new drive against the Jews, even if he took care to remain out of the limelight. One of the main agitators for radical action against the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, had no difficulty in April 1938 — in the immediate wake of the savage persecution of the Jews in Vienna — in persuading Hitler to support his plans to ‘clean up’ Berlin, the seat of his own Gau. Hitler’s only stipulation was that nothing should be undertaken before his meetings with Mussolini in early May. A successful outcome of his talks with the Duce was of great importance to him, particularly in the context of his unfolding plans regarding Czechoslovakia. Possible diplomatic repercussions provoked by intensified persecution of Jews in Germany’s capital were to be avoided. Goebbels had already discussed his own aims on the ‘Jewish Question’ with Berlin’s Police Chief Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf before he broached the matter with Hitler. ‘Then we put it to the Fuhrer. He agrees, but only after his trip to Italy. Jewish establishments
The ‘Madagascar solution’ — which would be considered seriously for a brief time in 1940 — had been touted among radical antisemites for decades.22 Reference to it at this juncture seems to signify that Hitler was moving away from any assumption that emigration would remove the ‘Jewish problem’ in favour of a solution based upon territorial resettlement. He was conceivably influenced in this by Heydrich, reporting the views of the ‘experts’ on Jewish policy in the SD. The relative lack of success in ‘persuading’ Jews to emigrate — little short of three-quarters of the Jewish population recorded in 1933 still lived in Germany, despite the persecution, as late as October 1938 — together with the mounting obstacles to Jewish immigration created by other countries had compelled the SD to revise its views on future anti-Jewish policy.23 By the end of 1937 the idea of favouring a Jewish state in Palestine, which Eichmann had developed, partly through secret dealings with Zionist contacts, had cooled markedly. Eichmann’s own visit to Palestine, arranged with his Zionist go-between, had been an unmitigated failure. And, more importantly, the German Foreign Office was resolutely hostile to the notion of a Jewish state in Palestine.24 However, emigration remained the objective.
Hitler, too, favoured Palestine as a targeted territory. In early 1938, he reaffirmed the policy, arrived at almost a year earlier, aimed at promoting with all means available the emigration of Jews to any country willing to take them, but looking to Palestine in the first instance.25 But he was alert to the perceived dangers of creating a Jewish state to threaten Germany at some future date. In any case, other notions were being mooted. Already in 1937 there had been suggestions in the SD of deporting Jews to barren, unwelcoming parts of the world, scarcely capable of sustaining human life and certainly, in the SD’s view, incompatible with a renewed flourishing of Jewry and revitalized potential of ‘world conspiracy’. In addition to Palestine, Ecuador, Columbia, and Venezuela had been mentioned as possibilities.26 Nothing came of such ideas at the time. But the suggestions were little different in essence from the old notion, later to be revamped, of Madagascar as an inhospitable territory fit to accommodate Jews until, it was implied, they eventually died out.27 The notion of Jewish resettlement, already aired in the SD, was itself latently genocidal.
Whatever line of policy was favoured, the ‘final goal’ (as Hitler’s comments to Goebbels indicated) remained indistinct, and as such compatible with all attempts to further the ‘removal’ of the Jews. This eventual ‘removal’ was conceived as taking a good number of years to complete. Even following ‘Crystal Night’, Heydrich was still envisaging an ‘emigration action’ lasting from eight to ten years.28 Hitler himself had already inferred to Goebbels towards the end of July 1938 that ‘the Jews must be removed from Germany in ten years’. In the meantime, he added, they were to be retained as ‘surety’
Goebbels, meanwhile, was impatient to make headway with the ‘racial cleansing’ of Berlin. ‘A start has to be made somewhere,’ he remarked. He thought the removal of Jews from the economy and cultural life of the city could be accomplished within a few months.31 The programme devised by mid-May for him by Helldorf, and given his approval, put forward a variety of discriminatory measures — including special identity cards for Jews, branding of Jewish shops, bans on Jews using public parks, and special train compartments for Jews — most of which, following the November Pogrom, came to be generally implemented.32 Helldorf also envisaged the construction of a ghetto in Berlin to be financed by the richer Jews.33
Even if this last aim remained unfulfilled, the poisonous atmosphere stirred by Goebbels’s agitation — with Hitler’s tacit approval — had rapid results.34 Already on 27 May, a 1,000-strong mob roamed parts of Berlin, smashing windows of shops belonging to Jews, and prompting the police, anxious not to lose the initiative in anti-Jewish policy, to take the owners into ‘protective custody’.35 When in mid-June Jewish stores on the Kurfurstendamm, the prime shopping street in the west of the city, were smeared with antisemitic slogans by Party activists, and plundering of some shops took place, concern for Germany’s image abroad dictated a halt to the public violence. Hitler intervened directly from Berchtesgaden, following which Goebbels ruefully banned all illegal actions.36 However, Berlin had set the tone. Similar ‘actions’, initiated by the local Party organizations, were carried out in Frankfurt, Magdeburg, and other towns and cities.37 The lack of any explicit general ban from above on ‘individual actions’, as had been imposed in 1935, was taken by Party activists in countless localities as a green light to step up their own campaigns. The touchpaper had been lit to the summer and autumn of violence. As the tension in the Czech crisis mounted, local antisemitic initiatives in various regions saw to it that the ‘Jewish Question’ became a powder-keg, waiting for the spark.38
Hitler’s own approval of the antisemitic campaign of the summer may well have been linked to his expectation of a short war to crush Czechoslovakia in the autumn.39 Successful completion of that enterprise was, it appears, to have been accompanied by the completion of the expropriation of Jewish property and exclusion of Jews from the economy.40 Hitler had, in the event, no choice but to be content for the time being with the Sudetenland, and the tension had suddenly evaporated. But the triumphalism of the Nazi Movement, the pressures to exclude Jews from the economy as a matter of urgency, the demands to speed up emigration, and the general momentum of violence and discrimination that had built up over the summer meant that the radical tide surged forward. The atmosphere had become menacing in the extreme for the Jews.
Even so, from the perspective of the regime’s leadership, how to get the Jews out of the economy and force them to leave Germany still appeared to be questions without obvious answers. As early as January 1937, Eichmann had suggested, in a lengthy internal memorandum, that pogroms were the most effective way of accelerating the sluggish emigration.41 Like an answer to a prayer, the shooting of the German Third Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, on the morning of 7 November 1938 opened up an opportunity not to be missed. It was an opportunity eagerly seized upon by Goebbels. He had no difficulty in winning Hitler’s full backing.
